“It’s our policy from Day One, when it comes to Ukraine, to do everything we can to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression. At the same time, we have neither supported nor enabled strikes by Ukraine outside of its territory,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said while standing beside his French counterpart in Paris a few days ago, in the wake of Ukraine’s drone attack on the Nizhnekamsk oil refinery in Tatarstan, responsible for over 6% of Russia’s oil output.

“Ukraine is acting within the framework of legitimate defense. We consider Russia to be the aggressor. Based on this, there can be no other comments,” said the French foreign affairs minister, Stephane Sejourne, of the incident, chalking it up to the refinery being a military target, even though its oil output as one of the country’s five largest such facilities sounds pretty important for civilians.

The United Nations generally condemned “all attacks on civilian infrastructure” without getting caught up in the debate of whether this particular target was legitimately military or civilian. That’s for international law to decide years from now, if ever. France could have said something like that, but decided instead to go all-in on its support for this new escalation involving attacks deeper inside Russian territory – even when the target isn’t overtly and unambiguously military, or at least in the absence of any evidence from Paris for why it was qualifying it as such.

Why is France so keen to encourage strikes inside Russia........

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