Tolstoy reacts on 17 Mar 2024 to Macron's position on troops in Ukraine

Oh dear! Russian Duma [4] deputy speaker Pyotr Tolstoy reacts on 17 March 2024 to Emmanuel Macron's position on sending troops to Ukraine, that had been given in an interview on 14 March.Show more

Tolstoy's given name might be translated out of Cyrillic by Piotr Tolstoy or Petr Tolstoy. Wikipedia gives it as "Pyotr Tolstoy (politician)" [0] where we discover his early career as a French correspondent journalist. He is quite fluent in French and we are surprised to learn that he appears never to have studied in France. We are left to speculate that one trait of the Tolstoy family is its affection to the French language. This is perhaps a vestige of the Russian nobility's use of French as the court language. At any rate the interview is a clue to the political thought prevalent in March 2024 in the United Russia party [1], whose chairman is (or was in 2021) Dmitry Medvedev [2] and one of whose founders is the current Minister of Defence Sergey Shoigu [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Tolstoy_(politician)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Russia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Medvedev

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Shoigu

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Duma