Macron’s ego may just have permanently damaged EU unity on Russia

See if you can guess which EU politician I am talking about. A leader who threatened to veto Russia sanctions unless the EU delisted an oligarch, after making a secret deal for his own interest. He met Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where he pretended to speak for the EU. His country has a track record of trampling on EU laws at home. And his capital city is full of grand buildings from an old empire. Former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán ticks all those boxes, naturally. But so does French president Emmanuel Macron, which is a bigger problem. France wielded its veto on the extension of Russia sanctions this week to delist an oligarch, in a secret deal on a spy-exchange with Azerbaijan. Macron cast himself as the EU's 'Putin-whisperer' in a visit to Moscow on 7 February 2022 and in multiple phone calls with Putin after the full invasion of Ukraine, in which the Russian leader addressed him as a spokesman for "the West" and on EU sanctions. Their last publicised call was in July 2025. Orbán was in his own league when it came to being an EU scofflaw, of course. But France also has a history of non-compliance with EU rules, such as its years-long tramping on the Stability and Growth Pact, and is second only to Italy in the number of EU-law infringement cases it has fought in the European Court of Justice over the decades.