La scomparsa del Nagorno-Karabakh, cronaca di un’impossibile promessa francese (in francese)

Very interesting article that’s behind hard paywall. So, I’ll provide an English translation of Russian summary from TG:

>The Disappearance of Nagorno-Karabakh: A Chronicle of the Impossible French Promise

> The French newspaper Le Figaro revealed some behind-the-scenes details of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue from the Elysee Palace a few days before Azerbaijan’s aggression on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

>The author of the article writes that in January 2023, when Nagorno-Karabakh was still under siege, a small group of pro-Armenian journalists and activists, including famous football player Youri Djorkaeff and French writer Sylvain Tesson, met with French President Emmanuel Macron in the Elysees palace.

> In addition, Macron’s diplomatic advisers issued a diplomatic note to him, which specifically spoke of the need to make a presidential trip to the Lachin region – as Mitterrand did in Sarajevo – in order to publicly and locally declare the unacceptability of the current situation. It was also proposed to organize a humanitarian conference to help Armenians from Artsakh deprived of food and medicine. The diplomatic note also spoke of a French military-civil operation.

>”We were impressed by his knowledge of the matter,” says writer Sylvain Tesson. “He understood the plans of the Azerbaijanis and was more pessimistic than us, and this is normal because he was better informed. At that time, he already foresaw a ground attack on the region. Macron understood that the problem had gone beyond the borders of Armenia and that whole geopolitical upheavals were ahead,” Tesson recalls.

>“Macron tried to resolve the situation diplomatically. This is probably the president who spoke the most with President Ilham Aliyev,” according to a diplomatic source.