Putin’s confidant sends French shrapnel at Macron, nearly killing him

Dmitri Rogozin (59) looks back on a long career as a confidant of President Vladimir Putin (70). Rogozin was Russia’s representative to NATO, then deputy prime minister and finally head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. In mid-December he celebrated his 59th birthday in occupied Donetsk. It almost cost him his life.

The hotel where he was partying with his wife came under Ukrainian fire. His wife suffered a severe concussion, Rogozin was hit by shrapnel and had to go under the knife. “Another millimeter and I would be paralyzed or dead by now,” Rogozin wrote in an angry letter, demanding that the shrapnel removed by the operation be handed over to French President Emmanuel Macron, 45. In the end, he was nearly killed by a French projectile.

Rogozin addresses his letter, which he published on Telegram, to the French ambassador in Moscow, Pierre Levy. The letter is only reminiscent of times gone by, when Rogozin and Levy went on “joint trips” and spoke “of the prospects for Russian-French political and economic cooperation”. Tragically, Russia and France are now enemies. From merely diplomatic, the tone turns bitter: “Your country,” writes Rogozin, “has submitted to Washington’s dictates and has become a puppet state in the style of the Vichy government that serves the basest instincts of the Nazis.”

“Your Mission Completely Failed”

In the envelope, Rogozin sent the ambassador “a fragment of a shell fired from the French 155mm Caesar artillery position”. Rogozin describes what happened in December. The shrapnel “pierced my right shoulder and lodged in the fifth cervical vertebra, just a millimeter away from killing or immobilizing me.”

The French howitzer shell killed two of his “young friends, leaving their wives widows and their children orphans. These boys had accompanied us on a journey. They,” he addresses Ambassador Levy, “shake hands with you. Now they are killed by weapons that your country has supplied to Ukraine».

Then the request to send the shrapnel to President Macron: «And I ask you to hand over the fragment cut from my spine by surgeons to French President Emmanuel Macron. And also tell him that no one will escape responsibility for the war crimes committed by France, the US, Britain, Germany and other NATO countries in Donbass.” Rogozin assures the ambassador of his “respect, but I fear that your mission is completely has failed”.