Paris Condemns Moscow's Record Kyiv Barrage; Senate Opens Referendum Front on End-of-Life

Emmanuel Macron spent the day responding to the largest Russian air attack of the war. In a statement on X he called the overnight wave of nearly 1,500 drones and missiles on Kyiv "the largest in the past four years" and said it "lays bare all the hypocrisy" with which Moscow had negotiated the fragile May 9-11 ceasefire days earlier. He went further than Berlin in casting the assault as a sign of weakness: "By bombing civilians, Russia demonstrates less its strength than its weakness: It is running out of solutions on the military front and does not know how to end its war of aggression." Paris, he wrote, was working toward "a just and lasting peace for Ukraine, one that guarantees its security and that of Europe." Macron's intervention dovetailed with Friedrich Merz's Charlemagne Prize laudatio in Aachen — Merz told the Krönungssaal that the attacks "speak a different language" than negotiation, and dismissed a Kremlin offer to engage the European Union only through pro-Kremlin former chancellor Gerhard Schröder with the line, "We Europeans decide for ourselves who speaks for us, no one else does." The exchange continued a Paris-Berlin line of resistance that hardened on May 7, when France, Germany and the European Commission rejected an explicit Russian threat to strike "decision-making centres" and refused to evacuate their Kyiv embassies ahead of Moscow's May 9 Victory Day commemorations.

The domestic political story moved on a separate track. Senator Francis Szpiner (Les Républicains) filed a bill on May 13 — the day after the Senate rejected the assisted-dying text for the second time — to launch a shared-initiative referendum (RIP) on the end-of-life law, reopening a months-long standoff with a government that may now hand the final word to the National Assembly, where the bill has majority support. The RIP procedure, created in 2008, requires at least 185 parliamentary signatures and 4.8 million citizen signatures; no campaign has ever reached the citizen threshold. Szpiner's gambit is therefore less about forcing a vote than about denying the Assembly the appearance of consensus, and it lands on a Lecornu government already navigating a hung parliament after Macron's 2024 snap election.

The pattern of the past three days is of a president talking past Moscow while domestic flanks pick at his coalition. On May 12 in Nairobi, Macron used the closing remarks of an Africa Forward summit to accuse Mali's junta of ingratitude over France's 2013 Sahel intervention, drawing pushback in Bamako; on May 13 he defended his Africa record on RFI, criticising US sanctions on Rwanda and hailing what he called a "partnership of equals." In the same window François Ruffin, the LFI deputy who has broken with the left's coordinated primary line, formally declared he would stand for president in 2027 even without a left-wing primary, sharpening the 2027 fracture on Macron's left. None of these strands intersect on Thursday's record drone-and-missile night in Kyiv — but they leave Paris simultaneously defending its Sahel posture, its assisted-dying compromise and its lead role in Europe's diplomacy on Ukraine, all from the position of a government without a parliamentary majority.