PARIS — A French-built warship designed to strengthen Russia’s ability to deploy troops, tanks and helicopter gunships is getting its first test run Wednesday — just as Western powers are trying to rein in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military threat to Ukraine.
A spokesman for the shipbuilder says the Vladivostok helicopter carrier is setting sail from the French Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire. A few hundred kilometers away in Paris, France’s government is hosting American, Russian and other leading world diplomats Wednesday amid mounting tensions over Ukraine.
The warship is part of a 1.2-billion-euro deal ($1.6-billion) that marked the biggest-ever sale of NATO weaponry to Moscow, a deal that already raised eyebrows both within Russia’s military circles and among France’s Western allies when it was struck in 2011.
France has criticized Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, but says it has no plans to scrap the defense deal.
That’s because France, like many of Russia’s European trading partners, has found itself wedged between efforts to squeeze Russia diplomatically and its own economic interests. The French government’s top priority is reviving the lackluster economy and battling unemployment, and this deal underpins some 1,000 jobs.
The Vladivostok is on track to be delivered by the last quarter of this year, said spokesman Emmanuel Gaudez of DCNS, a state-backed naval shipbuilder manufacturing the warships along with South Korean-controlled shipbuilder STX.
A sister ship, the Sebastopol — named, ironically, for a Russian-controlled port in Crimea — is scheduled to be delivered about a year later. “We’re not going to comment on the political situation — that’s for politicians to decide,” he said.
A few Russian customers and military personnel are to visit the ship later this month, and larger Russian delegation is expected in June, company officials said.
“But now with what’s happening in Ukraine, perhaps they have other priorities — I don’t know,” said Christophe Morel, a CGT labor union delegate on the STX board.
France has joined the United States and Britain in suspending preparations for a Group of Eight summit in Russia in June, and France and EU allies are considering possible sanctions against Russia.
But French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, speaking on RTL radio Monday, said “we’re not there yet” when it comes to suspending any defense exports.