On July 28, two Russian women had refused the entrance to the tourist place because of their origin, on the basis of a restriction taken at the start of the war in Ukraine.
Le Monde with AFP
The incident will not happen again. After the access refused at the end of July to two Russian nationals wishing to visit the Château de Vincennes (Val-de-Marne), the cabinet of the Minister of the Armed Forces regretted Tuesday a lack of “discernment” and assured that the Russians were still authorized on its tourist sites.
On July 28, two Russian women were refused the entrance to the tourist place because of their origin. One of them, a 31-year-old journalist, had testified to the France-Presse agency that he was “upset” by this ban. Arrival in France “five months ago”, she had “fled Russia because she was” opposed to war “, she confided. ”
This castle, located south-east of Paris, contains one of the centers of the historic defense service (SHD), whose libraries and archives are accessible to the public under certain methods.
Monday, a service of the Ministry of the Armed Forces had thus justified this prohibition by an “internal directive” taken “following the invasion of Ukraine” to restrict “access to the ministry’s military holdings to Russian nationals “.
But the cabinet of the Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, contacted AFP on Tuesday to specify his response. The episode of the Château de Vincennes is thus a “” application without discernment “of the decreed rule” in February for all military facilities “, explained the cabinet.
“It goes without saying that [this rule] cannot be applied in the same way for strategic buildings as for places receiving from the public as museums,” he insisted. The Château de Vincennes, but also the Air and Space Museum or the Invalides can therefore always accommodate Russian tourists and immigrants.
“The Minister of the Armed Forces asked (…) that we would specify this directive with the agents of these places to avoid any incident”, like that of the Château de Vincennes, added his cabinet, which did not have Knowledge of other similar cases.
On the other hand, access to “strategic buildings” is very strictly limited to the Russians since the conflict of the conflict in February. France crossed the threshold of 100,000 Ukrainian refugees in its soil in early August. According to INSEE (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies), 73,500 Russian immigrants lived in France in 2021.