According to the agency, Macron expressed his request in March of this year during a telephone conversation with Trudeau. A few weeks earlier, Ottawa unilaterally imposed sanctions on titanium supplies from Russia, causing serious concern among Airbus and other European companies whose factories are located in Canada.
Subsequently, Macron, as well as other representatives of France and another unnamed European country, repeatedly raised this issue during various contacts with Canadian authorities.
Ottawa, as Reuters notes, initially stood firm but then made concessions by granting Airbus and other companies exceptions to the sanctions regime, drawing criticism from kyiv.
Agency sources say the lifting of sanctions was largely influenced by the personal intervention of Macron, who made “considerable efforts” to resolve the problem. “It was not easy to get the sanctions lifted. I think that if the French government had not raised the issue at such a level, we would have held out quite firmly,” the agency quoted its Canadian source as saying.
The administrations of the French president and the Canadian prime minister, as reported by Reuters, refused to comment on this information, and the Airbus press service stated that the company “complies with all applicable sanctions related to Russia.”
