Environmental activists melted away from a Paris museum with a waxwork of President Emmanuel Macron to protest France’s business ties with Russia and climate change.
Greenpeace France said in a statement Monday that they had “borrowed” the model from the Grévin Museum to highlight gas, chemical fertilizer and nuclear power contracts between the two countries which “finance the war in Ukraine.”
“Despite Macron’s international speeches of solidarity with Ukraine, France continues to line Moscow’s pockets,” the statement said. “As long as these dependencies persist, efforts to restore peace to Ukraine and strengthen the strategic sovereignty of France and the E.U. will remain futile.”
A team of about six people entered the museum with tickets, and as one of them distracted a receptionist, “the others carried and took the figure out through an emergency exit,” a spokesperson for the museum said in an email Tuesday. Then “the door alarm went off.”
The spokesperson said that Yves Delhommeau, the museum’s director, “received a call from Greenpeace promising that the figure would be returned.”
A Greenpeace spokesperson told Reuters that there had been “no confrontation with museum security because we had planned everything carefully to ensure it happened quickly.”
The spokesperson added that the museum — which displays waxwork figures of more than 200 famous people — had not been made aware of the action beforehand.
Macron's office was not immediately available for comment.
The waxwork later reappeared outside the French capital's Russian Embassy, alongside several protesters. Greenpeace said they would return it to the museum, although it was unclear when this might happen.
No arrests have been made, and the waxwork, which the museum said was worth 40,000 euros ($45,674), has not yet been recovered.
Macron, along with fellow European leaders like U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has been leading efforts to broker a ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine, which entered its fourth year in February.
But France, along with Belgium and Spain, is among the main importers of liquefied natural gas from Russia, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), an independent research organization focused on air pollution.
Russia has made more than 883 billion euros ($973 billion) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, of which, France contributed 17.9 billion euros ($20.4 billion), according to CREA.
“If we want to be coherent and consistent, we cannot, on the one hand, support Ukraine and, on the other, continue to import such massive amounts of gas, chemical fertilizers, and uranium,” Greenpeace France director Jean-Francois Julliard told Reuters.
