The leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party declared that Ukrainians living in the Donbas should be "consulted' on their future.
Ukraine's spokesperson on Foreign Affairs Heorhii Tykhyi hit back at Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Monday, after the leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party, declared that Ukrainians living in the Donbas should be "consulted' on their future.
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During a major campaign ally on Saturday, Mélenchon said that his party refused to "allow discussions about peace in Ukraine" to be headed by European leaders. This comes as France, Germany and the UK are set to take part in US mediated Russia-Ukraine talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, alongside a joint EU team.
"We cannot accept the notion of a peace agreement that involves territorial concessions in Ukraine without first seeking the consent of the affected populations to live on either side of the border", said Mélenchon.
Responding to Mélenchon's remarks on X, Tykhyi declared that Ukrainians had "already settled the question of their country's border" during the country's 1991 independence referendum.
Tykhyi said that Russia had chosen to "disregard the choice of Ukrainians" with its invasion of Ukraine, adding that "'referendums' under occupation are a tool of annexation, not an expression of the people's will."
"No civilised, democratic country would ever accept this for its own borders, so it should not be proposed to Ukrainians", he said.
Moscow has already staged sham consultations in annexed Crimea and in the four regions of south-eastern Ukraine it partially controls, procedures rejected by Kyiv and the international community.
France's Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot also weighed in on the controversy Sunday, describing Mélenchon as a "mouthpiece of the Kremlin."
"All over the world the Kremlin is trying to convince heads of state and government that, basically, the Donbas is Russian and that the war of aggression is a war to liberate the Donbas", said Barrot.
"This is obviously of unprecedented seriousness and, in my view, definitively disqualifies him [Mélenchon] from holding the offices he aspires to", he added.
The France Unbowed party programme affords less space to the question of Russia's war against Ukraine in comparison with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is featured more prominently.
The war in Ukraine has become an increasingly controversial topic over the course of France's presidential elections. The far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, said in mid-October that she would end French financial aid to Ukraine, which she estimated at €6 billion a year, if she were to win the 2027 presidential election.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy then responded that "Madame Le Pen does not have a very good grasp of certain details" of French-Ukrainian military cooperation, defending a "win-win" partnership that he said was also beneficial to France's security.