A court in Moscow has sent French citizen Laurent Vinatier to pretrial detention until at least August 5 on a charge of violating Russia's "foreign agent" law.
The Zamoskvorechye district court announced its decision on June 7, a day after the 48-year-old expert on Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, who works for a Geneva-based conflict mediation organization, was detained by Investigative Committee officers in a restaurant in the Russian capital.
The Investigative Committee said then that a French citizen was detained on suspicion of gathering information about the military and failing to register as a foreign agent.
The committee released a video showing a man with a blurred face being approached by masked officers in a Moscow restaurant and led to a police vehicle.
According to the Investigative Committee, the man had allegedly "collected data related to military and military-technical activities of the Russian Federation."
French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed in a televised interview late on June 6 that Vinatier was detained in Russia, stressing that he had never worked for French government structures.
The French Embassy has yet to comment on the arrest.
The arrest of Vinatier came as Macron hosted ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion on the beaches of Normandy during World War II.
Earlier on June 6, French media reports said a 26-year-old native of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region with dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship was detained in France after a handmade explosive device detonated in his hotel room.
The man sustained burns and is currently being treated in a hospital. He is suspected of planning a terrorist attack in France that would have targeted military aid that Paris has been sending to Ukraine.
Relations between Russia and France have sunk to their the lowest point in history over Moscow’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022.
