Greenpeace activists overnight Tuesday to Wednesday returned a wax figure of President Emmanuel Macron they had stolen from a Paris museum as part of a protest against French economic ties with Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
After taking the waxwork from the Grevin Museum in a carefully planned heist on Monday the campaigners had placed it outside the Russian embassy in a symbolic protest.
Carrying on the action late on Tuesday, they placed the waxwork, estimated to be worth 40,000 euros ($45,500), in a chest and put it outside the headquarters of French electricity giant EDF.
They also put the statue on its feet and stood next to it a sign with a slogan denouncing Macron for not completely cutting ties with Russia under Vladimir Putin, in particular in the energy sphere.
"Putin-Macron radioactive allies," it said.
Police then arrived and secured the chest and waxwork ahead of its return to the Grevin Museum, the Paris equivalent of Madame Tussauds in London.
"We came to bring back the statue of Emmanuel Macron because, as we said from the start, we had just borrowed it," Jean-Francois Julliard, executive director of Greenpeace France, told AFP at the scene.
"We notified both the management of the Grevin Museum and the police. It's up to them to come and retrieve it," he said.
The choice of the EDF headquarters was "to make Macron face up to his responsibilities concerning the trade that is maintained with Russia, particularly in the nuclear sector," he added.
According to Julliard, French companies can still, despite the sanctions regime in place since the invasion, "import a whole host of products from Russia" including enriched uranium to power French nuclear power plants, natural uranium transiting through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan via Russia, LNG and chemical fertilizers.
He said Greenpeace particularly criticized the surge in Russian fertilizer imports into the EU, which rose some 80 percent between 2021 and 2023 according to French fertilizer manufacturers.
According to a police source, two women and a man on Monday entered the Grevin Museum posing as tourists and, once inside, changed their clothes to pass for workers. The activists slipped out through an emergency exit with the waxwork.
A museum spokeswoman acknowledged that "they had clearly done their research very thoroughly".
