You're welcome.
The pressure on our export policy has come from Yemen, in particular, not really from Turkey. Why? Because Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt are major clients of France and Turkey is not.
France exports approximately €50 million worth of military materiel every year, and we aren't much involved in any of the major strategic programs for which we've positioned ourselves—major aeronautic, naval, submarine and air defence programs, for example.
That being said, in September 2019, France established a fairly stiff sanction mechanism in the specific context of the partition of Syria and an extensive occupation of the fringe region south of Turkey in Syria to establish a new "Yalta" in Syria between the Syrians supported by the Russians, on the one hand, and the Turks, on the other, all to the detriment of our Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS.
This sanction situation is actually quite unusual. It was never made public in France. It includes sanctions and regular efforts to exert pressure, but they haven't been made public because publicizing them generally tends to destroy the bilateral relationship and ultimately to jeopardize the entire partnership.
However, in the case of Turkey, since it's close enough to us, complex and disruptive right now, we decided to make the measure public. It wasn't broadly followed by other European countries, which probably would have preferred to employ other methods, including methods based more on the targeting of individuals.
To be clear, since one of the previous speakers referred to the circumstances regarding Armenia and the drone issue, it's true that we're genuinely concerned about Turkey's proliferation policy as it spreads its own equipment into other theatres, either for political purposes—as in Azerbaijan—or for other purposes that are less clear. The same drones as Azerbaijan and Turkey used in Armenia were recently employed in the Ukrainian theatre by Ukraine against the Russians.
These developments caught our attention, and we're now seeing behaviour from the Turks that's clearly hostile toward NATO itself. For example, a serious naval incident occurred on June 10, 2020 in the course of a NATO operation that you are no doubt aware of called Sea Guardian. As you will recall, the situation in Libya involved two parties and NATO, which was determined to interdict arms shipments to Libya, at either Haftar or Sarraj.
Since the Turks had successfully supplied enormous amounts of equipment to the western zone, NATO decided to conduct an embargo inspection operation on a ship, the Çirkin, which was being escorted by several naval vessels and refused to identify itself. I simply want to say that, after the ship had been monitored by American aircraft and Italian vessels and hailed by the French navy, the French ships were completely illuminated and threatened by missile and gun batteries, something that's not done between NATO friends.
This caused a crisis within NATO and increased the level of caution at the European Union, which decided, in December, to impose more individual sanctions on Turkish leaders, as a result of which the Turks decided to resume dialogue with the European Union, which has been actively pursuing that dialogue for several months now.
Thank you.