The campaign group said the stunt involving the French head of state's waxwork doppelganger had the serious message of urging the real Macron to stop all economic cooperation with Russia, especially in nuclear energy.

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 stood the statue on its feet and put next to it a sign with a slogan denouncing Macron for not cutting ties with Russia under Vladimir Putin, in particular in nuclear energy.

"Putin-Macron radioactive allies," the sign 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.

- 'Just borrowed' -

"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 fertilisers.

He said Greenpeace particularly criticised the surge in Russian fertiliser imports into the EU, which rose some 80 percent between 2021 and 2023 according to French fertiliser manufacturers.

EDF is notably tied to a 600-euro-million contract signed in 2018 with Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, for the recycling of EDF's reprocessed uranium.

- 'Feeding the war machine' -

"France publicly supports Ukraine, but behind the scenes, contracts with Russia continue," Greenpeace France said in a statement on its Instagram account, accusing Paris of "feeding the Russian war machine".

Without giving details, it said a Russian cargo ship transporting uranium "will dock again" in the northern port of Dunkirk on Thursday in what the group described as the latest scene from a "well organised ballet".

It said in 2024 a quarter of the enriched uranium imported into France came from Russia, and half of the natural uranium imported into France came from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the majority of which transits via Rosatom on Russian soil.

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".

She said the activists distracted a security guard by asking a question about a disabled access lift, while some of them donned maintenance coats.

With the stunt involving his double, Greenpeace said it was up to Macron to act. "We call on the real head of state to stop this double talk and immediately sever these toxic ties with Russia," it said.