On 12 May 1971 the Warsaw Pact War Council convened in East Berlin, followed by a larger than usual series of summer military exercises by the alliance member states. Pyotr Abrassimov was the only civilian to participate in these exercises. Later in 1971 he received a communication from Leonid Brezhnev who had scheduled a visit to Paris later in the year. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was relatively fresh in the minds of the French political establishment, and Abrassimov was instructed to take over the Soviet ambassadorship there to prepare for the Brezhnev visit. He remained in Paris for two years after which he returned to Moscow and took a position as a department head with the Party Central Committee.