In mid-November 2015, in the wake of the Russian plane bombing over Sinai and the Paris attacks, both Russia and France significantly intensified their strikes in Syria, France closely coordinating with the U.S. military. On 17 November, Putin said he had issued orders for the cruiser "Moskva" that had been in eastern Mediterranean since the start of the Russian operations to "work as with an ally", with the French naval group led by flagship "Charles De Gaulle" then on her way to the eastern Mediterranean. Shortly afterwards, a Russian foreign ministry official criticised France's stridently anti-Assad stance as well as France's air strikes at oil and gas installations in Syria as apparently designed to prevent those from returning under the Syrian Ba'athist government's control; the Russian official pointed out that such strikes by France could not be justified as they were carried out without the Syrian Ba'athist government's consent. In his remarks to a French delegation that included French parliamentarians, on 14 November, President Bashar Assad sharply criticised France's as well as other Western States' actions against the Syrian Ba'athist government suggesting that French support for Syrian opposition forces had led to the Islamic State-claimed attacks in Paris.