This led to a long war of words between the two foreign ministers in the summer of 1939 over just what precisely Bonnet actually said to Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop was to use Bonnet's alleged statement to convince Hitler that France would not go to war in the defence of Poland in 1939. Both Bonnet and Saint-Legér Léger were quite vehement in insisting that no such remark was ever made. In January 1939, Bonnet commissioned a study for the French cabinet that concluded that the 1935 Franco-Soviet alliance was now defunct, and there were no grounds for hope about help from the Soviet Union. Rumours in the French press over the winter of 1938–39 that France was seeking the end of the eastern alliances generated concerns both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the press, leading Bonnet to state in a speech to the Chamber on 26 January 1939: "So, gentlemen, let us dispose of the legend that our policy has destroyed the engagements that we have contracted in Eastern Europe with the USSR and with Poland. These engagements remain in force and they must be applied in the same spirit in which they were conceived". In response to Bonnet's speech, Ribbentrop summoned the French Ambassador to Germany, Robert Coulondre, on 6 February 1939 to offer a formal protest over his speech. Ribbentrop told Coulondre that because of Bonnet's alleged statement of 6 December 1938 accepting Eastern Europe as Germany's zone of influence meant that "France's commitments in Eastern Europe" were now "off limits". Besides seeking to end the "cordon sanitaire", Bonnet's major initiative in foreign policy after Munich was a series of economic agreements he sought to negotiate with the Germans. Bonnet's economic diplomacy was intended to achieve four goals:  However, during the winter of 1938–1939, negotiations with the Germans proceeded slowly, in large part because the Germans refused to abandon the economic practices that caused such concern. The atmosphere, following the German destruction of Czecho-Slovakia (as Czechoslovakia had been renamed), on 15 March 1939 was not considered conductive for France to be pursuing any sort of agreements with the Germans, and the talks were called off, never to be resumed. At the same time, Bonnet ordered Charles Corbin, the French Ambassador in London to warn Chamberlain and Lord Halifax during their scheduled visit to Rome in January 1939 against any weakening of Anglo-French relations at the expense of improved Anglo-Italian relations. During a meeting between François-Poncet and Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister claimed that the demonstrations were purely "spontaneous" and did not reflect the views of his government.