Posted on 05/05/2024 8:29:22 AM PDT by Drew68
France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk. The French soldiers are drawn from France’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is one of the main elements of France’s Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère).
In 2022 France had a number of Ukrainians and Russians in the Foreign Legion. They were allowed to leave the Legion and, in the case of the Ukrainians, return to Ukraine to join Ukrainian forces. It isn’t clear if the Russians returned home.
The Legion today is run by French officers but the rank and file are all foreigners. Under the curren anonymat (being anonymous) a volunteer who joins the Legion can decide whether to keep his given name or adopt a new one. Legionnaires serve for three year terms, after which they can ask for French citizenship. If a legionnaire is wounded, he is entitled to gain French citizenship without any waiting period. There are no women in the Foreign Legion.
The initial group of French troops numbers around 100. This is just the first tranche of around 1,500 French Foreign Legion soldiers scheduled to arrive in Ukraine.
These troops are being posted directly in a hot combat area and are intended to help the Ukrainians resist Russian advances in Donbas. The first 100 are artillery and surveillance specialists.
For months French President Emanuel Macron has been threatening to send French troops to Ukraine. He has found little or no support from NATO countries outside of support from Poland and the Baltic States. Allegedly the US opposes sending NATO soldiers to Ukraine (other than as advisors).
One of the questions to immediately arise from France’s decision to send soldiers from its 3rd Infantry Regiment is whether this crosses the Russian red line on NATO involvement in Ukraine? Will the Russians see this as initiating a wider war beyond Ukraine’s borders?
France itself does not have many troops to put on Ukraine’s battlelines, should the French government want to do so. According to reports, today France cannot support an overseas deployment of a full division and won’t have this capability until 2027 at the earliest.
The decision to send Foreign Legionnaires is, itself, a peculiar French compromise. France is not deploying its home army and, besides the small number of officers, the men sent are not French citizens.
France’s decision has two meanings, beyond the obvious one of potentially triggering a pan-European war.
First of all, it allows Macron to send troops to Ukraine and act like a tough guy without encountering much home opposition. That’s because no French army soldiers are being sent and there is no consequent conscription or other measures in the offing. This clearly reduces the potential fury of Macron’s political opponents.
The second reason is Macron’s anger at seeing French troops, almost all from the Legion, getting kicked out of Sahelian Africa and replaced by Russians. Control of Francophone Africa, and the riches it provides to French politicians, has been broken by the revolt and revolution in Africa and a decisive tilt to Russia – either directly or through PMC Wagner (the Wagner Group). now clearly under Vladimir Putin’s direct control.
This “humiliation” is felt in the Élysée Palace and particularly by Macron who, his opponents say, has lost France’s influence and harmed France’s overseas mining and business interests.
A particular blow is in Niger, an important supplier of uranium to France. France gets 70 percent of its electrical power from nuclear power generators. Global uranium supplies are tightening and prices rising. With Russia and Kazakhstan, along with Niger, on the top of the heap in terms of supplying uranium for nuclear reactors, France has a home economic security problem. The US decision to ban Russian uranium (but probably not realistically, in the next few years) the Russians could deal a serious blow to France and the United States by cutting off supplies.
Given the risk of losing access to uranium, or at least enough of it to supply France’s reactors, Macron has to hope that his troop deployments to Ukraine won’t trigger a Russian embargo on sales to France.
It isn’t clear how the Legionnaires can help the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians know how to operate artillery, and they have sophisticated intelligence support, some of it generated by their own FPV drones and spies and some of it thanks to US and other NATO intelligence and surveillance assets supporting Ukraine.
Anyway, the Ukrainian issue is not about how to use artillery but where the ammunition is supposed to come from. Ukraine continues to complain it lacks adequate supplies for 155mm howitzers.
The decision to put the Legion soldiers in Slavyansk is extremely provocative and goes against statements from the French side, including Macron, to the effect that if France sent troops they would replace Ukrainian army units in western Ukraine who could, therefore, be moved eastward to fight the Russians. As Slavyansk is on the front line, this French image of a soft deployment is turning into a war with Russia directly.
The US worked hard for years to achieve war between Russia and Ukraine, give credit where it’s due.
1500 French Surrender Monkey’s isn’t enough.
Send in 15,000 French Surrender Monkey’s.
It’s over in Berdycia, a village of 300, but at a cost of a battalian!
https://youtu.be/isXn-ghxzB4?si=nKsfqVzaaa-bg6tU
That’s complete bull crap. There was a complete French armored division involved in desert shield desert storm. He’s just making things up today. Also France never last NATO. They simply refused to place the fridge military under the command of an overall NATO military commander. Essentially they did not want American military officers commanding the French army. And they decided not to have any more NATO bases on French soil.
And that didn’t exactly happen in the vacuum. In the two years before, NATO and the CIA was not seen as an asset for France. People forget that the generals putsch was launched two days after the Bay of Pigs. With the world distracted by an American invasion of Cuba, Charles de Gaulle was supposed to be overthrown. The CIA claimed not to be involved, but they were eyeballs deep with the French generals. A year after that a French colonel from that era let assassination attempt against Charles DeGaulle and his wife. A machine gun ambush that failed. All of those things culminated in I’m not really seeing NATO as protection for France.
The French leaders are being retards today. But it’s very hard to find fault in the decisions of Charles DeGaulle in the early 60s.
The French “Advisors” got slaughtered in Vietnam.
If it’s not fake news, it’s one of the craziest decisions on every level. Does very little for a big problem France face is at the moment, and opens them up to all kinds of problems. But you know, a common thread to these people like Macron, they don’t have children. He doesn’t care what kind of world he leaves behind.
They were sent there to teach the Ukrinees how to retreat. It’s what the French do most.
\wy69
They were sent there to teach the Ukrinees how to retreat. It’s what the French do most.
\wy69
That makes way more sense than an organized unit of the foreign legion. So essentially it’s mercenaries.
The French “Advisors” got slaughtered in Vietnam.
Wonder how many were former Waffen SS, who joined The French Foreign Legion after the war?
Maybe we can send them some white flags.
LOL.
It’s Europe again Boo Boo getting us involved in another world war
France is always there for us when she needs us.
Curious why you think French soldiers are surrender monkeys. Was it their performance in Mexico? Over a century in North Africa? At the battle of Yorktown where essentially it was the French military fighting the British? Was the their performance in World War I, with Verdun being particularly noteworthy? Was it their heroic and desperate fight at Dien Ben Phu?
Was it their fight in World War II where they lost more casualties in six weeks than we did in the whole Vietnam war before they were out classed by the modernized German military?
We never stop hearing about poppies, Flanders field etc. France came close to doubling the British dead in World War II. And funny how we never hear about tea drinking surrender monkeys were the British army fled the battlefield in World War II at Dunkirk. Their runaway is cast as a heroic thing. Or how about Singapore, or a new chapter of military history was written when an army surrendered to an attack and forced 1/3 of its size.
A lot of the bull crap people put out about the French being cowards is British propaganda, and American leaders upset that the French will not rubberstamp everything we tell them to do. I am second to none of my scored for the French government. But you will never hear a professional talk crap about the French army
> If it’s not fake news, it’s one of the craziest decisions on every level. <
Agreed. Out of curiosity, I did a bit more digging. No major news service is mentioning this story. Plenty of minor ones are. But they all either link to ‘Asia Times’ or to Russian-language sites.
Hmm. I’d make a small wager that this story is rather clever Russian disinformation. I could be totally wrong. (My ex-wife used to mention that often. That’s why she’s my ex-wife.)
Scorn for the French government
Zackly. They could lose their country while trying to sustain Ukraine.
Stephen Bryen, the author of this piece, is a former US deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.
This will turn out to be another Vietnam.
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