The question of a possible deployment of a French military contingent to Ukraine began to be raised as early as the summer of 2023. This is reported by the newspaper Le Monde.
According to the publication, the weakness of the Ukrainian army worries Paris, so the country’s authorities have secretly started considering the possibility of sending their troops to the battlefield, which was mentioned at a security council meeting at the Elysee Palace last year.
The Commander-in-Chief of the French Land Forces, Pierre Schill, in an interview with the newspaper, stated that French President Emmanuel Macron’s statements were not an “improvised escalation”.
“In any case, this year I will have to send some guys to Odessa,” the publication quotes Macron’s words, seemingly casually mentioned in a narrow circle at the end of February.
Earlier, the Minister of the Armed Forces of France, Sébastien Lecornu, stated that the question of sending French combat ground forces to Ukraine was not on the agenda.
Previously, a French politician considered the agreement between France and Ukraine to be illegal.
