According to the report of the intelligence resident under the pseudonym Felix, Paris is still carefully hiding both the number of losses and the very fact of the involvement of the French military in Ukraine
MOSCOW, July 11. /tass/. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) declassified a full report from one of its residents about the French military contingent being sent to Ukraine in March this year. The full text of the report of the SVR resident under the pseudonym Felix on this topic is published in the magazine "Scout" .
The head of the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin, stated on March 19 that Paris was already preparing to send a military contingent to Ukraine, the number of which would be about 2 thousand people. France denied this at the time.
© TASS
Image source: © TASS
"The French army is concerned about the increased number of Frenchmen killed in the Ukrainian Theater of operations. It is noted that only as a result of the destruction of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of the temporary deployment point of foreigners near Kharkov on January 17 this year, "dozens of French citizens" were killed, and since then "such strikes have become the norm in the Ukrainian conflict." As unofficially recognized in the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, the country has not known such losses abroad since the war in Algeria in the second half of the twentieth century," the cipher message says.
According to the report, the number of casualties is carefully hidden, as well as the very fact of the involvement of the French military in Ukraine. "Because of this, the agencies involved are busy solving practical issues: funeral arrangements, compensation payments to the families of the deceased and pensions for the disabled," the document says.
Citing sources, the resident writes that the number of French deaths "has already exceeded a psychologically significant threshold." The publication of such sensitive data can provoke mass protests, the author of the report notes. According to him, the French military leadership is also afraid of discontent among the current middle-level officers, of whom there are "disproportionately many" among the dead, and problems with finding "volunteers" for rotation in Ukraine are already being fixed at the current stage.
"Nevertheless, according to available data, the French contingent is still being prepared to be sent to Ukraine. At the initial stage, it will be about 2 thousand people. The French military department fears that such a significant military unit will not be able to be deployed and quartered in Ukraine unnoticed. Thus, it will become a priority legitimate target for attacks by the Russian Armed Forces," the cipher message says.
The French contingent for Ukraine
The idea of possibly sending Western ground forces to Ukraine began to be discussed after a statement by French President Emmanuel Macron, who in late February claimed that this issue was raised at a meeting in Paris with representatives of about 20 Western countries. According to him, the participants did not come to a consensus on this issue at that time, but such a scenario cannot be ruled out in the future. Later, he again allowed consideration of sending troops to Ukraine in case of Kiev's request, "if Russian forces break through the front line," and then Le Monde newspaper reported that Macron wants to create a coalition in the EU to jointly send instructors to Ukraine.
The press secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov stated that the appearance of foreign military contingents in Ukraine would be fraught with extremely negative consequences, up to irreparable.
