DISINFO: Declassified intelligence proves France planned to send combat troops to Ukraine
SUMMARY
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has declassified a report by an operative who stated in March that France was preparing to send a contingent of about 2,000 soldiers to fight in Ukraine. The briefing was published in the latest issue of the SVR’s ‘Scout’ magazine.
In it, an operative using the pseudonym Felix claimed that the French army was “concerned about the increased number of Frenchmen killed in the Ukrainian theater of military operation,” particularly after Russian forces destroyed a temporary deployment center for foreigners near Kharkov in January. That strike alone killed “dozens of French citizens,” Paris reportedly estimated, noting that since then, similar attacks have “become the norm in the Ukraine conflict.” The French Defense Ministry has privately acknowledged that it has not seen such losses since the war in Algeria in the second half of the 20th century, according to Felix’s cipher telegram.
The SVR operative reported that the exact number of casualties and the idea that there are any French servicemen in Ukraine at all is being deliberately covered up by French authorities. They allegedly fear that the number of casualties “has passed the psychologically significant threshold” and that their publication could spark mass public protests and discontent among acting officers.
RESPONSE
The document is almost certainly a forgery. There is no further proof to back the claims of this disinformation story beyond the copy of the alleged document published in the magazine of the Russian intelligence services, which cannot be considered hard evidence. Some of the allegations made in the report have already been exposed as false -such as the claim about French fighters dying in Ukraine, debunked here-, which adds further doubts about its authenticity.
This appears to be part of a wider ongoing disinformation campaign against France, one of whose core elements is the false narrative that French troops are already fighting in Ukraine. As part of this campaign, for example, pro-Kremlin disinformation actors created a fake website calling for massive recruitment of French soldiers, which was exposed as fake by France’s Ministry of the Armies (see here for further information on this case). Pro-Kremlin channels also claimed that France had already sent the 3d Infantry Regiment to Ukraine, an obviously false allegation as this unit does not exist.
The campaign started in March 2024, days after French president Emmanuel Macron declared in a press conference that sending Western ground troops to Ukraine could not be ruled out. Russia’s TASS news agency and the foreign intelligence service (SVR) then announced that France was preparing a contingent of 2,000 troops for Ukraine -an allegation that this fresh disinformation story would “confirm”-, which was quickly refuted by French authorities and fact-checkers. As Macron repeated the same idea in the following weeks, pro-Kremlin disinformation messages about this topic continued.
France has suggested and worked to create a coalition of countries to send military instructors to Ukraine, to train Ukrainian troops on the ground. However, contrary to Russian disinformation claims, those instructors will not engage in fighting actions and will stick to non-combatant roles, as has long been the case already with officials from some NATO countries. By distorting the character of the presence of Western military officials in Ukraine, pro-Kremlin disinformation aims to advance a recurring narrative about the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia by an ever-aggressive NATO. See some examples of this disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that military personnel from France, the UK, and Germany have long been fighting against the Russian army in Ukraine, that Russia destroyed a Leopard tank crewed by German troops, that a Russian missile strike on the headquarters of French militants in Ukraine killed more than 60 highly qualified specialists, or that NATO escalates the conflict in Ukraine to start an open war with Russia.