France will supply Ukraine with fourth generation ‘Mirage 2000’ fighters and train Ukrainian pilots in French territory. Not only that: Paris’ commitment to supporting Kiev in the war against Russia goes further. “We want to form a French brigade” in Ukrainesaid French President Emmanuel Macron during an interview with French TV channels TF1 and France 2.
”The challenge – Macron clarified – is to train 4,500 Ukrainian soldiers, equip them, train them, defend their territory” and set up a ”French brigade”, he added without speaking specifically about French soldiers in Ukraine.
”France is helping the Ukrainians to resist but we don’t want an escalation. Very concretely, we will launch a new collaboration and we will supply the Mirage 2000-5s and we will offer to train the pilots,” Macron reiterated.
“Ukrainian President” Volodymyr Zelensky, “his Defense Minister, called on all allies to train soldiers more quickly,” the head of the Elysée said. ”We have to ask ourselves whether this is a factor of escalation. The answer is no,” he added.
Macron confirms himself at the forefront of support for Ukraine. The French president, in recent months, has been the protagonist of verbal ‘accelerations’, going so far as to hypothesize the sending of soldiers to Ukraine in the event of a total emergency, linked to a possible Russian breakthrough of the front line.
Last week, the French leader clearly took a position in favor of using French weapons to strike Russian military targets. “We are with the Ukrainians – he continued – and Ukraine can hit the targets” corresponding to the areas “from which missiles were launched” towards the Kharkiv region, targeted by Russia in the last month. “We forbid hitting civilians with our weapons,” he stated again.
A red line comparable to that also drawn by the United States and ‘refreshed’ by President Joe Biden in an interview with the ABC network. Kiev also obtained US approval to strike military targets on Russian territory near the border with weapons supplied by Washington. The American green light, in particular, does not allow the launch of Atacms missiles – capable of reaching targets 300 km away – towards Russia.
Ukrainians “are authorized” to use American weapons “close to the border”, on Russian territory, when there are attacks against “specific targets” in Ukraine, Biden said, according to which “we are not authorizing attacks 200 miles inside Russia nor attacks on Moscow, on the Kremlin”.
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