French President Emmanuel Macron said last month that he “cannot exclude” the possibility of Western soldiers being sent to aid Kiev in its fight against Moscow, branding Russia an “adversary” while denying Paris was “waging war” against it.
Russia’s military and top officials have repeatedly pointed to the presence of French mercenaries already fighting for Kiev on the ground.
In the statement on Tuesday, the SVR chief said the French Armed Forces had become “concerned” about the rising number of French nationals dying in Ukraine.
The casualty level has supposedly surpassed a “psychological threshold” and could trigger protests, the statement said, adding that Macron’s government was concealing this information and “delaying” the moment it would have to be revealed.
The claims come as the chief of staff of the French Army, Gen. Pierre Schill, said in an interview on Tuesday that France is prepared to take part in the “toughest engagements” militarily, and is ready to face any international developments. He added that Paris could assemble a division of 20,000 troops within 30 days and an army of 60,000 by joining with divisions from other NATO allies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has also claimed this week that Western mercenaries, including French nationals, are dying in Ukraine “in large numbers.” Commenting on a potential NATO deployment to Ukraine, the president also warned that this would be “one step shy of a full-scale World War III.”
Cross posted this from lemmygrad
Migrant communities are difficult to police and to surveil, particularly when they're ghettoized but still heavily relied on for cheap labor. They can regularly form the heart of nascent union movements, rebellious groups, and revolutionary cohorts targeting neighboring bourgeoisie-friendly-but-unstable regimes. Russian exiles in the UK and France ended up toppling the Tsar. Cuban exiles overthrew Batista (and have threatened to overthrow the Castros in turn). Somali expats in America are a chronic thorn in the side of both Democrat and Republican regimes, as they push politicians in a direction that the national government doesn't want to go. Palestinians in Jordan are a major security concern for both the local King and his neighboring allies in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt.
There are plenty of ruling-class residents of these countries that are under real pressure thanks to the impact large, often-well-educated and politically active migrant communities have on the global geopolitics.
The "migrant crisis" is a tool by southwestern and midwestern conservative Republicans to attack their Democrat peers. However you perceive the actual presence of Latin American migrants (or Eastern European / East Asian / Middle Eastern migrants, depending on how far you want to take the hysterical claims), the fixation on climate refugees as a threat is destabilizing to the current national government.
If you're aligned with the Biden Administration, your bourgeoisie affiliation does not leave you immune to the threat that a Trump-ascendant government presents. If nothing else, Trump's fixation on Right Wing Bugbears (the entire state of California, the mastheads of DC and New York news media, the rapidly growing private green energy industries) pose a threat to the financial elites tied in with these wealth aggregating sectors.