French ground army chief of staff General Pierre Schill said in an op-ed that his forces are ready to respond to “the toughest engagements” and said the country could engage a division of 20,000 troops within 30 days.
Russian Foreign Intelligence Chief Sergey Naryshkin said on Tuesday that thousands of French troops are being prepared for deployment in the Odessa region of Ukraine.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to put around 2,000 troops in Odessa would only serve as a “human tripwire force” and would be “the equivalent of NATO, like a dog, urinating on Odessa, marking it as NATO’s territory,” Mark Sleboda, an international relations and security expert, told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Wednesday. He added that in this analogy, France is like “a poodle.”
On Tuesday, French ground army chief of staff General Pierre Schill said in an op-ed that his forces are ready to respond to “the toughest engagements” and said the country could engage a division of 20,000 troops within 30 days.
“He’s wrong. The French army is most certainly not ready for this,” Sleboda said, commenting on the general’s assertion. “If they were engaged in a high-intensity conflict such as the Kiev regime is engaged in, firing many less artillery shells than Russia, then France would have enough artillery shells for four days of conflict with Russia. Four days,” Sleboda explained.
By comparison, Russia has more than 600,000 troops deployed in the special operation zone, according to both Russian and Western analyses. “There is a likelihood that the French believe that Russia will not fire on these French troops, [because] they are under uniform, out of fear of striking a NATO member, even though of course, NATO’s Article Five would not apply,” Sleboda explained.
Sleboda added that he believes Macron thinks that if French troops are killed by Russia, then that will create more support for the conflict domestically and “help politically mobilize” other European countries to join the fight.
“I think if Macron sent his troops to Odessa, obviously not a force that could be able to engage Russia in a slugfest on the battlefield, but as kind of a human tripwire force. It would be the equivalent of NATO, like a dog, urinating on Odessa, marking it as NATO’s territory,” Sleboda said.
“Of course, with NATO troops officially in uniform dying in Ukraine, that would take us to a whole other level,” he warned.
Sleboda predicted that there will be a “very big information warfare game, the targets of which will be the French people,” and other NATO member states, noting that Finland, the Czech Republic, the Baltics and Canada “have all already suggested that they might” join the French.
Co-host Wilmer Leon asked if Macron could seriously believe a “behind whopping isn’t on the horizon,” Sleboda responded by describing NATO’s “salami-slicing tactics” of incrementalism.
“We now have NATO leaders openly admitting, ‘yeah, we’ve got troops all over Ukraine. They’ve been heavily involved in all operations of combat,’”he said, citing a Spanish newspaper. “Russia has still not taken any retaliatory actions against NATO outside of Ukraine, outside of the parameters of the proxy war. So, I think this is one more escalation they believe they can get through [using] incrementalism.”
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