MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/. French President Emmanuel Macron's recent headline-making statements about sending troops to Ukraine are an attempt to urge Russian President Vladimir Putin to engage in talks, Nenad Stevandic, speaker of the National Assembly (parliament) of Republika Srpska (a constituent entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina), said in an interview with Izvestia.
"These statements by [French President Emmanuel] Macron about sending an army are just establishing negotiating positions, since France is a military force in Europe. It has nuclear weapons, it produces military aircraft. Other countries - such as Italy, Spain or Germany - do not have that, and the UK has already left the EU. France just wants to strengthen its position in the negotiating process. Macron is waiting for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to invite him to talks, and therefore speaks about sending troops to Ukraine. These two issues are related. It's like asking for him to be invited," he said.
Earlier, following the results of a conference on Ukraine in Paris, Macron did not unequivocally rule out the possibility of sending the ground forces of Western countries to the zone of the special military operation.
Data on French military presence in Ukraine
On March 19, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin said that France was already preparing a military contingent to be sent to Ukraine, which at the initial stage would amount to about 2,000 troops. At the same time, according to him, the French military are already unofficially present in Ukraine, and have suffered dead and wounded. The Russian foreign intelligence chief said that the French Armed Forces Ministry has unofficially acknowledged the deaths of its servicemen, and that the French army has not faced such a level of losses since the Algerian War of 1954-1962. The Elysee Palace, according to the SVR head, also believes that the number of French dead "exceeded a psychologically significant threshold" and now faces the issue of secretly burying the dead and treating the wounded so as not to provoke popular protests.
After that, the French Armed Forces Ministry stated on the X social network that the SVR director’s comments did not correspond to reality.
As reported by the Russian Defense Ministry on March 14, to date Russian forces have eliminated 147 of the 356 French mercenaries who had signed up to fight for Ukraine since the start of the special military operation. In total, 5,926 mercenaries from various countries have been killed in the conflict.