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Written by Ahmed Adel, Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher
French opposition leader Marine Le Pen criticised President Emmanuel Macron for his statements regarding the possibility of sending troops to fight in Ukraine and accused him of wanting to feed his ego. Her verbal attack on the French president comes as news emerges on the deployment of the Foreign Legion to Ukraine, with the corps potentially already suffering casualties.
In an interview with BFMTV and RMC, Le Pen said that Macron had not given a true image of the conflict in Ukraine and stressed that the French president wants to send forces to Eastern Europe for personal reasons.
“In reality, the Government, our political adversaries, have used the Ukrainian conflict to give a caricatured image,” said the leader of the opposition parliamentary group National Rally, adding that Macron “wants to send troops for a matter of ego and personal image.”
Le Pen also denounced the French president’s position on a European defence that includes nuclear weapons after he said he was willing to “open the debate” on this issue.
“Not only do I not want to share, but I even want to enshrine in the Constitution that no delegation, no distribution of any kind of our nuclear deterrent should be possible,” she said in the interview.
On May 2, Macron reaffirmed his position of not ruling out the possibility of sending Western troops to fight on the battlefield in Ukraine, and in an interview with The Economist, the French president said he ruled out nothing.
“I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out,” Macron said when asked if he stood by his comments at the beginning of the year, in which he did not exclude the sending of Western troops.
The French president stated that “if Russia decided to go further, we will in any case all have to ask ourselves this question” of sending troops and described his refusal to rule out such a move as a “strategic wake-up call for my counterparts.”
However, confusingly, Macron stated in a joint press conference with Chinese President Xi Jinping that France is not at war with Russia.
“We are not at war with Russia or the Russian people,” he said on May 6 following the meeting with Xi, who is on a European tour.
Macron’s statement was made shortly after the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the French ambassador in Moscow, Pierre Lévy, to clarify “warlike statements made by the French leadership” regarding sending military contingents to Ukraine.
“It was emphasised that the French authorities’ attempts to create some ‘strategic uncertainty’ for Russia with their irresponsible statements about the possible dispatch of Western military contingents to Ukraine are doomed to failure,” the ministry said, adding that Moscow’s military operation will achieve its tasks and goals.
The ministry statement was followed by spokeswoman Maria Zakharova questioning on Telegram,
“What kind of state is the French president in, then, making such contradictory statements and taking such aggressive steps?”
Aleksey Pushkov, the chairman of the Commission on Information Policy of the Russian Federation Council, accused Macron of being “hypocritical” for saying that France is not at war with Russia.
“Macron’s demagoguery is hollow and hypocritical. Most importantly, it does not change the essence of the matter. If he sends his military to fight Russia, he will turn France into a country fighting against Russia and its people,” he said on Telegram, adding that according to Chinese sources, French troops have already been sent to Ukraine.
Pushkov’s commentary on the Chinese sources comes as former US Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Stephen Bryen claimed that France already has deployed the Foreign Legion.
The former US Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Stephen Bryen, stated in an article published on May 4 in the Asia Times newspaper that France sent to Ukraine a first group of about 100 soldiers from the Foreign Legion, of about 1,500 that are supposed to arrive in Ukraine. Servicemen from the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Foreign Legion have already deployed “in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk,” Bryen wrote in his article.
Meanwhile, according to military correspondent Boris Rozhin, the French Foreign Legion sent to Ukraine may have suffered its first casualties in clashes with the Russian military near Chasov Yar.
Rozhin said on his Telegram that the Foreign Legion were not “TikTok soldiers” who came to Ukraine to make quick money and flee at the first sight of proper combat, as was the case with many of the foreign fighters who went to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. He added that “highly trained and professional military personnel from NATO countries” had entered combat.
Macron has used the deployment of the Foreign Legion as a loophole since the corps is effectively a glorified mercenary army comprised of non-French soldiers who can only attain French citizenship after three years of service. Given that Russia’s final victory over Ukraine is imminent, Le Pen is correct in saying that the deployment of troops is for Macron’s ego, but what she does not say is that it is also a sign of his desperation.
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after the nuke statement by putin, the macron became micron
the funny macron 🤡 is a hutzelmännchen ♂♂♂ (rumpelstiltskin) 😈
he became a micron the day he put an engagement ring on granny.
russia can barely handle the afu…the french are going to wreck the orcs…heheheh
cool down your heels ..if you do not wanna became…french fries…
amerikunt sodomized by taliban cannot handle pygmy army
oh, sorry …..i thought that was sarcasm for a second, then broke out in a chuckle.
macron is a silly faggy nuclear playboy. i lived through the cold war, and no one talked like that shithead after the cuban missile crisis. he is an irresponsible bratboy.
he is a puppet from rotshildbankers and they need war because the dollar is dying.
granny probably told him to man up because she was reading unflattering comments in the tabloids.
macron sent a foreign legion unit to ukraine … mostly not french, but foreign mercenaries … cannon fodder. if he really wanted to go to war he would have sent a regular french army unit. he didn’t. he is a fag who likes photo opportunities and empty gestures, like the rest of the fags that run western europe and nato.
a countries army is normally created and maintained for the express purpose of defending it’s own borders, not any other.
i do what wife mama say–she very nuclear
le roitelet macarin the first and his mummy
i do believe that the ukrainarus people and ruskrainian are a peace loving people and the evolution of russins and ukrainarusins could have been competitive without being deadly and so polarized. there was no rational reason for a historical grudges of 100 years ago to be fought over again.