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  6.  » French Defense Reports Acknowledge Ukraine Is Done With

Moon of Alabama – March 12, 2024

The French president Macron has recently pushed for an engagement of foreign troops in Ukraine. The idea was immediately rejected by every country that would be able to send a reasonable number.

The question is why Macron suddenly came out with this.

A series of recent reports from the French defense establishment might have caused his irritation.

The French magazine Marianne got access to “several confidential defense reports” from the French army on the situation in Ukraine.

Guerre en Ukraine : de la prudence à l’affolement… Ce que cache le virage de Macron (archived) – Marianne, Mar 7 2024

Arnaud Bertrand has translated large parts of it:

The situation looks exceedingly bleak for Ukraine, which might in part explain Macron’s recent declarations around sending troops to Ukraine. I translated the important parts of the article:

“A Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible”

The reports Marianne consulted write that Ukraine’s counter-offensive “gradually bogged down in mud and blood and did not result in any strategic gain” and that its planning, conceived by Kiev and Western general staffs, turned out to be “disastrous”: “Planners thought that once the first Russian defense lines were breached, the entire front would collapse […] These fundamental preliminary phases were conducted without considering the moral forces of the enemy in defense: that is, the will of the Russian soldier to hold onto the terrain”.

The reports also highlight “the inadequacy of the training of Ukrainian soldiers and officers”: due to a lack of officers and a significant number of veterans, these “Year II soldiers” from Ukraine – often trained for “no more than three weeks” – were launched into an assault on a Russian fortification line that proved impregnable.

Somehow people who had never heard of the Battle of Kursk convinced themselves that Russian soldiers in defensive positions would run away as soon as they would hear a tank rumbling towards them. They of course did not do so.

These Russian troops are well managed and cared for:

Cont. reading: French Defense Reports Acknowledge Ukraine Is Done With