French Rafales and Swedish Gripens at Sweden’s Luleå airbase.
Laura Kayali – Politico May 2, 2025
The sun has just risen when the silver French air force tanker takes off from southern France bound for northern Sweden.
France’s April deployment of the Airbus A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport is part of the Pégase High North mission to Sweden’s northernmost air base of Luleå. It’s the third such visit by the French air force this year — a concrete example of Paris pivoting to European defense after decades of focusing mainly on the Indo-Pacific and the Sahel.
It’s also a sign of closer cooperation between two of Europe’s defense heavyweights as the continent boosts military spending to counter the threat from Russia, amid questions over the U.S. commitment to Europe’s security under President Donald Trump.
“We’re showing that we’re capable of operating across Europe in half a day,” said General Patrice Hugret, the head of the French mission.
Sweden and Finland joining NATO — a break from decades of neutrality triggered by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — is putting more focus on the Arctic as the region becomes a growing source of tension for NATO, Russia and even China.
That makes the Swedish base a “sweet spot … to protect the border in the east,” said Colonel Peter Greberg, the commander of Luleå’s air base. “We’re approximately 600 to 700 kilometers away from the first Russian military base. From a flying perspective, it’s not that far.”
Despite very different geographies — Sweden is an Arctic nation that shares a maritime border with Russia, while France is on NATO’s southern flank and faces the Mediterranean Sea — Paris and Stockholm are surprisingly similar when it comes to defense policy, and they are getting closer.
Both countries share a vision of military self-sufficiency that includes a powerful, wide-ranging defense industry and armed forces able to defend their own territories without much outside help.
“We have been forced to develop a complete set of capabilities for our air force. [Before joining NATO], we could not rely on anyone else,” said the commander of the Swedish air force, Major General Jonas Wikman, standing in front of French Rafale and Swedish Gripen fighter jets on the Luleå airbase tarmac.
“That is something we have in common,” echoed General Nicolas Chambaz, who’s in charge of international relations at the French air and space force. “It’s so easy for Sweden and France to work together because we have exactly the same mindset.”
Kindred spirits
France and Sweden’s military ties stretch back centuries. In 1631, under the Treaty of Bärwalde, France agreed to provide financial support to help the Nordic nation in the Thirty Years War against Habsburg Austria; Sweden’s royal family is descended from a Napoleonic commander who went rogue.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been working to strengthen those ties, coming for a state visit in January 2024. Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has been to Paris a couple of times this year, including to take part in a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” of countries allied with Ukraine.
The supreme commander of the Swedish armed forces, General Micael Bydén, visited France in his first trip abroad after his country joined NATO, while Macron recently appointed the deputy head of the DGA arms procurement agency, Thierry Carlier, as French ambassador to Sweden.
“The geopolitical context only brings us closer together,” said Carlier.
Closer ties don’t mean complete harmony. French and Swedish arms-makers are also fierce rivals, as France’s Dassault and Sweden’s Saab compete for fighter jet contracts in South America. Sweden’s military industrial complex is also more closely tied to the U.S. than France’s.
However, France’s MBDA and Saab also pledged to deepen cooperation, and both Paris and Stockholm are in the European Long-Range Strike Approach missile project.
“Partnership with Sweden opens the way to cross-purchasing,” Carlier said. He confirmed that France is in talks to procure Saab’s GlobalEye surveillance aircraft to replace its aging Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS airplanes, and said he hopes both countries will boost cooperation on air defense and the naval sector.
Crucially, Sweden is also among the European countries most interested in Macron’s proposal to talk about how French nuclear weapons can be used to protect Europe, several French and Swedish officials said.
The topic was addressed when Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson met with his French counterpart Sébastien Lecornu in Paris in March; several Rafales sent to Luleå during the Pégase High North deployment were nuclear-capable.
“The question of the [European nuclear] deterrent is looming in the background. We follow this very closely depending on how the Americans are operating and acting,” said Jakob Hallgren, the director of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, referring to growing worries about the reliability of the U.S. under Trump.
NATO defense plans
In the winter, with heavy snow and darkness nearly 24 hours a day, the conditions are very harsh in the Luleå airbase, a highly secured airfield at the end of a long road framed by tall trees.
Now, as Gripens and Rafales roar into the blue, spring sky, there is barely any frost left.
“More and more air forces are coming to Luleå,” said Stefan Kaarle, a pilot who’s been in the Swedish air force for 30 years. “It’s a pretty important area of the world right now and many NATO countries want to show that they can operate from the high north.”
Sweden’s proximity to Russia, and previously the Soviet Union, pushed Swedish pilots to learn how to land on roads and highways — a technique that requires specific logistics and support. Such a skill could be useful for other NATO allies because it limits reliance on airfields, which can be more easily targeted by enemy forces.
“We don’t necessarily need that in France, but it’s good to have several strings to our bow,” said Colonel Frédéric Dalorso, the deputy head of the Pégase High North mission.
One of the French mission’s objectives, he explained, is to rehearse NATO’s regional defense plans. The French worked to improve their Agile Combat Employment skills — a NATO scheme of maneuver that implies flying fast and far — while the Swedes train to refuel their warplanes from the French MRTT.
Air-to-air refueling has been identified as a key capability gap for Europeans if the U.S. disengages from the continent.
In Luleå, Sweden and France worked on cross-maintenance and logistics by using local mechanics and local spare parts, for example aircraft tires. More broadly, Pégase High North’s aim is also to identify preferred areas for NATO’s regional defense plans.
“That way, if we need to deploy in six months or a year, the contacts will have already been made,” Dalorso said.
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Story by Eirian Jane Prosser • They were hundreds of mostly male asylum seekers, smuggled in secrecy in a fleet of coaches in the dead of night into a four-star hotel in a leafy village in the Cheshire commuter belt.
But six months on from that covert operation to take over a hotel in Altrincham to house migrants MailOnline has discovered that many of those original arrivals have been evicted for criminal offences- only to start living in tents nearby,
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“We’re showing that we’re capable of operating across Europe in half a day,” said General Patrice Hugret, the head of the French mission.”
The ram is an idiot. This base will cease to exist within minutes of any major war.
All fatuous when Europe is already invaded by all the Third World and not Russia
“French and Swedish warplanes deter Putin”
Just as if!!😂
Russia just wants to sell Europe cheap gas…Instead the EU followed Satan’s orders & chose high energy prices and infinity “migrants”….So who’s the enemy?
Some costumed French imbecile belched out, “We’re showing that we’re capable of operating across Europe in half a day” With the French, I suppose the second half of that day can then be spent scrubbing the shit out of their pants from when they ran away in panic, or scooping what’s left of their comrades into buckets when it becomes starkly obvious they tried to bite off far more than they could chew.
A book of French Military Conquests Since 1840 could be printed on a matchbook, so go ahead and get slaughtered again in the north, you shit-spewing lightweights. It won’t be like Libya when you jumped in with the criminally insane Jewnited States to bomb the only cuntry in Africa that had its shit together, other than a glaring lack of air defenses, and turn it from peace & prosperity to utter mayhem in a couple of days because their leader apparently had the unmitigated gall to share some of the oil wealth with the citizens and wanted to start a new pan-African currency uncontrolled by the Jew criminal syndicate.
Go for it!!!! Don’t blather about it,,, do it!
Another Politico propaganda POS to hype the official narrative that Russia is some kind of threat and the EU NATO nations have to do their part in the great war effort. The governments and brass of France, Sweden and the rest of the NATO nations know the DEAL to let Russia have the four eastern oblasts (“territories”) on its border was made even before the Russian crossed the border 3 years ago. All of this media hype with the thunderous EU flybys with menacing obsolete jets (all of which, incidentally, can be taken down with any advanced missile system) is simply to make the slaughterous war and the carving up of the Ukraine by the powers seem justified to the naive public, and especially for the the totally duped Ukrainians who were led down the garden path by the US and the rest of the Western powers. Russia vacated Syria in exchange and that is all which really matters to the ZOG powers – no matter what tiny skirmishes they mount in the Ukraine in order to make the peace deal seem hard to attain.
After the totally-planned, Israeli-US executed 9-11 operation to usher in the “surveillance state” and serve as a pretext for more wars in the ME, and then after the totally-planned 2007 “Great Recession” with trillions in wealth transferred to the few, the gullible & brainwashed public CONTINUED to believe all of the official narratives of the lying Western establishment. Whistleblowers such as Victor Thorn and Catherin Ann Fits and all of the hard and irrefutable evidence were totally ignored:
Victor Thorn on 9-11:
“The New World Order Exposed” – 2003
“9-11 on Trial –
“9-11 EVIL: Israel’s Central Role in the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks” – 2006
“Made in Israel: 9-11 and the Jewish Plot Against America” – 2011
“How $21 Trillion Went Missing Without a Trace: America’s Biggest Financial Coup Explained”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbO9qzfMK8Q
Then even after the 2010 Rockefeller Foundation publication “Scenarios for the Future of Technology
and International Development” which laid out the lockstep measures for the governments of all of our nations to take for the very-planned Coronavirus flu plandemic, all in order to usher in their top-down, totalitarian UN Agendas and New World Order, the Western brainwashed public does not dare to look at the true source.
“Lock Step to Lock Downs, Harry Vox from 2014”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/2wQmsZsIH8Ca
Poor Harry was completely ignored and even after 2020 after which he said, |”I told your so.”.
Not for those who are “woke” but those who are awake, we have to ask how anyone with any common sense BELIEVE anything the “authorities” anywhere in the West or the East tell us about the carefully-executed proxy war in the Ukraine, expect for the wanton slaughter of over one million Ukrainian soldiers in the Russian meatgrinder, which no one except the affected Ukrainian families seems to care about.
Blatant mass deception and mass murder by the power elites in the Ukraine? If you don’t believe it, then you have hour head up your ass. How about Gaza? You think genocide is okay?
why look enemy in foreign lands when
we have our enemies of our race within !
first enemies are our own traitors + their voters .