French Defence Ministry denies presence of French soldiers in Ukraine

The French Ministry of Defence denies the presence of French soldiers in Ukraine, as allegedly evidenced by documents attributed to the Pentagon that were leaked to Russian social media in the middle of the week.

Source: The spokesperson of Sebastien Lecornu, Minister of the Armed Forces of France, reported by The Guardian

Quote: "There are no French forces engaged in operation in Ukraine. The documents cited do not come from the French armies. We do not comment on documents whose source is uncertain."

Details: Top-classified Pentagon documents, reportedly containing diagrams and details of expected arms shipments, battalion sizes and other sensitive information, were posted on Twitter and Telegram earlier this week.

One of the slides stated that Ukraine already has a small contingent of special forces from France, America, the United Kingdom and Latvia, comprising less than a hundred soldiers from NATO member states.

According to military analysts, the documents were changed in some parts to overstate the US estimates of Ukrainian military losses and underestimate the number of Russian military losses.

Background: Mykhailo Podoliak, advisor to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, has called the first batch of materials "photoshopped" and joked about the degradation of Russian intelligence.

Andrii Yusov, representative of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, has said that evaluations of losses of both sides are clearly false in the material, and part of the information is "explicitly collected from open sources".

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