Russia Declares it Considers NATO Troops in Ukraine Fair Game

Russia responds to Ukraine’s claim that it will soon be welcoming French troops to its borders by threatening to kill them, saying they would not be immune from military action.

The chief of Russia’s foreign service Sergei Lavrov says Russian forces consider NATO — specifically French — troops deployed to Ukraine as legitimate targets and, furthermore, that he believes the French are already there.

The war talk follows months of bellicose rhetoric by French President Emmanuel Macron, who above and beyond other NATO leaders seems determined to become directly involved in the Ukraine conflict to prevent the country being permanently occupied by Moscow and, he says, to save the rest of Europe from further Russian aggression.

Following Macron’s repeated calls for NATO to deploy directly to Ukraine, Kyiv itself last week went further on the idea, saying it had cleared the way legally for foreign soldiers to arrive on its territory. They also urged France to send soldiers — military advisors in this case — as quickly as possible.

Russia’s Lavrov intoned he saw no distinction between French troops in Ukraine being “servicemen from the French armed forces” working as instructors to Ukrainian recruits to “simply mercenaries”. In either case, he threatened, they “represent a legitimate target for our armed forces”.

Spokesman for Vladimir Putin Dmitry Peskov made similar threats, and is reported by Kremlin state media to have said: “The thing is that all instructors who train Ukrainian troops have no immunity [from Russian attacks against them], whether they are French or not.”

The threats against French soldiers, and presumably by extension NATO itself, are not the first such made by Russia in return for Macron’s positions on deploying troops to Ukraine. Indeed, back in May Russian spokesman Maria Zakharova hit similar themes, and said: “If the French appear in the conflict zone, they will inevitably become targets for the Russian armed forces”.

It has been claimed by Russia several times in recent months that, far from preparing to deploy to Ukraine, France has already sent large numbers of soldiers to Ukraine in secret. Indeed, Western-backed fact-checkers state Russian media channels have circulated fabricated evidence to substantiate the claims, including allegations of large-scale repatriations of hundreds of bodies of fallen Western troops.

Lavrov again made the claim this week, saying “I have grounds to think and there are quite a few specific facts that they [the French] are already working in Ukraine”.

Whatever the truth of the matter, that France has a limited number of soldiers in Ukraine supporting the Ukrainians has also been claimed by their own ally Germany, which came in the form of a thinly-veiled criticism in March. The soldiers were said to have been deployed to help Ukraine operate the sophisticated cruise missiles given to the country to strike against the Russian occupation.