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Between 2015 and 2020, France delivered state-of-the-art military equipment to Russia.This equipment has enabled Vladimir Putin to modernise 1,000 tanks, fighter planes and combat helicopters...

PUBLISHED MAR 14, 2022
BY DISCLOSE
His face was expressionless, the tone serious. On March 2nd 2022, ten days after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron addressed the French nation. “Putin chose war,” he declared to the 21 million viewers watching his speech live. “Russian forces have been shelling Kyiv and besieging major cities. Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians have been killed.” In a similarly sombre tone he added: “We stand with Ukraine.” France had chosen its side.

That evening Emmanuel Macron omitted to mention an important detail: the fact that between 2015 and 2020 France had secretly armed Russia. This is a paradox given that for years the French president has been busy on the international scene seeking to find a diplomatic outcome over Ukraine rather than a military one.

Classified documents obtained by Disclose, which have been corroborated by data in the public domain, reveal that since 2015 France has issued 76 export licences to Russia for military equipment worth a total of 152 million euros. This figure appears in the latest French Parliamentary report on arms exports, though the types of weapon are not detailed there. According to our investigation the French aerospace and defence companies Thales and Safran, in which the French state has major stakes, were the main beneficiaries of these contracts. The deals mostly involve thermal image cameras for tanks, and navigation systems and infrared detectors for Russian fighters and attack helicopters.

Yet on August 1st 2014 the European Union imposed an embargo on arms exports to Russia. This move followed months of tension in Ukraine. In February 2014 Russia had annexed the Crimean peninsula, just two months after its army had gone into the Dombass region of east Ukraine in support of pro-Russian separatists. In July that year a Boeing 777 jet airliner with 298 civilians on board was shot down by a missile over the region. Russia was singled out for criticism, accused of having fuelled the armed conflict.

Under pressure from European partners and the United States, French president François Hollande cancelled the planned sale in 2015 of two Mistral-class amphibious assault ships to Russia. But successive French governments under first President Hollande and then President Macron were to take advantage of a loophole in the European embargo: it was not retroactive. So any contracts signed before the decision to impose an embargo could continue.

On top of that, the equipment was being exported under guarantee, in other words the French manufacturers were committed to carrying out any repairs for several years after delivery, as long as France did not suspend their export licence.

This French-made military equipment helped Russian leader Vladimir Putin to modernise his armed forces over the years; and it could already be in use in the war in Ukraine.

That might have been the case on March 4th, for example, in the city of Zaporizhzhia. On that day there was fighting near the biggest nuclear power station in Europe. Fire broke out in one of the buildings on the site. No reactor was hit but the next day the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accused the Kremlin of resorting to “nuclear terror”. The tanks in the front line of the fighting “knew what they were targeting” as they were “equipped with thermal cameras”, he said in a video. It is possible that these thermal cameras bear the names of the defence companies Thales and Safran.

According to a classified report from the French inter-ministerial body the Secrétariat Général de la Défense et de la Sécurité Nationale (SGDSN) – which coordinates national defence and security policy – dated May 2016 and obtained by Disclose, some 121 Catherine XP thermal imaging cameras were due to go to the “Russian army”. These deliveries were never stopped. According to our information, by 2020 these two heavyweights of the French arms industry had sold a total of 800 cameras of this type to Russia.

In 2012 Thales signed a contract with Russia for ‘Catherine FC’ and ‘Catherine XP’ cameras. According to the company’s website, these cameras enable human targets to be detected at night thanks to the heat that they give off, and to detect a tank several miles away. Thales says the benefit of this is that the enemy vehicle can be engaged at “sufficiently long range to ensure ‘first hit’ advantage”.

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