Var: Video shows Ukrainian military training aboard French light battle tanks

For discretion, you will have to return. While the Ministry of the Armed Forces decided to keep information about the presence of Ukrainian soldiers in France as vague as possible, it was the latter who ultimately revealed their whereabouts. Indeed, while the Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, announced to the Parisian “a plan to prepare for the deployment of up to 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers in France”, images of Kyiv army troops in France have just leaked to the social network.

These videos, discovered by Ukrainian subscribers to the conflict, combine a nearly three-minute montage of images of Volodymyr Zelensky’s soldiers, in particular aboard French-made AMX-10 RC (cannon wheel) light battle tanks. This montage was made using the InShot app.

Against the background of metallic music, the soldiers who are training and training alongside the French troops, with a certain pride, take pictures of themselves (folding the letter V of victory with their fingers), developing in the middle of a desert landscape, hilly and dusty. They can also be distinguished by what looks like a military barracks.

Thanks to building inscriptions discovered by former French soldiers, some experts claim that this was the Canyuers camp in Var. Information we can confirm, according to a source close to the case. The largest camp in Western Europe, the Canjouers military complex is “essential for the operational training of French troops” and stretches over 35,000 hectares on the high plateaus of northern Var, according to the Ministry of the Armed Forces.

Formation and tanks that could play a decisive role at the front

If it is difficult to date these images, they would have been taken very recently. “At least in recent weeks, since the announcement by the President of the Republic,” continues this person briefed on the case. Emmanuel Macron did indeed announce on January 4 the future delivery of these light armored tanks weighing 25 tons, moving on wheels and equipped with a 105 mm cannon. The decisive declaration of that time about the war in Ukraine, since it was supplanted by announcements of heavy armored vehicles for Kyiv from many Western countries … Except France.

It is not yet known whether these soldiers, whose numbers are carefully hidden, are already on alert, but they may reach “Ukraine with these tanks in the coming days or weeks.” If not already. Meanwhile, about 55 Ukrainian soldiers are completing a month-long training in Spain this week to use the Leopard 2 tanks that some Western allies have supplied or promised to Ukraine, Madrid said on Monday.

Arriving in Spain in mid-February, these Ukrainian soldiers are due to leave for Poland on Wednesday before joining Ukraine and the front, a Spanish government source said. According to the Spanish captain Contreras, they were trained 12 hours a day and six days a week at the military base of San Gregorio in the city of Zaragoza in northeastern Spain.

Other Western countries such as Poland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Canada have delivered or promised Leopard tanks to Ukraine to counter the Russian invasion. Dozens of tanks and thousands of new trained fighters who could play a decisive role in the plan of the Kyivans for a new counteroffensive.