France providing intelligence to Ukraine, minister assures after US freeze
France is offering intelligence to Ukraine, Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Thursday, a day after Washington said it was suspending intelligence sharing with Kyiv, an effort to step up pressure on Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
This could be an important move, since Ukraine does not have satellites of its own currently.
Ukraine has been relying on US and commercial satellites to monitor Russian activity in areas where drones cannot reach, or where they cannot communicate.
Commanded by the Trump administration, the US military recently stopped sharing intelligence data with Ukraine. Commercial data tends to have a higher latency and lower resolution, so I think Ukrainians will highly appreciate French assistance.
Ukraine should immediately sign a precious metals contract with France.
So, Actual Freedom Fries now then?
Fries are Belgian actually.
It is a fucked up time we live when we all have to agree the French are right
based France
It's great. However, from the french ministère des armées Link I count 3 types of satellites for a grand total around 8 including two dedicated to satcom. (assuming this is up to date, and that all informations are public) It's not a bad number of a "medium-sized nation" but unless other European nation have the same capacities it's definitely not enough to provide 24/7 intelligence to Ukraine
I know France have an agreement with Germany and Italy about sharing the data of their satellites. It's most probably included in the data shared with Ukraine, directly by these countries or via the French agreement.
I think the UK have a number of imaging satellites of their own. The question is, would they be realistically able to share the Intel to Ukraine via France without the US discovering, as this could jeopardise the UK's current diplomatic position as the bridge between EU and US.
It seems plausible to me that UK and France agreed to play a good cop/bad cop face of Europe.
Yeah to not show all their hands would be a good play on their part even though the general population might be screaming for more transparency of collaboration.
I anticipate Rubio will try to lean on Macron to change their tune. I do not expect the tactic to work. I do expect the French to (rightly) tell us to fuck off in an interesting and amusing way.