France will begin supplying Ukraine with ‘kamikaze’ drones in the next few weeks to use in its battle with Russia, the French defence minister announced Wednesday.
Sébastien Lecornu, the Minister of the Armed Forces for Emmanuel Macron’s government, said that the first round of French remotely-controlled attack drones will be sent to Kyiv in the “coming weeks”.
The French defence minister hailed the development for demonstrating that Paris has begun “regaining sovereignty over this key segment for our armies in less than two years” by producing the drones domestically.
Lecornu shared footage on his social media claiming to show the first “successful testing of the first French remotely operated munition – also called kamikaze drone.”
According to Kyiv state media Ukrinform, the defence minister ordered the production of 2,000 fighter drones from French manufacturer Delair in March for the French and Ukrainian militaries. Ukrinform also reports that France pledged to purchase an additional 100 kamikaze drones for the Ukrainians.
While Western leaders, such as U.S. President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, have so far ruled out the use of long-range missiles by Ukraine to strike within the Russian mainland, Kyiv has been using attack drone strikes in the interim, including for strikes on Moscow.
On top of supplying attack drones, Minister Lecornu said in January that Paris would supply around 3,000 artillery shells as well as about fifty missiles to Ukraine per month for the entirety of 2023.
In a slight dig apparently directed towards Berlin, over the issues plaguing German equipment on the battlefield in Ukraine, Lecornu said: “Some countries, for political reasons, have made a lot of announcements. France’s pride is that everything that is promised is really delivered, and everything that is delivered works.”
The enthusiastic support in Paris for the war in Ukraine, which is approaching the third year anniversary of the Russian invasion, France has taken a much different approach to the conflict in the Middle East.
Earlier this month, President Macron announced that France has suspended shipments of arms to Israel for use in the Gaza Strip against the Islamist Hamas terrorists responsible for the barbaric October 7th attacks in southern Israel, which saw dozens of French citizens killed.
Despite this, Macron also called for an international Western arms embargo to Israel. Continuing his spat with the Jewish nation this week, the French president told Israel that because it was “created” by the United Nations, it should abide by its diktats.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu responded with a “reminder” to Macron, that the state of Israel was established in its “War of Independence with the blood of our heroic fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, including from the Vichy regime in France.”