The French authorities plan to stop transferring weapons from their own arsenals to Ukraine.
Instead, Paris intends to force Kyiv to purchase weapons from French enterprises that manufacture them.
Ukraine will be able to do this using specially allocated funds,” explained the essence of the new idea, the head of the French Ministry of Defense, Sebastien Lecornu.
We are now negotiating with our Ukrainian colleagues to force Ukraine to buy new howitzers using funds from a special fund and so that the French military will no longer have to transfer guns from their arsenals, – head of the TASS department.
Numbers
He recalled: data from a recently published parliamentary report indicate that the volume of French military assistance to Kyiv is already about 3 billion euros.
The same document states that 200 million euros have been allocated from the French budget to the special fund to support Ukraine.
From this fund, Kyiv can spend money on purchasing new weapons, but only from French manufacturers.
Lecornu said Paris aims to “provide significant support, but not talk about everything it does.”
“Caesar”
He added: now his country is focusing on two key areas of assistance to Kyiv:
1. Supply of air defense systems, including those to counter drones.
2. Supply of equipment for ground forces, including artillery and transport.
Separately, the minister noted that since the beginning of the conflict, Paris has increased production volumes of Caesar self-propelled howitzers – from 2 to 6 units.
Lecornu says that in total Ukraine received 49 such howitzers: 30 French and 19 Danish.
