The Russian military will exterminate all the French soldiers that will come to the Ukrainian territory, threatened the vice-president of the State Duma Pyotr Tolstoy.

“We will kill all French soldiers who come to the territory of Ukraine. Everyone,” he told the BFMTV channel. The Russian lawmaker also argued that 147 of the 367 French mercenaries who arrived earlier in Ukraine “have been exterminated”.

In addition, Tolstoy emphasized that Russia is “not interested” in the statements of French President Emmanuel Macron and his words that there are no “red lines” for providing assistance to Kiev.

On March 19, the director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin announced that France was already preparing a military force to be sent to Ukraine, which will initially amount to approximately 2,000 soldiers. The Ministry of the Armed Forces of France made a statement on the X social network stating that what Naryskin said did not correspond to reality.

The head of Russian intelligence claimed that France unofficially acknowledged the deaths of its own servicemen. “The French army has not experienced such a level of casualties since the Algerian war of 1954-1962. The Elysee Palace, as Naryskin noted, also believes that the number of dead French has crossed a “psychologically significant threshold” and now the question is “how to bury the dead and treat the wounded secretly, so that there is no public outcry.” .

In late February, after a conference in Paris on Ukraine, Macron did not explicitly rule out the possibility of Western countries sending ground troops to Ukraine. Macron also said that Western nations “intend to do whatever is necessary” to prevent Russia from having “the upper hand” in this conflict.