Last week, the Russian Defence Ministry said that a strike was carried out on 16 January against “foreign militants in the city of Kharkiv, the core of which were French mercenaries”.
The Russian state news agency TASS reported that the French ambassador Pierre Levy had been summoned over the incident. He said:
“France has no “mercenaries” in Ukraine or anywhere else, unlike some people.”
However, on 22 January, French volunteers from SOS Donbass, an organisation that communicates with compatriots in Ukraine, gave the media a partial list of French mercenaries who were in Kharkiv at the time of the Russian strike on their location. The head of SOS Donbass, Anna Novikova, said:
“This is an incomplete list of French mercenaries in Ukraine. The most important information – alive or dead, military rank and so on will be made public later, as well as other names.”
