“For the Russians, I have already died twice”, announces Franck, generous beard and sarcastic smile on his lips: “Fortunately, these are not very serious deaths since I am resurrected” then jokes this fighter from the Ukrainian International Legion. The strong 50-year-old, who agreed to testify on Skype openly from the front line where he is deployed, is one of the alleged French “mercenaries” killed according to Moscow in a strike on the night of January 16 to 17 in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine.
In a vast communications operation, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have on this occasion “eliminated” around sixty fighters “most of whom were French citizens” and injured 20 others. Paris, for its part, assures that it has “identified a coordinated maneuver by Russia” to disseminate false information involving France, at a time when the latter is increasing its arms promises to Ukraine.
“Phoney propaganda”
Several lists, including one supposed to reveal the identity of around thirty “dead French mercenaries”, were relayed massively by Telegram channels and pro-Kremlin activists. There is mention of Franck, who in the fall of 2022, had already been declared killed by Russian media, in a video seen by AFP. “I lost my Go Pro camera in a trench in the Zaporizhia region,” he says. They had used my images, mixed with those of corpses, to say that my entire group was dead. »
AFP was also able to find and question two other French people appearing on these lists. All three denounce “phony propaganda”, intended to “discredit” their commitment as volunteers alongside the Ukrainian armed forces. These former French soldiers, none of whom were in Kharkiv at the time of the attack, forcefully refute the term “mercenary”.
Lists created by ChatGPT
Béranger Minaud, who testifies under his real name and whom AFP met on January 25 in Aix-les-Bains, at the foot of the French Alps, says he left Ukraine in September 2023 after being wounded in combat. “For me, it is completely impossible that 50 French fighters find themselves in the same place at the same time in Ukraine,” says this 45-year-old former delivery driver, who first got involved in humanitarian work before taking weapons to “stop the massacres” of civilians.
French security sources estimate the number of French volunteers in Ukraine at around a hundred. “These lists are nonsense: there are other guys on them that I know, they were in Ukraine in the past but they returned to France for a while,” adds the man who calls himself Sly, 43 years. Contacted via WhatsApp, he said he was currently fighting “in the Ukrainian South”.
According to Franck, who made contacts in Kharkiv from Donbass where he works as a “sniper”, “the bombing that night did not hit any military buildings, it hit civilian infrastructures, there were 19 civilians injured, but that’s all.” A report close to that given by the local authorities, who reported on January 17 that 17 civilians were injured. Some of the identities presented are also false, French diplomatic and military sources point out, one of them affirming that certain lists “generated by Chat GPT” produced fanciful names. Like this “Air Jordan”, born in 1986, which would have died.