“New Marching Orders From NATO”: Checking In On France’s Military Build-Up On The Eastern Flank 

France has embarked on a quiet force build-up and expansion of its troops and military presence in NATO’s ‘eastern flank’ country of Romania. It plans to send thousands more French troops to the country which shares a large border with Ukraine for major military drills planned next year.

“We used to play war,” French General Bertrand Toujouse was quoted in Politico as saying. “Now there’s a designated enemy, and we train with people with whom we’d actually go to war.”

Politico has further cited French army leadership as saying it has “new marching orders from NATO,” and that ultimately the plan is that by 2027 it “should be able to deploy a war-ready division in 30 days.” 

Within the next iteration of upcoming NATO drills in Romania, France will test “its ability to deploy a brigade, typically 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers, within a 10-day window.”

Over the past two plus years, and ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Feb.2022, France has led the way in providing soldiers for a NATO battle group stationed in Romania, including at least 800 French troops and climbing.

This build-up is happening in the face of constant Kremlin warnings about the expansion of NATO’s military infrastructure right up to Russia’s doorstep, a historic grievance which spans back to the 1990s and to the early 2000s. Russia has even recently changed and lowered its threshold for using nuclear weapons.

It must be recalled that in Sept. 2023 testimony to the European Union Parliament, then NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg (recently retired) admitted that it was the constant US-led push to expand NATO eastward that remains Moscow’s key rationale for invading Ukraine.

Stoltenberg’s revealing words are recounted as follows:

“The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition to not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second-class membership. We rejected that.

So, he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.”

Fast-forward to this week, Oct. 2024, and a US state-funded source details the following of French military expansion eastward:

France doubled its contribution to the NATO Response Force in Romania on 28 February, 2022, just four days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sending 350 additional soldiers as well as a dozen armoured vehicles and a dozen Leclerc tanks.

Since 1 May 2022, the deployed force, operating under the name “Mission Eagle” (“Mission Aigle“) has taken the form of a multinational battlegroup of which France is the core. France also deploys a MAMBA ground-to-air defense system, logistics and fighting units, totalling more than 1,000 French soldiers.

Last month, additional vehicles from the French 7th Armored Brigade  arrived in Romania. In total eight Leclerc tanks and six armed personnel carriers reached the army camp General Berthelot, just outside Bucarest, escorted by Romanian military police. 

While French President Emmanuel Macron early in the Russia-Ukraine war attempted to play peacemaker and mediator with Russia’s Putin through a series of ‘controversial’ phone calls, any attempt at serious diplomacy between the West and Moscow has long gone out the window.

In the meantime, Ukraine has only kept up its ultra high risk drone attacks deep into Russia, destroying with some success oil depots, gas facilities, and key miliary assets at air bases, including also on the Crimean peninsula. But this has made no different on the front lines in Donetsk, where Ukraine forces are crumbling.