They are 160 this Thursday, March 17, at attention, on a parking lot backed by a forest of tall Scots pines with their feet still covered with a thick layer of snow. One hundred and sixty alpine chasseurs of the 7and battalion of Varces (Isère), beret screwed on the head, just landed on the only military air base of Estonia, in Amari, via a special flight chartered the same morning from Paris. Their mission: to reinforce the eastern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its bases in the countries bordering Russia, in the context of the war in Ukraine.
In this mid-March, the reception of Colonel Eric Mauger, the head of the French section of this mission called “Lynx”, where France has regularly sent men since 2017, wants to be solemn. On paper, the alpine hunters are in Amari for a simple relief. But the proximity of the Russian border, only 250 kilometers from the air base, makes the war in Ukraine particularly vivid.
“We are here in a preventive, dissuasive and non-aggressive logic”recalls the colonel in the ranks facing him, before quoting the expression attributed to Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854-1934): “You have to show your strength to avoid its use”.
Smacks of “phony war”
Three weeks after the start of the Russian military offensive in Ukraine, preparing for the possibility of war without doing it has a special flavor for newcomers. On the faces, you can read both enthusiasm and a discreet feverishness. The atmosphere smacks of the “phoney war”, those eight months which preceded the invasion of Belgium and then of France by Nazi Germany in 1940, marked, in particular, by the “winter war” between Russia and neighboring Finland.
Unlike Operation Barkhane in the Sahel, in Estonia, the French soldiers here officially have no enemy, not even the Russians. They only come ” to reassure “ the Estonians, as the saying goes, integrate into one of its two infantry brigades, train with its soldiers on its territory covered with forests and swamps, and develop “interoperability”according to the military term.
A total of 350 French people are thus deployed in the country, including around a hundred airmen with four Mirage 2000s. reinforced air” (eAP), also under the leadership of NATO.
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