PARIS, France: French General Eric Vidaud will resign as head of the Directorate of Military Intelligence after he did not warn the government of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as reported by Agencie France Press.

Government sources said Vidaud has been criticized for conducting “insufficient briefings” and “failure to master the issues.”

For months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, French intelligence stood in opposition to the U.S. and Britain, who warned of an imminent military assault on Ukraine.

Senior figures from the Macron government repeatedly stated that there would be no full-scale invasion by Russia. At the same time, French President Emanuele Macron sought diplomatic solutions, meeting Putin in person in the Kremlin and trying to schedule a summit with U.S. President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, France’s top general, Thierry Burkhard, has publicly stated that there had been differences in the analyses between France and the U.S. over a possible invasion of Ukraine.

“The Americans said the Russians were going to attack, and they were right,” said Burkhard.
“Our services rather thought that the invasion of Ukraine would have a monstrous cost [for Russia] and that the Russians had other options” to achieve their goals, he said.

Meanwhile, Le Monde has written that the war in Ukraine “had exposed the differences between the intelligence services of France and those of the UK and the US, which have larger budgets and more room for manoeuvre, in terms of surveillance laws,” according to The Guardian.