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According to the Ukrainian media and Disclose, the French company would have sold weapons and equipment used by the Russians in Ukraine. The contracts had however been signed between 2007 and 2012, before the embargo in force since 2014.
On a video, we see a Ukrainian journalist who claims to be in Boutcha, one of the cities where the Russian army is suspected of having committed war crimes. In the middle of the gutted carcasses, he pretends to wonder: “How could poorly trained Russian soldiers shoot so accurately with old, post-Soviet equipment?” According to him, the answer is on an armored vehicle billed to the Russian army, where he points to a thermal camera, which allows high-precision shooting. “The components and technologies of these systems were sold to Russia by the French company Thales”he says.
On this video, the date of manufacture dating back to June 2016 appears, almost two years after the entry into force of the embargo on arms sales to Russia. kyiv immediately reacted to these images: “A family was killed (…) with French weapons sold in circumvention of sanctions.”
Faced with these accusations, Thales is defending itself. “No defense equipment export contract has been signed with Russia since 2014. (…) Any information suggesting the contrary is erroneous and therefore misleading”, the company said last April. According to information from the investigative media Disclose, the thermal cameras were indeed delivered after 2014, but the contracts were signed between 2007 and 2012. Long before the embargo, they are therefore valid.
This is called the “grandfather clause”. Between 2015 and 2020, thanks to contracts concluded before the embargo, European companies exported nearly 350 million euros worth of weapons to Russia.