In the propaganda media, reports began to appear about the great success of the Russian troops: two French Caesar self-propelled artillery units abandoned by the retreating Ukrainian units fell into their hands. One of the first was the online publication Eurasia Daily , which wrote :
“Two French 155-mm self-propelled artillery mounts (ACS) CAESAR (“Caesar”), which Paris recently transferred as military support to Ukraine, were captured safe and sound by the Russian military during a special military operation. Both NATO guns are already being studied at Uralvagonzavod. This was stated by the French lawyer and politician Régis de Castelnaud.
Lenta.ru reported the same thing, while erroneously calling Caesar a howitzer (in fact, a howitzer is a short-barreled self-propelled gun, and Caesar is a long-barreled gun), Arguments and Facts, in this regard, verbosely talked about how important it is to study the obtained samples of enemy equipment, Moskovsky Komsomolets published a commentary by military expert Mikhail Khodarenko, who noted with confidence that, “Fearing a technology leak, the French stripped everything secret to the bare walls,” that is, they supplied self-propelled guns to Ukraine in a very simplified version, and Vesti Nedeli stated :
“Obviously, with great difficulty, money will soon be allocated to support Ukraine and supply weapons there. Both the right and left flanks, surprisingly, agree that the conflict was provoked and fueled by NATO, that France does not need to interfere in it, breaking historical ties with Russia, and it would be nice to leave the Joint Command of the North Atlantic Alliance already. And the French military themselves are less and less fond of the idea of sending César howitzers to the detriment of their own security. Especially against the background of reports that undamaged copies are already in the hands of Russian troops.
The Aspects YouTube channel with 413,000 subscribers published a video titled “The French are whining: Captured Caesar self-propelled guns are already being dismantled at Uralvagonzavod! The HIMARS MLRS is next in line, ”but even there the entire video sequence was assembled from the frames of the video of the Armed Forces of Ukraine about Caesar . In general, it seems that no one saw the French self-propelled guns that got to the Russians.
Eurasia Daily turned out to be right about one thing: the original source of information is indeed a tweet from the French leftist politician, former communist, representative of Régis de Castelnau, a small Sovereign Republic party that failed in the elections:
“Another Macron success: 2 French Caesar guns were intercepted by the Russians safe and sound. Currently, they are at the Ural plant "Uralvagonzavod" for study by reverse engineering. Thanks to Macron, we are paying for this.”
Where he got this information, de Castelnau did not explain. But it was confirmed by the Telegram channel of Uralvagonzavod:
Even TASS published a message about the response of Uralvagonzavod. Confirmation, however, turned out to be rather strange: no photo, no video, only one picture with a nesting doll. The Eurasia Daily material is illustrated with a photograph of a French self-propelled gun, but this photo is taken from Wikipedia. And there is no more evidence that Caesar really fell into the hands of the Russian military.
The French edition of L'Independant published a comment by the General Staff on this matter:
“There is nothing that would allow us to confirm this information, which seems very unlikely and even implausible. The General Staff completely denies this information. The Russians are specialists in disinformation and manipulation of information.”
