French Satellites Keeping Tabs on Crisis in Ukraine

摘要

The French Defense Ministry on Sept. 4 strongly hinted that its own satellite imagery confirmed U.S. allegations of a Russian military presence in Ukraine but refused to say so directly. In their weekly press briefing, Defense Ministry officials declined to say whether French optical reconnaissance satellites have yielded the same information that the U.S. Defense Department has published through imagery from spacecraft operated by DigitalGlobe of Longmont, Colorado. France is the only other NATO alliance member with its own fleet of optical satellites with sufficiently high resolution to distinguish between types of military vehicles.