France has entered the final phase of negotiations with MBDA and Safran Electronics & Defense to field THUNDART, a new precision rocket designed to give the French Army deep-strike reach of up to 150 kilometres, the companies said.
The agreement concerns the successor to the Lance-Roquettes Unitaire, the French Army’s existing rocket launcher, and follows the selection of the MBDA-Safran solution under the Direction Générale de l’Armement’s Frappe Longue Portée Terrestre programme. France currently operates nine LRU systems, modernised variants of the American M270 launcher whose guided rockets reach around 70 kilometres and which are nearing the end of their service lives. THUNDART roughly doubles that reach. The 227mm guided rocket is designed to perform in contested conditions, including against jamming or the loss of satellite navigation, drawing its guidance and navigation from Safran, whose package is derived from the AASM Hammer precision kit, and its propulsion from Roxel, a wholly owned MBDA subsidiary.
Stéphane Reb, executive vice-president for programmes and managing director of MBDA France, framed the win as a sovereign capability. “THUNDART represents far more than a new strike capability: it is a sovereign, robust, and adaptable response to the operational challenges of the French Army,” he said in a statement, adding that the two firms were offering the French armed forces “a strategic capacity designed to last.”
Alexandre Ziegler, director of the defence global business unit at Safran Electronics & Defense, said the selection rewarded “several years of innovation, commitment, and collective work,” and pointed to interest from allied countries that could open the system to export.
Designed, developed and produced in France, THUNDART is built around a launcher developed by Safran with partners including Scania France, CMAR and Essonne, and is intended to plug into the French Army’s ATLAS fire management system. Its modular design, the companies said, would allow integration with other command systems and platforms for export customers, and the ammunition pod has been built to fit other launchers as well, aimed at the wider long-range artillery market. The system is free of United States ITAR export controls, leaving France in control of its own sales abroad.
Over the weekend a great deal of blatant pro-Russian propaganda has appeared in Western media, especially Reuters. Apparently, the war criminal Putin has undertaken a staged TV interview, in which he denied that the current Ukraine counter-offensive is causing problems for Russian forces
Putin’s state television interview with Pavel Zarubin was an exercise in geopolitical gaslighting, weaponising revisionism and outright deception (dezinformatsiya) to mask Russia’s compounding operational military failures along the line of contact and particularly Crimea
Putin claimed that intensive Ukrainian drone strikes on domestic refineries – which have forced emergency fuel rationing inside Russia – have “absolutely no effect” on the front lines. This is pure nonsense; degrading logistics chains directly cripples mechanized manoeuvres, a logistical reality his own emergency cabinet meetings implicitly contradict.
Furthermore, Putin’s framing of Ukraine’s alleged proposal to limit combat as a desperate sign of “catastrophic personnel shortages” flips reality upside down. This narrative hides his own relentless, high-casualty frontal assaults designed to capture the four “annexed” regions that Putin covets, but Russia still fails to fully control. Putin made no mention of the recent Ukrainian military isolation of Crimea at all, which speaks volumes.
Finally, his assertions of sovereign stability and looming diplomatic triumphs with yet another jolly to Moscow by Trump’s US real estate “negotiators” Witkopf and Kushner (their 9th) are deliberately misleading. These claims are carefully timed to shape the information ecosystem ahead of September’s stage-managed State Duma elections. Ultimately, Putin’s interview relies entirely on a distorted, fabricated reality constructed to disguise severe domestic infrastructure vulnerabilities and an increasingly unsustainable war of attrition