Are there going to be military ‘trainers’ from NATO countries moving into the Ukraine soon?
The current effort to train the Ukraine milirtay in Europe and America is time consuming and has been looked at simply NOT working as well as it should be…
President Biden (Afghanstan?) has been adement against having too many US military people in the Ukraine….
But?
Other countries ARE seriously thinking about sending in trainers and advisor’s to help the beleaguered Ukraine military….
And Biden may again move to join the crowd to increase help for Ukraine as he has in other situations…
NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.
Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached a critical point, and its position on the battlefield in recent weeks has seriously worsened as Russia has accelerated its advances to take advantage of delays in shipments of American weapons. As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and NATO counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment.
So far the United States has said no, but Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that a NATO deployment of trainers appeared inevitable. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.
For now, he said, an effort inside Ukraine would put “a bunch of NATO trainers at risk” and would most likely mean deciding whether to use precious air defenses to protect the trainers instead of critical Ukrainian infrastructure near the battlefield. General Brown briefed reporters on his plane en route to a NATO meeting in Brussels….
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The administration has also urged NATO allies not to send its troops.
But in February, President Emmanuel Macron of France said that “nothing should be ruled out” when it comes to sending Western troops to Ukraine. Mr. Macron has doubled down on his comment since, including after senior American diplomats asked him to stop.
The government of Estonia has not ruled out the possibility of sending troops to western Ukraine to take over rear roles that could free Ukrainian troops to go to the front, Estonia’s national security adviser said this week.
Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, backed Mr. Macron’s stance in an interview with the The Guardian last week. “Our troops have been training Ukrainians in Ukraine before the war,” he said, adding, “So returning to this tradition might be quite doable.”…
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The American military has done training for Ukrainian troops in Poland, Germany and the United States, but pulling troops out of Ukraine is time consuming. American officials now acknowledge that the current training by Ukrainian forces is not sufficient, and that they need better and faster training to push back on an expected Russian drive this summer.
The United States used to help run a NATO training program at Yavoriv, in western Ukraine, but American troops were pulled out from there at the start of the war…
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Moving the training into Ukraine, military officials acknowledge, would allow American trainers to more quickly gather information about the innovations occurring on the Ukrainian front lines, potentially allowing them to adopt their training….
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Other NATO allies, including Britain, Germany and France, are working to base defense contractors in Ukraine to help build and repair weapons systems closer to the combat zone — what military officials have described as a “fix it forward” approach. Current and former U.S. defense officials said the White House is now reviewing its ban on allowing American defense contractors in Ukraine, although a small number have already been allowed in, under State Department authorities, to work on specific weapons systems like Patriot air defenses.
“There is an element of ally malpractice in the fact that we’re providing masses of Western equipment to Ukraine, but not giving them the resources to sustain it,” said Alexander S. Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a Ukrainian-born American combat veteran…..