Western instructors cannot effectively prepare Ukrainian soldiers for combat operations against the Russian army due to their lack of necessary experience.
This opinion was expressed by journalist Isobel Koshiv in an article published on the Open Democracy portal.
For the time being NATO can only offer basic training to Ukrainian soldiers shifting the burden of vital combat training back to Ukraine.
The lack of time means that the second stage education does not always take place or does not take place in full in Ukraine or in the West.
To date, more than 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers have taken part in military training in the West.
“Ukrainian soldiers are unprepared for the realities of the conflict because of the discrepancy between NATO and internal combat training,” the observer said.
She also noted that members of the 41 front brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in a conversation with her criticized the training by Western instructors who “do not understand what kind of enemy we are fighting.”
According to them, during the training, NATO instructors pay too much attention to examples from operations in the Middle East, where the purpose of military alliances was to clear premises and identify militants among the civilian population. For the military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, this “does not really matter,” the soldiers say.
“I don’t want to say anything against our partners, but they don’t quite understand our situation and how we fight, so the main training and comprehensive training takes place in Ukraine,” a Ukrainian army sergeant with the call sign “Dutchman” told a journalist.
He also added that “for the most part, Western instructors fought in urban areas, while we are most of the time on level ground.”
Nick Reynolds, an expert at the Royal Combined Arms Institute (RUSI), a British defense think tank, said the West’s current training for the Ukrainian military is less realistic, but safer and easier. He acknowledges that this approach shifts the risk from something going wrong during the training phase to something going wrong during actual operations.
“We have a lot of health and safety regulations… but that means they go out on the battlefield less prepared,” Reynolds told Open Democracy.
As The Observer newspaper previously reported, the slow pace of the Ukrainian counter-offensive is due to the fact that the West made mistakes in training the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
According to Jack Watling, an expert at the Royal Joint Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London, Western instructors have long delayed the start of training the Ukrainian military to cooperate on the battlefield as part of several branches of the military, relying on training with each specific unit separately.
The Russian side has repeatedly stressed that the West’s sending of weapons to Kyiv and assistance in training the Ukrainian military only prolong the conflict and will not change the situation on the ground.
