Ukraine’s Western Military Brain Trust
Ukrainian military officers have distinguished themselves in the war against Russia. Is western training giving them an edge on the battlefield?
Ukrainian soldiers demonstrate different weapons systems during a high-profile visit on July 31, 2018 in Yavoriv, Ukraine. (DVIDS)
Ukraine has thus far received ample support from the west in its ongoing war against Russia. So far, more than thirty nations have funneled military equipment into the country. The U.S. tops the table, having already donated $18.5 billion dollars worth of materiel — including the game changing HIMARS rocket launcher systems, self-propelled artillery, and next-generation anti-tank weapons.
American aid dwarfs the contributions of the next three biggest senders, Germany, the UK, and Poland, who have so far donated around $2 billion dollars each.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky estimates that it costs around $5 billion dollars per month to keep the war going. If Ukraine hopes to continue its success, Western donations will have to keep coming — that is, as long as Western governments can convince their populations it is in their interest to do so.
Such support has had a tangible effect on Ukrainian operations. They’ve integrated a vast spectrum of foreign munitions, weapons, drones, and technology, eschewing older Soviet models and tactics for more effective Western ones. And that, in tandem with the intelligence they receive on a daily basis, has helped deliver several stunning victories.
But while we often talk about the technology behind Ukraine’s success, it’s certainly no silver bullet. Western weapons are hard to maintain — at least in Ukraine — being both subject to breakdown and difficult to replace when stocks run low.
In this discussion we tend to forget the human element — how hard it is to deploy and use modern weapons effectively.
Among other things, Ukrainian troops are road-testing real-time online information and networking systems, drone-jamming guns, and maritime remote-controlled kamikaze boats — western systems that take real know-how and expertise to operate within a combined arms setting. They are improving their intelligence and surveillance-gathering efforts. They are becoming experts at psychological warfare, joint operations, and sustainment logistics. It’s been a whirlwind crash course to say the least.
But they have not worked alone. As far back as 2014, Ukrainian officers were receiving Western training, especially from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and other European nations. These programs — arguably more than the weapons and munitions themselves — are conferring Ukraine a distinct battlefield advantage.
If Ukraine’s officer and NCO class has distinguished itself since February, revamped training programs and the knowledge they’ve gleaned from their Western brain trust has certainly played a massive role.
Ukraine’s Military Resurgence after the 2014 Invasion of Crimea
Ukraine has been on the receiving end of western assistance for at least three decades dating back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Many senior Ukrainian officers and political officials — themselves veterans of the Soviet Union during the Cold War — sought doctrinal reforms in anticipation of the evolving Eastern European security situation in the twenty-first century.
Changes came slowly when when a newly independent Ukraine joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 and subsequently enrolled in NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program three years later, a tailor-made cooperative venture that promotes security, stability, and military readiness in non-NATO countries in exchange for a commitment to NATO’s founding values.
In 1997, NATO signed a charter establishing the NATO-Ukraine Commission (NUC), a bilateral organization that oversaw Ukraine’s integrative efforts in its ongoing relationship with NATO. But initially, things didn’t go well. According to Adrian Bonenberger, a veteran, war-correspondent, and volunteer trainer who reported on the war in Ukraine between 2015 and 2017, “between 1991 and 2014, Ukraine’s military was shrunk and systematically robbed of resources until it had almost vanished as a fighting force.” Bonenberger writes how Ukraine’s 800,000-man military — protected by capable armored and air forces — relinquished its nuclear deterrent to Russia under pressure by the US and the UK in exchange for a “clearly worthless” verbal guarantee of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Its air force slowly atrophied. Its tanks fell into disrepair. Its military shrunk eightfold. Its economy collapsed. Corruption took hold.
Then, in 2014 Putin flexed his authoritarian muscles, annexing Crimea by force. At that point, Bonenberger had “it on good authority from Ukrainian officers that there were just 7,000 soldiers in three brigades that were ‘combat ready’ in terms of training, equipment, and personnel.” 7,000. Out of an army that once counted 800,000 soldiers in its ranks. A dozen of its 800 tanks — “the dozen used for parades,” Bonenberger clarifies — were operational. Many of Ukraine’s top intelligence and military organizations had been betrayed by pro-Russian officers, some who later defected back to Russia. Things were dire indeed.
Ukraine did what it had to to survive after Crimea fell. It mobilized, conscripting tens of thousands of Ukrainians of all backgrounds, organized them into militias (some, like the Azov Battalion, privately backed and only unofficially affiliated with Ukraine’s national military), and shipped them off to the Donbas to fight back Russia’s invasion in the east.
Out of this nucleus, Ukraine’s modern, revamped, western-facing military would emerge. Its forces suffered a string of early defeats as Russia consolidated gains in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Material assistance from the west was not very forthcoming. But countries with willing active duty personnel, especially the United States, were soon sending veteran units to Ukraine to train conscripts and militias cycling off the frontlines.
Officers of Ukraine’s 1st Battalion, 95th Separate Airmobile Brigade participate in an after-action review after a computer assisted command post exercise held at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center Simulations Center on September 4, 2017. (DVIDS)
Bonenberger participated in these efforts. According to him, “the Ukrainians enjoyed the opportunity to train hard but were teaching U.S. paratroopers, sergeants, and officers more about war than they were learning.”
Ukrainians quickly absorbed the basics of the various weapons systems they were receiving. They learned to maintain their equipment, prioritize logistics, fight together as tactical units, and communicate effectively. Many units participated in joint-multinational training exercises held throughout Europe. For instance, in 2015 U.S. Army Europe established the Joint Multinational Training Group — Ukraine (JMTG-U), a blended task force of Americans, Poles, Lithuanians, Brits, Canadians, and other soldiers who mentored and advised Ukrainian battalions in the art of combined arms warfare — a “‘train-the-trainer’ approach” that would help returning Ukrainians impart their new knowledge to their peers.
Around this time, about a hundred British soldiers began training Ukrainians in Kyiv under the banner of a program called Operation Orbital, one that helped more than 20,000 Ukrainians learn infantry skills, planning, medical care, logistics, and more. Canada, too, launched its own training program in 2015 known as Operation Unifier, training more than 34,000 Ukrainian personnel. In 2019, many veterans of Orbital and Unifier helped establish a multinational Military Coordination Cell (MCC) in Kyiv, a partnered allied effort to build military capacity and help Ukraine’s Security Forces work toward NATO compatibility.
A Ukrainian combat training center engineer kicks in a door after using a breaching charge while training with Canadian and U.S. Army engineers to build their breaching skills, enabling them to teach those skills to Ukrainian army units who will rotate through the combat training center at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, near Yavoriv, Ukraine, on Feb. 23. (DVIDS, Photo by Sgt. Anthony Jones, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team)
Ukraine used these programs to actively jettison Soviet-era practices that had long hamstrung its military evolution. During this period Ukraine began revamping its military leadership, ousting corrupt officers from their positions and promoting competent replacements based on merit. The slow rise of an exceedingly capable NCO class was arguably one of the most significant outcomes of the 2014 invasion of Crimea.
The eagerness of this new class of leaders impressed their western trainers. “You can tell they have this grittiness,” Paul Wade, a retired master sergeant in the California National Guard who visited Ukraine to train its national guard units, observed. “They were like sponges when it came to anything we had to offer in the way of military training.”
Ukrainian combat training center engineers detonate an explosive charge to breach a door before entering a mock building as part of training with Canadian and U.S. engineers to build the Ukrainian’s breaching skills, at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, near Yavoriv, Ukraine, on Feb. 24, 2017 enabling them to teach those skills to Ukrainian army units who will rotate through the IPSC. (DVIDS, Photo by Sgt. Anthony Jones, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team)
The result was an impressive cultural military transformation, without which Ukraine would arguably not have been able to blunt Russia’s initial thrust on Kyiv like it did. By 2016, Bonenberger wrote that “about half of Ukraine’s forces had been exposed to, or were actively running an innovative and meritocratic military culture of a type unknown under the top-heavy Soviet system (a system that lacks an empowered professional corps of noncommissioned officers, or NCOs).” Many of these experienced veterans remained on the rolls when Russia invaded in February 2022. As Ukraine’s military mushroomed in size, new recruits were assigned units with veteran NCOs who could orient and prepare them for the fighting ahead.
By mid-2022 Russia still had not altered its outmoded NCO mindset, opting instead to concentrate battlefield authority in the hands of a few high-ranking officers. This helps explain Ukraine’s ongoing (and rather successful) efforts to decapitate Russia’s battlefield leadership using precision missile strikes. Ukraine, on the other hand, has tried to insulate itself from the possibility of command paralysis. By promoting capable NCOs with exceptional critical thinking skills who have risen through the enlisted ranks, it has been able to decentralize its command authority, a decision that has resulted in better professionalism and tactical cohesion among smaller Ukrainian units.
Kostiantyn Stanislavchuk, Chief Master Sergeant of the Ukrainian Air Force, recently told an audience at the Senior Enlisted Leaders International Summit in Washington D.C. that Ukrainian NCOs and junior commanders have played a vital role in Ukraine’s success. “The sergeants of the armed forces,” he said, “without waiting for instructions from above, took the initiative to conduct ‘independent, small operations’ and act ‘independently and resourcefully.’ In this way, the defense forces are comparatively different from the enemy, where generals are forced to personally raise their subordinates to attack” and linger near the frontlines to oversee operations. “That’s why you see a much higher kill count with their officers…the Russians act according to a plan” and “follow the letter to the order” while “their junior commanders and NCOs lack intelligent initiative.”
Training in the US, the UK, and Elsewhere
The Ukrainian military has come a long way since 2014. American Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder argued in September that western training was “responsible for Ukraine’s greatest advantage over the Russian invaders.” Ukraine has clearly been the author of its own success, but it has nevertheless manifested a desire to continue learning as much as it can from the west.
A lot of Ukrainian soldiers receive training outside Ukraine itself. This is as much an imperative as it is a luxury. Early in the war, some 16,000 veteran instructors flocked to Ukraine from all over the US and Europe to train as many resistance fighters as possible. Many of them worked at the Territorial Defense Training Center in the suburbs of Kyiv. Speaking through translators, western trainers conducted crucial basic courses on weapons proficiency, maintenance, urban fighting, combined arms warfare, communications, and rescue operations, imparting rich combat experience to those who had none. But proximity to the front could also be a liability; in March 2022, a Russian missile attack near the border of Poland struck Ukraine’s Yavoriv training site in Lviv, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds more. In-country training is susceptible to attacks like these; the omnipresent threat incentivizes both Ukraine and its western partners to look elsewhere to train.
To oversee the disbursement of billions of dollars in security assistance, Ukraine and dozens of nations supporting it created the Ukraine Contact Group, a multinational body that meets monthly to coordinate shipments of arms and ammunition into the war-torn country. The International Donor Coordination Center works in tandem with the Ukraine Contact Group to handle the logistics of goods disbursement. The sole purpose of these international organs is to sustain Ukraine’s war effort — but Ukraine must also know how to use everything it receives.
In part due to its NATO commitment in Europe, the US continues to furnish much of Ukraine’s combined arms training at its bases in Germany and elsewhere. Much of Ukraine’s crucial artillery training on NATO-standard systems like the M-777 155mm howitzer occurs in Europe. Having only trained a few thousand Ukrainians total over the war’s first nine months, by December 2022 American advisors in Grafenwoehr, Germany have become capable of training up to 500 Ukrainian soldiers each month — a number the Biden administration hopes to increase as winter descends on Eastern Europe.
Capt. Matthew McCoy, commander of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Oklahoma Army National Guard and a resident of Oklahoma City, briefs German Brig. Gen. Kai Rohrschneider, chief of staff of U.S. Army Europe (second from left) and Polish Maj. Gen. Jan Śliwka (second from right) about how Ukrainian soldiers have planned a defensive position during live-fire training at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, near Yavoriv, Ukraine, on March 21, 2017. (DVIDS, Photo by Sgt. Anthony Jones, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team)
Great Britain has modeled effective training for Ukraine’s officers and NCOs abroad, too. In 2022 it launched Operation Interflex, the spiritual successor of Operation Orbital. Described as “a crash course in soldiering” for Ukrainian recruits, Interflex provided an opportunity for fresh soldiers with civilian backgrounds to receive military instruction of the highest order over a five-week training course staged in southern England. The course is an adapted version of Britain’s own fourteen-week basic training program, offering live fire exercises and experiential modules in weapons handling, trench warfare, fieldcraft, survival, military law, first aid, and more.
Under the watchful eye of their British advisors, Ukrainian soldiers who once plied their trade as engineers, bricklayers, dentists, and even dance choreographers learn the art of soldiering. One trainer remarked that the “nature of the recruits that are coming here to train are really quite remarkable. They are extremely professional, highly motivated, and they absolutely know that when they leave here they are going back to the frontline. They are keen to learn here so when they get back to Ukraine they are as lethal and as ready to fight as possible.” “It’s been humbling,” another trainer noted. “They are really motivated, all of them. I’ve not seen one yet who has put his hands up and said, ’No, I don’t want to do this.”
The UK originally agreed to train around 10,000 Ukrainian personnel. Resuming Operation Unifier’s own legacy, in August several hundred Canadian instructors arrived in the UK for a four-month stint to bolster the ongoing training efforts. Around 70 Australian officers as well also additional Dutch and other EU personnel also joined. By October 2022, Interflex had already cycled 6,000 Ukrainians through the program. Armed Forces Minister James Heappey has praised the program, saying it is “going ’gangbusters’”; UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace says Britain has more capacity to offer.
Dutch soldiers train Ukrainian recruits in the UK. (Netherlands Ministry of Defence)
There is urgency and even solemnity as each round of training unfolds. Ukrainians speak of the interpersonal bonds forged in the UK. Advisors know that within a few weeks, those they are training will be fighting and dying back on the frontlines in Ukraine. They fill their days quizzing units on identifying Russian and Ukrainian vehicles, weapons, and fighting systems from afar, building up to a standard of fighting excellence, giving one-on-one attention, and teaching them to operate vehicles. They develop their psychological resilience, too. Most see impressive improvements even in just five short weeks.
Other European nations are following Britain’s example. A new European Union initiative will see up to 15,000 Ukrainians receive similar training over a two-year span as part of the EU Military Assistance Mission (EUNAM). The effort, which is set to kick off this month, has already received support from some twenty countries. Headquartered in Poland and Germany, the training mission will complement the western-style military education Ukraine has thus far received elsewhere.
Still, there is more that can be done. Early on, France, for example, decided against its own training scheme, only training some forty Ukrainian soldiers primarily on the use of France’s Caesar self-propelled howitzers. But lately French President Emmanuel Macron has authorized a training plan that will see 2,000 Ukrainians embed themselves into French units for several weeks more akin to what the UK is doing.
Conclusion
Far from a comprehensive list of every instance of western training the Ukrainian Armed Forces have received, this short overview nevertheless shows how Ukraine has improved the motivation, morale, and effectiveness of its soldiers through the efforts and expertise of its friends abroad.
These factors have helped Ukraine offset serious numerical and material asymmetries. It has thus far inflicted far more casualties on Russia than most expected, outperforming the sanguine predictions of even the most optimistic onlookers from the start.
Western training missions missions are beneficial for both sides. Ukraine raises the standard of its armed forces, standardizing its professional training along the lines established by its western partners. In the process, it becomes more NATO-compatible. In Ukraine’s manifest eagerness to adopt new fighting practices, the west recognizes that its military aid is going to good use. More than that, as time goes on Western trainers will continue to learn as much — if not more — from their Ukrainian counterparts as they exchange intelligence and lessons learned from the fighting.
Ukraine’s capabilities will only continue to grow. Time will tell just how effective Ukraine can become with the assistance of its western brain trust.