“It’s Costing Us Human Lives”: Has NATO Mistrained Ukrainian Soldiers? The magnitude of the century’s flood in Hong Kong in photos and videos

After 561 days of war in Ukraine, it is an indisputable fact: tensions between Ukraine and its Western allies are tense. In particular, an article on the English-language portal ‘The Kyiv Independent’ has been adding fuel to the fire for a few days now. In a report from the front, infantrymen trained in Germany by the 32nd Mechanized Brigade complained that the improper or incomplete training had “cost lives”.

While in Ukraine the combination of World War I trench warfare and high-tech drones presented unique challenges for troops, in Germany their own soldiers had been fighting mostly house-to-house warfare for three weeks. The unnamed soldier who voices these criticisms in the article calls on NATO instructors to “go to Ukraine” and see the new reality of war for themselves.

Attention is also paid to a – credible – field report by a Ukrainian non-commissioned officer of the 92nd brigade, nicknamed ‘Nestor’, which actually confirms this criticism and goes further: drone reconnaissance would hardly have played a role in NATO training. In this modern battlefield, squad and platoon leaders would need to be equipped with a tablet in order to survive.

At the same time, this is also a NATO training error: the company commander is not allowed to sit in the trenches with his people, but must ‘keep a cool head’ from his own secure and networked command post and give the correct orders based on the drone images.

Finally, the non-commissioned officer highlights the neglect of camouflage techniques in the field and the complete omission of instruction in defusing mines as serious omissions from NATO’s course in Germany. “We asked our trainers if we could train in defusing mines. But for some reason they wouldn’t even talk to us about it. It was taboo,” Nestor is quoted on X/Twitter.

71-year-old showed up for refueling course

Following the New York Times controversy over improper Ukrainian counteroffensive tactics (see box), the article in The Kyiv Independent is yet another indication of growing irritation among allies. According to a report in the Financial Times, NATO trainers complain about the “know-it-alls” of Ukrainian officers trained according to old Soviet doctrine.

In some cases, unfit soldiers are also sent to Germany because Ukrainian field commanders want to keep their best people at the front: a 71-year-old volunteer has even turned up for a refueling course abroad.

A video is being shared these days, to much professional criticism, of a wildly circling Ukrainian Bradley infantry fighting vehicle shooting down another Bradley in the turret during a training exercise. This coincides with the statement by the Financial Times that security-conscious NATO officers showed little understanding of the wild training demands of the Ukrainians, who were naturally willing to take more risks to practice as realistically as possible.

But: where emotions quickly get the upper hand, sober voices are also present. Analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) think tank argue in favor of basing the training of Ukrainian soldiers on “the equipment and structure Ukraine uses, rather than teaching NATO methods that are configured completely differently. armed forces are intended”.

In an acclaimed article on the “War on the Rocks” portal, the two American experts Michael Kofman and Rob Lee come to a similar conclusion: the West still does not understand enough how Ukraine fights. To change that, NATO would have to send its own observers to the front, which it has so far shied away from.

Sergeant ‘Nestor’ concludes that the NATO courses should only be seen as basic infantry training. The interaction in larger associations must then be trained separately, taking into account the latest findings of the front.

But the loud criticism of the past few days has its good points, believe Kofman and Lee: only openly pointing out errors and misunderstandings can lead to improvements. In Russia, on the other hand, false reports of victory were widespread and the bad news was ‘buried’. (aargauerzeitung.ch)