Pace of war shortens EU-based training for Ukrainian troops

AT A TRAINING SITE IN POLAND—On the monitor, a row of drone feeds piped in live footage from a war zone: Russia’s Kursk province, where Ukrainian forces have been fighting since August.  

Sitting in front of the monitor, an Ukrainian officer kept an eye on the feed. Just behind him, officers clustered around an enormous paper map, on which Ukrainian and Russian forces sprawled in long sinuous lines. 

The drone stream was real. The battle on the map wasn’t. The officer watching the drone feed had no soldiers to control, nor did the busy officers bustling behind him and manning computers.  

The eager Ukrainian brigade staff were instead focused on a training exercise, part of a 21-day crash course run in Poland as part of the EU mission for training Ukraine’s army. The drone streams were being incorporated into the fictional exercise—although Ukrainian officers wouldn’t say how, citing operational security. 

As the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine grinds into its third year, Ukraine is in desperate need of experienced troops. Western military training, like that seen in Poland, could be the answer. Western officers say their high-quality training, which emphasizes initiative, is a key advantage that their armies have over Russia. 

Polish staff, Ukrainian trainers, and Ukrainian soldiers say the effort is bearing fruit. Per a request from the Polish training effort, all soldiers are referred to only by their nationality and occupation to preserve their anonymity amid Russian sabotage efforts targeting Poland. 

However, it’s no easy task to fight an existential war while training up new troops, as seen by Defense One during a visit in late August to Poland. 

With Kyiv straining to hold a 600-mile front line against Russian assaults, Ukrainian and Polish officers said soldiers must be rushed through training cycles to get them back to the front. 

Ukraine’s system for selecting soldiers for training, meanwhile, is plagued by inefficiencies that keeps trainers and trainees in a constant scramble to adjust.

The EU Mission

Russia has lost as many as 600,000 soldiers, wounded and dead. That figure exceeds the Russian army’s estimated ground strength at the beginning of the war—360,000 troops— and is the most casualties Moscow’s armies have suffered since Soviet losses in World War II. 

But Ukraine’s losses have also been high, with an estimated 80,000 dead and 400,000 wounded, the Wall Street Journal reported. Many units are exhausted, operating with fewer troops than they need and desperate for ammunition. Russia, meanwhile, is using its superiority in munitions and personnel to break through Ukrainian lines in areas that had once been secure. 

The U.S. and its allies in NATO have worked to replenish Ukraine’s losses through training. Among the largest efforts is the EU Military Assistance Mission (EUMAM) Ukraine, which coordinates EU member states’ efforts to train soldiers. 

Speaking from a conference room on a military base, where upbeat music played incongruously on hallway speakers, Polish staff detailed a sweeping mission that’s training a large percentage of the EU total. In 2023, EUMAM’s staff in Poland trained 10,528 troops. Poland is aiming to train some12,000 in 2024, one-fifth of the EU’s overall goal of 60,000. 

The multinational mission in Poland runs specialist training, in which medics, sappers, artillerymen, tank crews, and other specialized soldiers refine their skills or gain new ones. It also operates leadership courses, including training for platoon leaders, non-commissioned officers, battalion staff officers, and brigade staff. Western officials sometimes frame non-commissioned leadership training in particular as the secret ingredient in Ukraine’s successful defense early in the war.  

The EUMAM mission in Poland also runs collective training for squads, platoons, and companies, in which soldiers learn to work with each other and other types of units, like mortars. The mission also began running basic training courses in August. 

Speaking from his office, the Polish deputy commander of the training effort said that Ukraine saw particular value in learning NATO-standard methods of doing battle damage assessment and in civil-military relations, as well as in specialized courses like electronic warfare and emergency medical training. 

The Polish side also gets to see modern warfare nearly first-hand. Ukrainian troops train on real combat scenarios, some of them drawn from battles they actually fought in. They also bring along with them drones, including armed ones. 

But Ukraine’s desperate need for more troops warps training in ways that weaken their effectiveness.  

Most courses run for just a month, or slightly longer—far shorter than the multiple months that Western militaries devote to similar types of training, according to a briefing slide. Collective training for squads, platoons, and companies runs for one week each. 

Ukraine sets those timetables based on their needs, the deputy commander of the Polish EUMAM mission said.

But the EU can’t train all the necessary skills in just a month, the commander said. Consequently, training must focus on what the soldiers “need to have,” he said. “If we could have more time, then we will provide more types of training, and it will be more complex.”

Programs to train Ukrainian soldiers as instructors who can then work in Ukraine under a program dubbed “train the trainers” also struggle in Ukraine’s high intensity conflict. Ukraine will use such soldiers for training for a few months, and then be forced to send them into battle, where their skills are lost if they’re killed, the deputy commander said. 

“He will go to the battle, and he will disappear somewhere,” said the deputy. “And we need to train another guy.” 

Ukraine will also split up battalions trained in Poland into their component companies, the deputy said. “Even if you are providing the collective training for the battalion after that, when they are coming back to Ukraine, they are coming for the two places, and they will be split and they will join the different brigades,” he said. 

Although the center trains both brigade staff and the battalions that theoretically fight under them, in reality it's a “luxury” situation when a brigade and battalion from the same unit are present at the same time, he added. 

Communication between the incoming Ukrainian units and the trainers is another challenge, added a Ukrainian liaison officer, echoing statements by American forces involved in training Ukraine. 

Often, trainers won’t know their trainees’ level of experience until they arrive. 

“Instructors have to be very, very flexible,” he said. 

Some of this is down to bureaucratic inefficiency. For instance, Ukrainian officers told to send sappers to Poland for further training will identify candidates based on their qualifications on paper. However, in reality that candidate’s training may be years out of date, or not to the standard that trainers are expecting. Trainers must then spend time rejigging coursework. 

And even if these soldiers have some experience from prior service, their experiences may not be relevant in today’s modern battlefield. “Twenty years ago, nobody [was] thinking about drones, nobody [was] thinking about software,” said the liaison officer. 

Ukraine’s need for infantry also means that it must retrain soldiers from other parts of the Army, like logistics. Those soldiers are better than raw recruits as they already have experience of being shelled, but it still takes time to train them to lead infantry, he said. 

“For us, it's much better if he has participated in the war and he knows what war” is. 

Brigade training 

Later that day at the brigade staff training, at least some of the officers were exactly that: experienced soldiers with ample time on the battlefield. 

The commander of the brigade, a flint-eyed colonel who preferred cigarettes to the vapes often seen in the hands of Ukrainian soldiers, had previously fought in Ukraine’s liberation on Kharkiv province in its 2022 campaign. 

The colonel was already well acquainted with how technology has changed the battlefield. Thanks to Russian drones and anti-tank strikes, he said he must keep command vehicles up to 10 kilometers from the front to avoid being targeted. 

He has other ways of keeping touch, though. During Ukraine’s major counter-offensive in Kharkiv, the colonel said, he used a commercial Starlink satellite dish to keep in touch with soldiers who, due to the speed of their advance, were as far as 62 miles away. 

Much of the training at the brigade staff headquarters is run by Ukrainian trainers, who praised the EUMAM mission for providing them with the logistics, housing, food, safety necessary to run their training.   

The training process typically starts when the trainers make contact with the incoming unit and learn what skills it wants to focus on, said one trainer. 

That typically happens just a few days before the new brigade staff arrives, giving the trainers little time to prepare. With a full-scale war on, though, there’s little choice. Ukraine needs new staff officers, a deficiency that think tank RUSI has identified as one of the key problems facing Ukraine’s army and a factor in its failed summer counter-offensive in 2023. 

Part of the training involves familiarizing officers with the range of home-brewed battlefield intelligence platforms that Ukraine uses, like the battlefield-mapping software Kropyva and the intelligence platform Delta. Just like the U.S. Army, the units also train on paper maps, which can show data even when the power goes out, the trainer said. 

The trainer said that an emphasis is placed on using drones. Ukraine operates a broad range of drones, including small first-person-view suicide drones, quadcopter observation drones, drone bombers, and fixed-wing surveillance drones. The units also benefit by getting to use real data from past battles. 

As with everything in Ukraine, though, manpower is a major factor. 

Parts of the training are drawn from the U.S.’s Military Decision-Making Process, a guideline for managing staff. The process rests in part on the U.S. Army’s practice of mission command, in which soldiers are given objectives and given broad authority to achieve them in whatever way they see fit. Its effectiveness relies in part on trust that soldiers are well-trained enough to make decisions on their own. 

The practice contrasts with historic Ukraine military doctrine, which emphasizes detailed command, in which commanders are expected to plan military operations down to the last detail and soldiers are given less initiative. 

The U.S. system requires highly trained soldiers to operate effectively, said the Ukrainian brigade staff trainer. Soldiers in the U.S. system rely on years of training, particularly for the non-commissioned officers and officers who spearhead military operations. 

Ukraine, though, has only weeks or at most months to train soldiers, and brigade staff training is just 21 days. The units the brigade will lead have just a few weeks to train in complex combined arms operations. 

MDMP works when armies have experienced sergeant or commanders, the trainer said. “But when you have a lot of casualties, such a system can break,” he said. Consequently, Ukrainian trainers teach a blend of the two styles, he said. A handful of brigades staffed by experienced soldiers do use organizational strategies that are closer to MDMP, he said.

Combined-arms training 

Later the next day, Defense One arrived at a sprawling training base designed for collective training. 

Poland works with Ukraine to make the training as realistic as possible, said the Polish deputy commander of the training unit, pointing to how Ukrainian engineers had advised them on building trenches. The double line of trenches were covered in the remains of blue plastic practice grenades. 

Unit training there included a battalion training in combined arms maneuvers, as well as others learning how to operate new weapons, like sniper rifles and Javelins.

Crowded into a small room on the base, a group of soldiers from a specialized unit that focuses on assaults were practicing their skills using the U.S. made Javelin anti-tank missile using an electronic simulator. Others outside practiced their skill in identifying enemy vehicles, using a combination of binoculars and small plastic models of tanks set on a table some distance away. 

The men were experienced, having fought in the intense fighting around Chasiv Yar during the last year. In keeping with Ukrainian struggles to attract younger soldiers, though, many appeared above the average age of 40, including one soldier with a beard like Santa Claus.

Their senior non-commissioned officer, a lean former construction worker, said that the unit operated along mission command principles that favor initiative. The soldier said he had joined a local territorial defense unit in the first days of the war, then transitioned to a regular military unit later once he was formally drafted. Now, he said he saw the Army as a career, and intended to become a professional soldier. 

His unit, he said, operated according to NATO principles that gave more autonomy to lower ranked soldiers. The non-commissioned officer wasn’t alone. A battalion commander of another reconnaissance unit out practicing rifle skills said similarly that his battalion was run according to mission command principles.  

In a reflection of Western slowness in arming Ukraine — stemming from both production problems and political infighting — units sometimes had relatively little live ammunition to train with, said one Ukrainian training officer. 

Other problems were simpler, but no less hard to fix. Poland uses a laser-tag like system similar to the U.S. MILES system for training troops, but Ukraine uses a different type of rifle that’s not compatible with the system, the liaison officer said. 

The Ukrainian battalion in training did, however, have its full complement of over 200 soldiers which is in keeping with U.S. estimates of Ukraine’s battalion sizes. 

But manpower isn’t the only issue for Ukraine, noted the Ukrainian liaison officer at the EUMAM headquarters. 

Perhaps the greatest challenge, though, is the supply of equipment, they said. Ukraine can draft—and send–many more of its men. But without more weapons and vehicles to replace those lost in the war, Ukraine would not actually be able to arm them. 

“If you see how the war goes, everyday we have losses not only in soldiers, but in equipment,” he said. 

“And there’s only one way which we have to [replace] what is damaged. That means [deliveries from] partner nations, or our industry” he said. “Our industry, it's not very big.” 

This article was completed with support from the Transatlantic Media Fellowship grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.