Urban combat and beyond: Ukrainian recruits receive training in the UK

A BRITISH ARMY BASE, England (AP) — A few weeks ago, Serhiy was a business analyst at an IT company. Zakhar was a civil engineer. They are soldiers now, training to liberate Ukraine from Russian invasion, but doing so more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Britain.

They are among several hundred Ukrainian recruits undergoing an intense form of infantry training at a military base in south-east England. A batch of the 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers the British Army has pledged to train within 120 days spend several weeks learning skills including marksmanship, battlefield first aid and, crucial to their country’s future, urban warfare. .

As Ukrainians practice cleaning houses amid the noise of gunfire and smoke grenades in a simulated cityscape where British soldiers once trained for operations in Northern Ireland, they think about driving Russian troops from the streets of their own cities.

“The most important part is urban training, because it is the most dangerous combat in cities,” said Serhiy, who like other Ukrainians did not want his full name used for security reasons. “The British instructors have a lot of experience, from Iraq, Afghanistan. We can adapt all this knowledge to the situation in Ukraine and use it to free our country from the Russian invasion.”

British trainers are putting Ukrainian troops through a condensed version of British Army infantry training, covering weapons handling, first aid, patrol tactics and the law of conflict. The goal is to turn new recruits into battle-ready soldiers in a matter of weeks. The first batch arrived last month and has already been shipped to replenish depleted Ukrainian units.

“We are running a basic infantry course, which takes Ukrainian recruits and teaches them to shoot well, to move and communicate well within any tactical environment and to medicate well,” said Major Craig Hutton, a Scots Guards officer who Help supervise training.

Hutton says that many of the Ukrainian troops have little military experience but “are highly motivated. They have a fantastic willingness to learn and they just want to practice and practice and practice more.”

More than 1,000 UK personnel are involved in the training mission, which takes place at four bases around the UK. Other countries are also sending coaches, including Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the Nordic nations.

Britain is sending Ukrainians home with new uniforms, bulletproof vests, helmets and other equipment, part of 2.3 billion pounds ($2.8 billion) of UK military aid to the country that also includes anti-tank missiles and sophisticated systems. rocket launch.

Zakhar, the former engineer, said it was difficult to be away from Ukraine as fighting raged in the eastern Donbas region and in the south.

“I left my parents. I left my brothers and sisters, my relatives, to gain knowledge and experiences that will help me… free our territory from occupants and invaders,” he said through an interpreter.

Serhiy, the former IT worker, has been in uniform for less than a month and is just as determined.

“I know that Ukrainian soldiers are dying to protect our homes right now. So it’s hard to know that I’m not with them,” he said. “But the Ukrainian army only needs professional soldiers, so I am ready to train as hard as possible to be ready for the battle ahead.”

Brigadier Justin Stenhouse, who is in charge of training as commander of the 11th Security Assistance Brigade, said seeing the motivation of the Ukrainians is “humiliating.”

But he acknowledged that preparing for the chaos of urban combat is “almost impossible to do in training.” The goal of the mission, he said, is “to train them so they can adapt to surviving those first few weeks of combat.”

“They will learn more in the first few weeks of combat than we can possibly give them here,” he said.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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