Britain's offer to train Ukrainian troops: a reality check

The training programme and Boris Johnson’s visit to Kiev were far more likely to have been part of Britain’s efforts to exert soft power than it was a realistic attempt to affect the military outcome in the theatre.

The United Kingdom has offered to set up and run a training operation for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, with the potential to train as many as 10,000 soldiers every 120 days, the British Government announced on Friday. Arranged to coincide with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s surprise meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kiev the same day, a Government press release said that the programme would “train and drill the Armed Forces of Ukraine using battle-proven British Army expertise,” and “fundamentally change the equation of the war.”

The British programme is highly unlikely to achieve either outcome. First, Ukrainian soldiers and officers have considerably more experience in modern, high intensity combined arms warfare than their British counterparts. The British Army has spent the last twenty years training for, thinking about and fighting in counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars – fought against irregular forces without artillery, rockets, missiles, air defences, air forces, electronic and satellite intelligence capabilities, or massed armour – were about as far away from the battles in Ukraine as a Premiership rugby union match is from an NFL American football game.

It should also be noted that the UK lost both wars: in both Helmand and Basra the British Army was defeated, much to the exasperation of its American allies. The last time the UK fought and won a high intensity combined arms war was forty years ago in the Falkland Islands, when it defeated Argentina’s conscript expeditionary force in a contest that involved perhaps a fiftieth of the soldiers currently doing battle in Ukraine. It is true that British Army training is of high quality, in sharp contrast to MoD procurement competence or the incongruousness of our miserly defence budget and insatiable appetite for foreign adventure; however, the idea that Britain has transformative, “battle-proven” expertise to bestow on Ukrainian forces is a fantasy.

Secondly, even if British training could markedly improve the fortunes of Ukrainian soldiers, the scale of the programme – 10,000 soldiers every 120 days – is insignificant. During the first three months of the conflict, Kiev provided next to no information about its rate of attrition, and the Western press shamefully abrogated its responsibility by adhering to the blackout on casualty numbers. In recent days, however, Ukrainian officials have come clean on the shocking scale of their losses. First, President Zelenskyy claimed 60-100 Ukrainian soldiers were being killed every day (a figure, it transpired, that only covered the Donbass, excluding the Kherson and Kharkov fronts and the missile strikes on barracks and training centres deep within Ukraine). Shortly afterward, two other officials offered even higher figures – as much as two hundred a day at the upper bounds of their ranges.

Given battlefield injuries usually occur at three or four times the rate of deaths, Ukraine could conceivably have lost as many as 30,000 soldiers killed, injured or captured in May – if their official numbers are accurate. This sickening figure puts the British training programme into context: if nothing changes, it would take about four months to replace the soldiers Ukraine is losing every ten days. Only if the programme was strictly designed to train NCOs and junior officers (and neither the UK nor Ukraine has mentioned such a focus) would it come close to matching Ukraine’s apparent rate of attrition. There is therefore little chance that the British government’s offer will “fundamentally change the equation of the war,” a fact both the Prime Minister and the broader British government must know.

Instead, the training programme and Boris Johnson’s visit to Kiev were far more likely to have been part of Britain’s efforts to exert soft power than it was a realistic attempt to affect the military outcome in the theatre. First, Mr Johnson was probably fulfilling Britain’s role as the cat’s paw for Foggy Bottom. Earlier in the week, Emanuel Macron, Mario Draghi and Olaf Schultz, the heads of government of France, Italy and Germany, respectively, visited Kiev. All three countries are, in their own ways, known to be more keen on a negotiated settlement than their more hawkish Anglo-American allies. Even as President Macron has publicly continued diplomatic efforts with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Draghi has secured Italian carve outs from EU sanctions and flirted with endorsing territorial concessions, and Chancellor Schultz has shown little enthusiasm for providing heavy weaponry, British and American government officials have expressed a desire to drive Russian forces entirely out of Ukraine (including Crimea), bleed Russia militarily to permanently weaken it, and even foment regime change in Moscow.

Just as Mr. Johnson’s last visit to Kiev, in April, coincided with a moment at which Ukraine seemed to be making progress in negotiations with Russia – a process that broke down around the time of the Prime Minister’s visit – so it is possible to imagine that this visit was, with the endorsement of Washington, designed to stiffen Ukrainian resolve and relay the Atlanticist view in the event the three European leaders had applied any pressure to negotiate. The most telling aspect of the training programme offered was in fact that it would be ongoing: the message conveyed is that British (and, by inference, perhaps American) support is focused on a long war rather than negotiations.

Secondly, the programme is entirely in keeping with the British tradition of leveraging education and military training as a tool of soft power projection. Since the Second World War, the SAS has probably spent far more time training rebels and guerrillas, the personal bodyguards of friendly dictators, and third world regular forces in hostile environments, than it has on special operations. But more, innumerable senior officers around the world have passed through the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and countless foreign scions have been educated at prestigious British private schools, such as Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Westminster.
For instance, how much was Britain helped in its successful attempt to quickly secure Liquified Natural Gas from Qatar at the height of last year’s energy crisis by the fact Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst? For that matter, in the absence of serious military punch, how much is Britain’s position in the Middle East, a region of crucial geoeconomic importance, supported by the fact that – in addition to Emir Al Thani – the King of Jordan, the President of the United Arab Emirates, the King of Bahrain, the Chief of Staff of the Kuwait Armed Forces and numerous Saudi princes have passed through Sandhurst?

The United Kingdom’s offer of training to Ukraine is extremely unlikely to have the battlefield effect the government has claimed; however, it is entirely in keeping with two cornerstones of Britain’s soft power: alignment with the USA’s strategic interests and the use of academic and military education as a tool of influence.