By Ben Aris in Berlin
In another step in the creeping escalation, the US said sending military trainers” to participate in the War in Ukraine is “inevitable,” The New York Times (NYT) reported on May 16.
The US’ highest-ranking officer, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Western armies will provide military trainers to Kyiv “at some point” in a move that would mark a significant departure from Nato’s previous reluctance to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.
“We’ll get there eventually, over time,” Brown told reporters, according to reports. He stressed that doing so now would put “a bunch of Nato trainers at risk” and tie up air defences that would be better used protecting Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield, the NYT reported.
The revelation comes only a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that it was “up to Ukraine to decide” if it wanted to useUS-made weapons to strike targets inside Russian territory, a significant softening of the previous ban, due to fears of provoking a similar Russian retaliation.
The announcement also follows on from French President Emmanuel Macron’s earlier remarks that Nato should not take the possibility of committing troops to the fight in Ukraine off the table in order to maintain “strategic ambiguity” in the struggle against Russia. Those remarks provoked a strong condemnation from the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered military manoeuvres with Russian nuclear missiles in response as a signal to the West of what its direct involvement in the war in Ukraine may lead to.
A growing number of European countries have followed Macron’s lead and signalled a willingness to consider sending military personnel to Ukraine. An Estonian official said last week they are “seriously” discussing the possibility of sending troops into western Ukraine in non-combat roles, while Lithuania’s foreign minister said training missions in Ukraine “might be quite doable.”
Other leading European countries such as Germany have ruled out any direct involvement in the war by their troops.
The suggestion of direct western military participation in the conflict comes as the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) comes under increasing pressure from a new heavy assault on the eastern city of Kharkiv where Russian forces are making their first advances in months. At the same time little of the $61bn of new US military aid has appeared on the battlefield, according to battlefield reports, and Russia continues to pulverise Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with impunity. At least half of all of Ukraine’s generating capacity has been damaged or destroyed since an intensebarrage began in January and has only intensified since then.
In addition to anammo crisis, Ukraine is suffering from a manpower shortage, as undisclosed losses reach “catastrophic levels” according to Ukraine’s former top general Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy removed from office earlier this year.
As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and Nato counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment, the NYT reports. A Ukrainian delegation is currently in Washington to lobby for more US aid.
So far, the US has rejected these calls but Brown said at a press conference that a Nato deployment of trainers appeared to be “inevitable.”
“We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.
