The plans to send European soldiers to train Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine are becoming more and more concrete. French President Emmanuel Macron wants to forge an alliance to send Western military trainers to the war zone in a few days.
“Several partners have already agreed,” Macron said at the weekend. “We are not alone and we will launch this coalition in the coming days.”
The US government does not want to participate in the initiative. The communications director of the National Security Council, John Kirby, said on Friday evening on the sidelines of a visit by US President Joe Biden to France that Washington had made it clear from the beginning that it did not want to send American soldiers to Ukraine. “That has been the case so far, and it will continue to be the case in the future,” stressed Kirby.
According to information from WELT AM SONNTAG, French Chief of General Staff Thierry Burkhard sent a letter last week to the USA and around ten European countries – including Great Britain, Poland, the Netherlands, the three Baltic states, Denmark and Sweden – in which he invited the respective governments to take part in a training mission in Ukraine as part of a multinational “coalition of the willing”.
Paris bypassed the German government: no letter of invitation arrived at the Berlin Ministry of Defense. According to information from WELT AM SONNTAG, the traffic light coalition had made it clear several times during internal negotiations in Brussels in recent weeks that German soldiers would not take part in a training mission. But the Americans did that early on – and still received a letter of invitation.
According to Brussels diplomats, Macron is still trying to carry out the training mission under the umbrella of the already existing EU Training Mission Ukraine (EUMAM). This would require the mission’s mandate to be changed.
But that is certainly possible: the mission will be revised in the summer anyway and will have to be extended in November. EU diplomats reported, however, that there is resistance in Brussels to the ideas from Paris. The majority of EU countries are against training in Ukraine.
For example, the governments in Germany, Italy and Spain fear that training on site could pose a significant risk of escalation and draw the West further into the war in Ukraine. Hungary, for its part, stressed at a meeting of EU defence ministers at the end of May that Ukraine no longer had a realistic chance of winning the war.
However, EU diplomatic circles also said that from a military perspective there were good reasons to train Ukrainian soldiers in their own country. The training would then be more tailored to the needs of Ukrainian soldiers, and the soldiers would not have to leave their country for training.
