Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
Did NATO screw up when training Ukraine’s counteroffensive units? Did it train them for the wrong battlefield?
These questions are at the heart of a raging debate about why, after three months of grueling fighting, the counteroffensive in southeast Ukraine hasn’t yet managed to punch through to the Sea of Azov, cutting off the so-called land bridge that connects annexed Crimea with southern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.
With progress painstakingly slow on the Zaporizhzhia front — the main axis of three lines of attack — there’s been plenty of second-guessing and armchair generalship going on, apportioning blame, identifying missteps or highlighting things that could have been done better.
But among them, the most intriguing thinking is coming from soldiers on Ukraine’s front lines, or those who have newly returned, and they fault NATO for preparing them for a different fight.
Of course, Ukraine has been encountering criticism of its own in recent weeks, with Western military officials faulting forces for failing to observe the combined warfare tactics taught by NATO instructors earlier this year. The most notable reprimand was contained in July’s leaked battlefield assessment by Germany’s Bundeswehr, which complained the Ukrainian military was failing to implement NATO training, and criticized commanders for splitting their Western-trained brigades into small units of just 10 to 30 soldiers to attack enemy positions.
But some front-line veterans are now turning this criticism on its head, saying NATO prepared them for the wrong kind of war, and that the training they received was a mixed bag, and taken from manuals that weren’t adjusted for the realities on the ground in Ukraine. According to them, there was a clear schism between theory and practice, a disconnect that has cost lives.
Among the critics of NATO’s training is 10-year U.S. army national guard veteran Ryan O’Leary, who was on tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, and joined Ukraine’s foreign legion within days of Russia’s invasion. On arrival, he was almost immediately dispatched with other American and British volunteers to block Russian units from entering Ukraine’s capital from the north.
O’Leary argues the training for new brigades would have been better if “taught by Ukrainians who have experienced combat here and can bring with them the hard lessons they learned, so others don’t repeat them.”
It seems the training Ukrainian soldiers received was based more on what NATO forces have been most used to in recent years — counterinsurgency warfare, with some American-style “show-and-awe” thrown in. And while Ukrainians praise the drills on basic infantry tactics, reconnaissance and how to get close to the enemy unseen, as well as methods taught for storming trenches and buildings, they cite a lack of training on drone and mine awareness, explosive ordnance disposal and defensive combat.
When it comes to integrating drone warfare and how to overcome enemy drones, they received scant counsel — most likely because NATO forces have not yet caught up and adapted their own infantry training to the technology.
O’Leary is now a company commander in Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade, which has been tasked with reconnaissance and trench clearing in the counteroffensive in the southeast. “NATO should focus on basic soldiering — weapon drills, movements, building LP/Ops [Listening Post/Observation Post], camo, small unit tactics & cohesion drills as an example,” he posted on social media.
And further north, on the front lines in Kharkiv, this criticism is echoed by soldiers with the 32nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, who spoke with the Kyiv Independent. The brigade received only three weeks of NATO training in Germany, and while grateful for some of the Western drilling and kit, they complained that NATO officers didn’t understand the hard reality of warfare in Ukraine.
“A NATO infantryman knows he’s supported and can advance with the confidence that there’s a high likelihood that he won’t be killed or maimed,” a soldier named Ihor said. NATO’s way of war calls for massive preparatory airstrikes, artillery barrages and demining before the infantry advances, and, of course, Ukraine’s military — without the modern warplanes, long-range missiles and demining equipment they requested — has had to fight in a very different way than what standard NATO doctrine dictates.
That is why, during the first phase of the counteroffensive, Ukraine suffered substantial losses of soldiers and Western-supplied armor, as they got bogged down in some of the thickest minefields ever seen and had to switch tactics to this attritional second phase, using small infantry units to try and find ways through.
Some Ukrainian combatants say the training would have gone off better if battle-experienced Ukrainian officers and non-commissioned officers with knowledge of the local geography and landscape had been integrated into the NATO training — or if there had been an added component of intense instruction in Ukraine before draftees were deployed.
As a result of their lack of knowledge of the landscape, NATO trainers did not consider how much of the fighting would involve small units having to battle through thick tree lines — much like the Allied forces failed to account for northwestern France’s hedgerows after the 1944 Normandy landings. Similarly, on the Zaporizhzhia front — as well as in much of southern Ukraine — Soviet agronomists had divided the land into vast fields with oak, holly and poplar trees planted between them as windbreaks.
Currently, American military analyst Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, is one the few who still thinks there’s “a realistic possibility of Ukrainian forces breaking through Russian lines,” as “the momentum has picked up and the dynamic has somewhat changed in the last couple of weeks.” But even he cautions that war “isn’t a parlor game where one can gamble and easily predict outcomes.”
Meanwhile, others are more skeptical, blaming, in part, unrealistic expectations from the get-go, as well as Western powers’ risk aversion — including the administration of United States President Joe Biden — in the provision of advanced military weaponry for the assault.
On this front, Ukrainian officials point the finger at the West for their dither and delay in approving and supplying the gear they’ve requested — especially as some asks were made immediately after the invasion. They also fume at the sense of pessimism regarding the prospect of achieving the counteroffensive’s main goals.
But it is clear to most military analysts and Western officials that we are now nearing the counteroffensive’s end, with little time before the weather turns. And despite a breach of Russia’s first defensive line at Robotyne at the end of August, the counteroffensive has not altered overall positions much.
Speaking in Prague last week, U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Michael Carpenter reminded that “pretty soon, we are going to enter the rainy season and then the winter,” when military maneuver will become more difficult. “This,” he said, “is crunch time.”