Stop training Ukrainians to be Nato-style officers, think tank warns

Western nations should stop training Ukrainians to become Nato-style officers, the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) has warned, arguing drills should focus on the battlefield they are fighting on. ... Rusi urged the West to consider a bespoke training programme for would-be Ukrainian officers that reflects the conditions on the battlefield rather than Nato-standard norms. It warned sticking to the military alliance’s practices would be futile because of a lack of wider understanding of them amongst Kyiv’s armed forces. Dr Jack Watling, the report’s co-author, told The Telegraph: “We could get that horribly wrong. We could do it whereby we’re like – we’re going to teach you how to be a Nato staff officer ... we have courses and we have a book that tells us what that means. But the problem is that if you take that person who has learned all these Nato procedures and you put them back in Ukraine, where they have different tools and where none of their colleagues understand any of the Nato terminology, then they will revert to what their colleagues understand.”