Britain may send troops to Ukraine to train recruits

British military chiefs are considering sending troops to Ukraine to train soldiers in ‘secluded’ locations to help Kyiv’s recruitment efforts.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky at Downing Street. Picture: Getty Images

British military chiefs are considering sending troops to Ukraine to train soldiers in “secluded” locations to help Kyiv’s recruitment efforts, sources have disclosed.

Under the plans, small groups of British military trainers would travel to the west of the country to provide intensive basic training to new recruits before they head to the front line in the east.

This would solve some of the logistical problems that come with sending Ukrainian troops to UK bases for training and save money, according to two sources with knowledge of the talks.

President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Downing Street on Thursday (Friday AEDT) for talks with Keir Starmer as part of a tour of European nations to seek greater military support for Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.

Mr Zelensky and Mr Starmer embraced outside No 10 before the talks, which included Mark Rutte, the new secretary-general of NATO.

Outside Downing Street, Mr Rutte said the West should “stop worrying” about the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House. He said Mr Trump understood the war in Ukraine had a bearing on the safety and the future security of the United States.

He also said it would be “legally” sound for the UK and the US to fire long-range weapons, such as Storm Shadow missiles, in Ukraine but it was “up to allies” to give them permission.

Under the British-led multinational military operation codenamed Operation Interflex, more than 45,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been trained in the UK since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

However, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, said last month that the “biggest constraint” was “Ukraine providing the personnel in order to be trained”.

A UK defence source said that sending British troops to Ukraine instead of carrying out the training at military bases in the UK would be “cheaper for us and better for them”. The source said: “We could do [the training] quicker out there and it would be very far away from the front line, in secluded locations, so the risk would be much lower.”

A Ukrainian military source said that moving the training to Ukraine would send a “powerful military-political signal” to others and to Russia and would mark the start of a “de facto” deployment of NATO’s military infrastructure back inside Ukraine, which would be a “powerful deterrent”.

British soldiers would also learn battlefield skills from Ukrainian troops and have the ability to test the latest weapons being developed for the war, the source added.

In the two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, 116,000 Ukrainians completed military training abroad, mainly in the UK, Poland, France and Germany. A French official said nearly 15,000 Ukrainians had been trained by the French armed forces as part of an EU mission.

In February President Emmanuel Macron raised the possibility of deploying NATO troops to Ukraine, adding that all options for supporting Ukraine should stay open.

It later emerged that France was seeking to assemble a coalition of European countries willing to send military trainers to Ukraine, on the grounds that it would be more efficient to train them locally. Discussions have also been held at the UK Ministry of Defence.

The Ukrainian source said they hoped British leadership would inspire France to conduct training in Ukraine after talks in Paris appeared to have stalled for political reasons.

Operation Interflex was set up in the UK after Operation Orbital, the British Army’s long-term training programme in Ukraine, had to be halted in 2022.

Since then a small number of UK troops have been sent to Ukraine to help with medical training, although details of the mission are largely secret.

Most UK training of Ukrainians happens in Britain.Those trained have included former lorry drivers and shopkeepers, some of them arriving in their civilian clothes. They have been put through an intensive five-week course, taught how to fire weapons, given rucksacks packed with essentials and then sent back to Ukraine to receive specialist training with their units.

Mr Zelensky’s visit was his second to No 10 since Mr Starmer came to power, after he addressed an extraordinary meeting of the cabinet in July.

THE TIMES