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The top U.S. commander in Europe and his staff are developing training for Ukrainian forces that will take place on the continent and teach the soldiers about an array of sophisticated weapons new to the country’s arsenal, a senior U.S. defense official said Thursday.
The training will focus on using 155mm howitzer cannons, counter-artillery radar and Sentinel air defense radars, and will take a few days each, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon. The Ukrainians who receive training will already be familiar with similar Ukrainian weapons, cutting the amount of training required, the official said.
It’s not “going to take longer than a few days, max, to get them trained up on those systems,” the official said.
The Biden administration on Wednesday vastly expanded the kinds of weapons it will provide the Ukrainian military, as Ukraine and Russia both pivot to a new phase in their war that is expected to include large clashes in the open fields of the eastern Donbas region.
The official also disclosed for the first time that a small group of Ukrainian soldiers who had been in the United States for training when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 received training on not only armed, unmanned Switchblade aircraft that the Biden administration approved for transfer to Ukraine last month, but also on coastal defense surface drones that Biden approved Wednesday. Those troops have returned to Ukraine.
“They did receive training on that particular system, so some of that training already has occurred,” the official said.