As Canada and Sweden send their first groups of military instructors to the UK to provide training for the Ukrainian forces, it is likely that “the arrival of more NATO instructors will be used by media outlets loyal to the Kiev regime as another little brick in their attempt to build a wall of false 'wunder-waffen' hopes among both the military and the civilian population," former MEP Nick Griffin told Sputnik.
On Friday, Ottawa and Stockholm announced the deployment of their first batches of military instructors to Britain, in what came amid Russia's ongoing special military operation in Ukraine. The deployment followed Canada’s Defence Minister Anita Anand stating last week that Ottawa had authorized the dispatch of up to 225 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel to Britain to train Ukrainian forces, in line with a new program unveiled by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June.
She added that CAF servicemen will be sent to the UK for an initial period of four months, and that the Ukrainian troops will be trained on the basics of soldiering “related to frontline combat, weapons handling, first aid, field craft, patrol tactics, and include the law of armed contact.”
Anand said that apart from the training, Canada would provide the Ukrainian military with 39 armored vehicles, which she claimed are fitted with “additional, modern, state of the art armor and machine guns.”
Earlier this week, the Finnish Defense Ministry said that they would send about 20 service personnel to the UK to take part in a training program for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The move was preceded by the Swedish military announcing that it will deploy up to 120 military instructors to Britain within the framework of the program.
Meeting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev in mid-June, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered to launch a training program for Ukrainian forces, with the potential to train up to 10,000 soldiers every 120 days. He urged other nations in the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and Canada to join the initiative.
The JEF, which was launched in 2014, is a UK-led expeditionary force consisting of Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway.
The UK government noted on its website that under the program, “each soldier would spend three weeks on the training course, learning battle winning skills for the front line, as well as basic medical training, cyber-security and counter explosive tactics.”
According to No 10, the program will “train and drill the Armed Forces of Ukraine using battle-proven British Army expertise, allowing them to accelerate their deployment, rebuild their forces, and scale-up their resistance” to Russian troops.
Griffin said in this vein that Western countries are seeking to prolong the Ukraine conflict due to a whole array of factors, not least “the profits of the military-industrial complex, hostility to independent Russia of the neo-con and corporate lobbies, as well as the opportunity to use the conflict as an excuse for advancing the Western elite's insanely destructive decarbonisation agenda.”
He stressed that as far as Canada is concerned, “there is one extra factor: the country has the world's biggest concentration of Ukrainians, behind only the Ukraine itself and Russia.”
According to him, “the community's politics have been heavily influenced by Banderista ideology and hatred, and the Ukrainian lobby is well-organized, with plenty of politicians in receipt of campaign donations and back-handers. In a corrupted, kleptocratic democracy like Canada, money talks.”
Griffin suggested that Canada and Sweden sending their military instructors to the UK might be “far more of a political gesture and propaganda tool for the Kiev regime, than it is a genuine military factor” to change the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
“Training troops properly takes very much longer than Ukraine's unfortunate conscripts are getting before being thrown into the meat-grinder. Even well-trained troops only take a little longer to kill when the capabilities of the two sides are as far apart as they now are in Donbass, so [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau's aggressive gesture will change nothing on the ground,” the former MEP insisted.
Britain has delivered hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of military equipment and training support to Ukraine since 2014, including through secret “Operation Orbital”, over the course of which more than 22,000 Ukrainian troops were trained in the use of portable anti-tank missiles and other weapons.
Currently, the UK remains the second-largest supplier of weaponry to Ukraine after the US, providing Kiev with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, missile boats, armored vehicles, and long-range artillery.
The Russian Defense Ministry has repeatedly warned that the UK would evoke an "immediate and proportional response" from Moscow if it continued to provoke Kiev into launching attacks on Russian soil using British-made weapons, amid Russia’s special operation in Ukraine.
The operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine was announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin on 24 February following the Donbass republics’ request to protect them from Kiev’s atrocities.