The European Union discussed the creation of a Ukrainian Army training mission long before the escalation of the crisis in Ukraine, the bloc's foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has admitted.
“Several member states will have different ideas, but this idea of a training mission is an old idea. We had been discussing that even before the war started. So, member states put this idea on the table. So, it is the moment to act, it is the moment to take decisions,” Borrell told reporters after arriving at a meeting of EU defense ministers in Prague on Tuesday.
The official did not delve into any details about what kind of training assistance Brussels plans to provide Kiev, saying the bloc has already “done a lot of training missions,” and that the Ukrainians currently “need everything.”
“We are providing big amounts of military capability. Certainly, Russia will not be happy. They are not happy with the idea that we are providing all kinds of military equipment. And we will continue providing more military equipment,” Borrell assured.
Russia’s “unhappiness” with Western arms shipments to Kiev boils down to its implications for the security crisis, with officials saying more weapons will prolong the conflict and delay peace negotiations. Moscow has also expressed concerns about the fate of Western weapons once they’re in Ukraine, pointing to the dangers of arms ending up on the international illegal arms black market.
Earlier this month, an exclusive investigation by Sputnik Arabic uncovered a Ukrainian arms smuggling operation on the dark web, with enterprising businessmen taking advantage of the bonanza of Western guns flooding Ukraine by offering to illegally ship American-made automatic rifles to Yemen. Separately, a CBS News documentary on Western assistance to Ukraine was deleted earlier this month after revealing that a mere 30 percent of the aid was actually reaching the front lines.
In his remarks Tuesday, Borrell expressed hope that that the defense ministers’ meeting would result in an informal, political agreement among bloc members on an EU training mission for Ukraine. “We have a – procedure a quite complex one – in order to identify the objectives and the purposes, the dimensions, the resources. But today I hope we will have a green light, a political green light for this mission,” he said.
The official indicated that the issue of ways to boost Europe’s military-industrial complex, including getting bloc members to buy more equipment to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine, would also be discussed.
The US and its allies spent billions of dollars and millions of man hours training and equipping Ukrainian troops in the aftermath of the 2014 Euromaidan coup d’état, which sparked the current security crisis in eastern Ukraine. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops over the years, among them members of the National Guard – a controversial reservist volunteer force which includes thousands of ultra-right nationalist fighters.