The Ukrainian army is extending the period of training for its new recruits after months of reports have shown that their soldiers are ill-trained for combat and risk dying out too quickly.
The commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said in a Sunday announcement on Facebook: “Quality training is one of the main factors of saving the life of a Ukrainian soldier.”
“We are working to increase the duration of basic general military training,” he said in the post on the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Facebook account. “The relevant project will be started in October-November this year.”
The current training period for new recruits is three months, which includes one month of basic military training and two months of vocational training, according to Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda.
It is not clear what the duration of the new training program will be.
The news of the extended training period comes after months of reports have shown that Ukraine’s soldiers do not have the adequate training required to be on the front lines.
An August Associated Press report, citing commanders, said that new recruits struggle, or sometimes outrightly refuse, to shoot at their enemies. Some have even abandoned their posts, the AP wrote.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire,” a battalion commander in the 47th Brigade told the AP.
He added to the outlet: “That is why our men are dying.”
And according to a June Washington Post report, Ukrainian commanders often had to dedicate time to training recruits basic skills like how to shoot.
A deputy battalion commander from the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, known by his call sign Schmidt, told the Post that the soldiers transferred from rear posts to the front lines sorely lacked combat skills.
“We had guys that didn’t even know how to disassemble and assemble a gun,” Schmidt told the Post.
He added to the outlet that in the case there was a breakthrough in the city of Chasiv Yar and the new recruits were forced into the front lines, “they will be sent there to just die.”
Reports have also shown that inexperienced soldiers will be deployed to replace the experienced soldiers who are either dying out, injured, or feeling increasingly burned out by the war, which has now stretched well into its third year.
Ukrainian soldiers, according to the Kyiv Independent, are worried that the army will run out of trained people to continue fighting.
“If combat-capable people like us run out, we could only be replaced by people who don’t know anything,” a soldier named Roman, who has been serving since 2016, told the Kyiv Independent.
An infantryman who served in the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade told the Kyiv Independent that only four of the original 110 people serving in his unit in June 2022 remain in action because everyone was either dead or injured.
Representatives of the Ukrainian army didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside business hours.
