The United Kingdom’s Operation Orbital, a military training mission to Ukraine’s Armed Forces, has been extended by three more years through March 2023, as the British Ministry of Defense said late on Nov. 4.
The decision was made following a September visit of the UK’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace to the war zone of Donbas, during which the official also met with Ukrainian military commanders combating Russian-backed militant forces, particularly near the key Azov Sea port city of Mariupol.
“My recent visit to the Donbas region made clear not only the costs inflicted by Russian-backed separatists,” Wallace was quoted as saying.
“But also the resolve the Ukrainian Armed Forces have demonstrated in defending their territorial integrity. That is why we are extending our training mission to Ukraine for another three years — so we may train thousands more Ukrainian personnel and continue to make a difference.”
Ukrainian troops exercise under the guidance of British instructors as part of UK’s Operation Orbital on Nov. 5, 2019. (Ukrinform)
Operation Orbital was launched as a response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in early 2014, “in a demonstration of (Britain’s) unwavering support to Ukraine, in the words of UK’s Ministry of Defense.
As of 2019, the mission includes nearly 100 British instructors deployed to the Shyrokiy Lan boot camp in the Mykolaiv Oblast to provide Ukrainian military servicemembers with combat practice training. Besides, nearly 40 British Army officers have also provided counter-sniper and battlefield medical training to 600 Ukrainian troops from the 128th Mountain Brigade in the Zakarpattia Oblast in October.
More broadly, about 17.5-million-pounds is annually spent on training the Ukrainian military and supporting the country’s defense reform agenda. The U. K. defense ministry implements those efforts
Judith Gough, former British ambassador to Ukraine, previously told the Kyiv Post that that Operation Orbital, a guidance and training program for the Ukrainian armed forces launched in February 2015, has already trained more than 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
Ukrainian generals and army officers say that those 10,000 trainees have gone on to train even more soldiers and that combat medicine capabilities — which Ukrainian forces largely lacked beforehand — have had a particular life-saving impact.
In the light of growing tensions between Ukraine and Russia in the Azov and the Black seas, Britain in 2018 increased the number of its personnel in Ukraine by deploying training teams from the Royal Navy and Royal Marines to help train Ukrainian naval servicemembers.
