The United States has no plans to send military trainers to Ukraine, Gen. Charles Brown, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said.
“Right now, there are no plans to bring U.S. trainers into Ukraine,” he told reporters on May 20.
“Once this conflict is over, and we’re in a better place, then I would suspect we would be able to bring trainers back in.”
Roughly 150 U.S. military trainers were reportedly deployed in Ukraine before Russia invaded the country in early 2022.
Gen. Brown made the remarks at a joint press briefing with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
At the briefing, both men stressed the need to maintain U.S. support for Kyiv, especially in light of recent Russian gains in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region.
‘Quite Doable’
In recent months, the notion of sending Western military personnel to Ukraine, either as trainers or in a combat capacity, has steadily gained momentum.In February, French President Emanuel Macron told European Union leaders that the deployment of Western troops to Ukraine “should not be ruled out.”
He went even further in March, saying Paris should have “no limits” in its approach to Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, now in its third year.
In a recent interview with The Economist, Mr. Macron again raised the idea of sending troops, especially if Ukraine’s defense lines collapse.
“I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out,” Mr. Macron said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Macron’s controversial proposal appears to have gained traction in certain quarters.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis supports the French leader’s aggressive approach.
“Our troops have been training Ukrainians in Ukraine before the war,” he told The Guardian on May 9. “Returning to this tradition might be quite doable.”
Mr. Landsbergis further asserted that training Ukrainian soldiers inside Ukraine was “more practical” than training them inside NATO member states.
The White House has repeatedly stated it would not put boots on the ground—of any kind—in Ukraine and has urged its NATO allies to follow suit.
Trainers Already There: PM
Mr. Landsbergis also voiced support for recent assertions by British Foreign Secretary David Cameron that Kyiv should not refrain from using UK-supplied long-range missiles to strike targets inside Russia.“Ukraine has that right,” Mr. Cameron said on May 2.
“Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself.”
A Kremlin spokesman later decried Mr. Cameron’s remarks as “a direct escalation ... that could pose a threat to the entire European security architecture.”
The spokesman also warned against what he called “the dangerous trend of escalating tension in official statements.”
Russia’s foreign ministry warned that if UK missiles were to strike Russian territory, Moscow would target UK military assets—both inside and outside Ukraine.
Mr. Zelenskyy has since confirmed that Kyiv is negotiating with its Western allies to obtain permission to use their missile systems to strike Russian targets.
So far, however, talks have yielded “nothing positive,” the Ukrainian leader told Reuters on May 20.
On the same day, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told the Financial Times that Western fears of escalation with Russia were “not well-founded.”
According to Ms. Kallas, a number of Kyiv’s Western allies—she did not say which ones—were already “training soldiers on the ground” in Ukraine.
“It is an open public debate,” she said. “But we shouldn’t rule anything out right now.”
A staunch supporter of the Ukrainian war effort, NATO member Estonia has contributed a higher percentage of its gross domestic product in military support for Kyiv than any other country.
