By Sabine Siebold
BERLIN, March 11 (Reuters) – Ukrainian military trainers will help Germany’s military meet a target of being ready to defend against any Russian attack on NATO by 2029, the German army chief said, in a role reversal after years of Western troops training Ukrainian forces.
Berlin and Kyiv agreed last month that Ukraine would send military instructors to German army schools to teach lessons they have learned from fighting against Russia’s invasion.
“We have high expectations,” Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, the head of the German army, told Reuters in an interview. “The Ukrainian military is currently the only one in the world with frontline experience against Russia.”
Germany is not the only Western country drawing on Kyiv’s experience: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Thursday pledged to provide assistance to the U.S. in dealing with Iranian drones in the Middle East.
Freuding said Germany was the first country to reach an arrangement with Ukraine to provide military instructors but predicted others would follow suit.
Asked what the Ukrainian trainers would contribute, he referred to assessments by German and other Western intelligence agencies that Russia could be ready for a large-scale attack on the NATO military alliance by 2029.
“That’s almost the day after tomorrow. We have no time – the enemy doesn’t wait for us to declare we’re ready. So we have to use every possibility to prepare,” Freuding said.
Russia has insisted it does not intend to attack NATO, but Western officials say such assurances cannot be taken at face value as Moscow made similar statements before invading Ukraine.
EXPERTISE IN ARTILLERY, DRONES AND ENGINEERING
Freuding, who became army chief last October after previously coordinating Germany’s arms supplies to Kyiv, said the initial contingent of Ukrainian trainers would likely number in the “middle double-digits” and stay for a few weeks at a time.
The Ukrainian instructors are expected to contribute expertise in artillery, engineering, armoured operations, drone usage and command and control.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Germany has trained Ukrainian forces on weapons such as Marder infantry fighting vehicles, Leopard tanks, howitzers and air defence systems.
Freuding said Ukraine had built on these skills in combat, developing tactics and capabilities in data-centric warfare – the military term for highly digitalised and interconnected operations – that cannot be found in textbooks.
“The fact that they are now coming to us as instructors reflects a security partnership on an equal footing,” Freuding said.
(Reporting by Sabine Siebold; Editing by Andrew Gray and Alex Richardson)
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