In an article posted on March 12, the London Telegraph, also known as the “Torygraph,” brags in great detail about the British lead role in arming Ukraine, including the provision of many thousands of anti-tank weapons known as NLAWS—Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapons System—and the training of thousands of Ukrainian troops to use them in combat. Britain has sent 3,615 NLAWs to Ukraine, including 2,000 that were supplied before Russia’s tanks rolled in, the Telegraph reports. “And that is just a small part of the total. To date, more than 17,000 missiles, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, have been sent to Ukraine by the democratic West in the biggest emergency supply mission since the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. And with every hour that passes, thousands more weapons, bullets, helmets, ballistic vests, high energy rations and night-sights pour in.”
Though contacts between British and Ukrainian troops dated back to 1991, formal defense cooperation didn’t begin until after the February 2014 Maidan coup. “In 2016, Petro Poroshenko, the then President of Ukraine, ordered widespread reforms with the aim of getting the armed forces up to NATO standards by 2020. The U.S. provided £2 billion [$2.6 billion] in funding, starting under the Obama regime, and, as well as equipment, sent training officers to the Yavoriv military academy in the west of the country,” according to the Telegraph. “British assistance began with the secondment of staff to Ukraine’s ministry of defense, who helped ministers and officials improve the management of the force. Britain also started to provide military training. Short-term, ad hoc courses soon shifted into ‘Operation Orbital,’ a long-term arrangement providing anti-tank, sniper, anti-sniper and reconnaissance courses.”
One outcome of this arrangement was the training of more than 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers at the Yavoriv training center in eastern Ukraine by NATO trainers. Secondly was the creation of a 130,000 strong reserve force, made up in part of veterans of the war in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine.
