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The UK government is examining proposals to send British troops to Ukraine to provide military training, the defence secretary has said.
During a trip to Kyiv this week, John Healey raised the prospect of extending a domestic defence instruction programme that has been rolled out by the UK armed services to Ukrainian forces.
Britain must render its training assistance easier for the Ukrainians to access and should “work with the Ukrainians to help them motivate and mobilise more recruits”, he told The Times.
Asked whether this would involve dispatching UK personnel to Ukraine to train its recruits, Healey said: “We will look wherever we can to respond to what the Ukrainians want. They are the ones fighting.”
The proposals have been in the pipeline for weeks, according to British officials, who said that Ukraine’s allies had also been examining the idea of western contractors providing training in Ukraine.
Healey said he would deliver a five-point plan to Rustem Umerov, his Ukrainian counterpart, setting out Britain’s proposals to step up its support for Kyiv in 2025.
Additional training, weapons and industrial support will be among the options put forward, he said, as he warned Ukraine was grappling with “one of the most critical periods of the war”.
Healey stressed that the UK needed to “make the training a better fit for what the Ukrainians need”.
He declined to offer further details about the possibility of providing military training in Ukraine, but his intervention comes as Kyiv struggles to recruit new soldiers amid rising numbers of desertions.
Hundreds of infantry abandoned their positions in the eastern town of Vuhledar in October and returned to their homes in the Mykolayiv region where some publicly protested that more training — and weapons — were needed.
Attention has turned to whether Kyiv and Moscow could engage in peace talks next year, and speculation has risen among officials about what kind of security commitment European allies could provide if resolution is reached.
Healey has declined to comment on the possibility of western troops being deployed on the ground in any potential peacekeeping role. Earlier this month he told the Financial Times that events in Ukraine were “a long way” off from any such hypothetical situation.
This week the EU’s chief diplomat Kaja Kallas urged western capitals to stop pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy towards peace negotiations.