No Western training can save Ukrainian conscripts from their own commanders
A celebrated military cooperation project produces losses, mass desertion, scandal, but no learning
“President-elect” Trump is about to turn into simply “president.” Signs are multiplying that, once he is in the White House again, Trump will at least try to actually end the insanity of the Ukraine War.
He as well as his man for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, have distanced themselves from the obviously rhetorical campaign promise to end the war in one day. Now they are suggesting more realistic but still short – between 100 days (Kellogg) and six months or less (Trump) – deadlines. That is, actually, a sign of being serious.
More important again is the fact that Trump has now publicly signaled understanding for Moscow’s refusal to accept Ukraine joining NATO. Since this has always been the single most important reason Russia went to war, Trump showing a new – if terribly belated – American readiness to finally acknowledge the issue’s make-or-break importance is essential for establishing a basis for meaningful talks.
These talks are now as good as certain to happen fairly soon and at the highest level: Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have both made it clear that they are ready to meet without fussy pre-conditions. Again, another sign that we are not dealing with mere PR moves but a genuine attempt to find a compromise. That does not mean that it will succeed. But it does mark a key change from the past, when all serious negotiations were blocked by the West’s obstinate refusal to face reality.
If Russia and America should manage to mend fences comparatively quickly, not everyone will be happy, of course. It is true that an end to the fighting would save many Ukrainians from dying in a hopeless, unnecessary war for literally less than nothing, namely an even worse outcome for their country. But that does not seem to interest the Kiev regime under president-beyond-best-by-date Vladimir Zelensky. A recent meeting at the Ramstein base in Germany has shown that at least publicly Kiev keeps beating the war drums and insisting on even more Western support, while preparing its own population for further mobilizations down to the age of 18. Zelensky’s old, devastatingly failing recipe abides: “You, West, give us the money, arms, and ammunitions, and we feed our people into the meatgrinder.”
And then there are Washington’s European clients and vassals. They are also still putting on a brave face. For instance, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron – both, as it happens, abysmally unpopular at home – have dreamy dinners fantasizing about “supporting Ukraine as long as it takes.” True, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – another EU-NATO placeholder greatly not beloved by his people – has crashed his government and is facing an election and is therefore downplaying further support for Ukraine. Yet his foreign minister, the indefatigable Annalena “360 Degrees” Baerbock and his defense minister, Boris “Panzer” Pistorius, want more, as always.
As so often, it is hard to tell how serious they are, but, on the whole, the official party line among Western European leaders still is that, even with Trump in the White House and the Russians steadily advancing in Ukraine – strapped for money, equipment, and troops as well as politically unstable and psychologically gloomy – will stay the moronic course of prolonging the great Western proxy war. Even if it has to do so on its own. That will not work, of course, one way or the other. But it is a policy with the potential to get even more people unnecessarily killed and make everything worse all around for everyone – including Ukraine but not, actually, Russia and the US – before it finally crashes and burns.
As it happens, former British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has just delivered a choice specimen of the delusions that have cost Europe and Ukraine so much and that all too many still cannot let go of. On the podcast ‘The Rest is Politics’, Wallace explained that, in his opinion, the Zelensky regime should long have mobilized, in essence, everyone for war. Yes, literally “everyone!” – like Gary Oldman’s pill-popping-coked-to-the-gills corrupt cop character in Luc Besson’s ‘Leon’.
You may wonder: How was that supposed to even work? Easy peasy lemon squeezy, to quote another archetypal leader character of Western popular culture. Wallace bravely claims to actually believe that training all these new soldiers would have been a piece of cake for Europe, if only Ukraine had asked for it. “And then they go back to their houses [in Ukraine],” he waffled on, “they put their helmets under the bed, they put their uniforms in the cupboard, and you can then call them up.”
So simple, so unreal. Wallace, it seems, doesn’t read the news much. Otherwise, he would have known that Ukrainian politics are currently shaken by a bloody – literally – scandal that illustrates everything that is wrong with his fantasies. The essence of that fiasco is that 1,700 soldiers of Ukraine’s 155th Mechanized Brigade went AWOL even before their remaining comrades encountered hard fighting under atrocious conditions on the frontline near Pokrovsk in the Donbass area. Avoiding military service, in one form or another, is not unusual in Ukraine; in fact, it’s a mass phenomenon. For good, sad reasons, apart from 100,000 soldiers who have gone AWOL, 650,000 men have left the country to avoid conscription.
But the 155th Brigade constitutes a particularly politically explosive case. Better known under its byname ‘Anna of Kiev’ (itself a piece of playing fast and loose with eleventh-century history, but let’s not dwell on that), the brigade is a military formation but also a PR project second to none. Announced with great fanfare by Macron and Zelensky on the 2024 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, the brigade was meant to serve as a pilot: In the end, so at least in Zelensky’s pipedream, fourteen brigades were to be set up on the same simple pattern of Ukrainian-EU cooperation, with Kiev providing the soldiers and the Europeans their training and equipment, to the tune of about €900 million per brigade.
In the case of the 155th Anna of Kiev Brigade, for instance, the figures were substantial: 1,500 French soldiers and officers were made available to train 2,300 Ukrainian men, including 300 officers at the Mourmelon training area in the Marne region. France also supplied the brigade with 128 troop transporters, 18 AMX-10 lightweight tanks, 18 Caesars, mobile howitzers mounted on trucks, and Mistral and Milan anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems. In October 2024, Macron himself paid a visit. In addition, Norwegian trainers in Poland provided instruction of Leopard 2 tanks.
What happened? For one thing, apart from those 1,700 soldiers who went missing – and not on the battlefield – in Ukraine, 55 had already deserted while in France. And even that was just the tip of the iceberg. It is now becoming clear that the history of the brigade has been one of “complete organizational chaos” (in the words of Ukrainian journalist Yury Butusov), deeply flawed improvisation, and political cover-up from the beginning. In fact, it is so richly catastrophic that it cannot be recapitulated here in full. Just take a few highlights: Recruiting for the brigade started in March 2024; in October of that year 1,924 soldiers and officers left for their training in France. But even while still in Ukraine, the brigade had already “lost” 2,550 soldiers, which had been siphoned off to other units and 935 who went AWOL. The net effect of this massive instability was that of the almost 2,000 men leaving for France, 1,414 had served less than two months; 150 were so raw that they had not even passed basic training.
Then, while French instructors were trying to do their best with these mostly woefully unprepared recruits, Ukrainian recruiters kept mobilizing thousands more in Ukraine, including, as is their wont, the very unwilling and clearly overage – and by force. The unit these recruits were “joining,” however, was no longer there, but at Mourmelon in France, staff and all. That chaos and surely other reasons as well led 700 of these new recruits to go AWOL in October and November 2024. When the two streams, those who had gone to France and those who had been recruited in Ukraine in their absence were finally merged, both already had a demoralizing history of disorganization and desertion. What else could go wrong?
Plenty, it turned out: Thus, 95% of the command staff for the new brigade was also brand-new, having no prior experience in the war, but that still beat the technical specialists, for instance, the drone operators who had a completely-inexperienced rate of a clean 100%. Add massive gaps in equipment (to begin with at least no drones or electronic warfare gear, for instance), the usual foul-ups with supplies from Ukrainian production (plenty of duds among the howitzer shells), and, of course, falsified reporting to cover it all up, and the end result was what one Ukrainian member of parliament has called a “zombie brigade.” And of course, severe losses, in men and materiel, among those not lucky enough to escape before getting to the frontline. Now, it seems, what remains of Anna of Kiev has been unceremoniously carved up among other units that use what is left to plug (some) holes in Kiev’s degraded and tottering defenses.
In sum, an absolute catastrophe. Yet not a simple one, but one that illustrates in exemplary fashion the key flaws in the approaches of both the Kiev regime and its Western supporters: First, the old Western hubris that already led to the bloody fiasco of Ukraine’s 2023 summer offensive – an over-reliance on imposing Western methods in a hasty and badly thought-out manner. Second, the disregard for morale: All the Zelensky-ish pep talks and nationalist propaganda in the world will not compensate for the immediate experiences of compulsion and chaos that make ordinary soldiers flee before even beginning to fight. Third – and worst – the fundamental disregard for reality and the persisting wishful hunt for panaceas and quick fixes: After various tanks, planes, and missiles, this time it was an unserious scheme of building whole brigades rapidly from scratch that crashed not merely on the frontline but, literally, before even getting there. How much longer until Western silliness and Zelensky regime obstinacy finally end costing Ukrainian lives?
