More than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers have swapped a country at war for a military camp in eastern France, where they’re receiving a crash course in combat. But with only a few months before the recruits head to the front lines, their French trainers are seeking to recreate the conditions in Ukraine as faithfully as possible.
“What’s striking on first contact is that they arrive in a country at peace, and there’s a stress that immediately disappears,” says Colonel Guillaume Vancina, one of the officers in charge of training the Ukrainian troops.
“That’s a very important aspect, and one that I think allows them to work with a certain calm.”
Some 2,300 soldiers began arriving in France from Ukraine in September and will spend around three months in training at an unnamed base in the east of the country.
While allies throughout Europe and beyond have offered assistance since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this is one of the largest Ukrainian contingents yet trained by another country on its own soil.
Together with another 2,200 troops completing training in Ukraine, they will ultimately form Ukrainian Brigade Number 155 – also known as the “Anna Kyivska” or “Anne de Kiev” brigade, after a medieval Kyiv-born princess who married King Henri I and became queen of France.
Fresh recruits
It’s a steep learning curve for many of the recruits, Vancina told reporters last week.
“Their profiles are very varied, lots of them are conscripts but there are also volunteers.”
While the brigade is led by an experienced Ukrainian officer and includes a “small percentage” of veterans, as a unit created from scratch and still in training, “there are a lot of new recruits in the ranks”.
France has allocated some 1,500 personnel to prepare them for frontline combat.
“First off there’s a whole set of basics to get to grips with, and that’s going to take a bit of time,” said Vancina. “So no, we don’t throw them straight into a combat environment, but that will come very quickly.”
Training techniques include using simulation devices to subject the soldiers to the noise of battle. The Ukrainian military wants them to be ready for the conditions they’re heading into, Vancina said.
“They’re very exacting. They’re at war, and they’re asking for everything they can get.”
Battle simulation
France's army has also sought to replicate the terrain that Ukrainian recruits will encounter, according to General Damien Wallaert, deputy chief of air-land operations.
“We dug over 600 metres of trenches and buried combat posts,” he said. “We took into account what they told us about the size, dimension and depth of the trenches they were digging in Ukraine, so that they could train in conditions as close as possible to the real thing.”
For the same reason, drones are a daily part of the soldiers’ training – either as backup or to simulate threats.
“Again, the aim is to expose them to conditions as close to reality as possible in terms of noise, stress and fatigue,” Wallaert said, “so that it’s as realistic as it can be and when the day comes, they have the right reflexes, survive the battle and win.”
Show of support
The French officers spoke to the press on the day President Emmanuel Macron inspected the new Ukrainian brigade, accompanied by the defence ministers of France and Ukraine.
The visit, the first time Macron has met some of the 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers that France has trained over the past two years of war, was intended to highlight the country’s continued support ahead of talks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky has been meeting with several European leaders over the past week in a bid to get their backing for what he has called an “action plan” to pave the way for finally ending the fighting.
He has not yet shared the details publicly, instead promising that he will discuss them at a peace conference expected in November.
The Ukrainian president has also been pushing Western countries to sign off on long-range missile strikes against Russia, using weapons supplied by Ukraine’s allies.
While the United States and others are wary of escalating the conflict, Macron has previously said that Kyiv should be free to “neutralise” Russian bases firing missiles on Ukraine.
France's Macron reaffirms possibility of sending troops to Ukraine
This story was adapted from a report in French by RFI's Franck Alexandre.
