Ukraine extends training of soldiers after reports of recruits dying quickly

“We are working to increase the duration of basic general military training,” he said in a post on the Facebook account of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “The relevant project will be started in October-November this year.”

The current training period for new recruits is three months, which includes one month of basic military training and two months of professional training, according to Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda.

It is not clear what the duration of the new training program will be.

The news of the extended training period comes after months of reports that Ukrainian soldiers lack the proper training needed to be on the front lines.

An August Associated Press report, citing commanders, said new recruits struggle, or sometimes outright refuse, to shoot at their enemies. Some even abandoned their posts, AP wrote.

“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in the trenches, but they don’t open fire,” a battalion commander from the 47th Brigade told AP.

He added to the press: “That’s why our people are dying.”

And according to a June Washington Post report, Ukrainian commanders often had to spend time training recruits in basic skills such as how to shoot.

A deputy battalion commander of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, known by his call sign Schmidt, told the Post that soldiers transferred from rear posts to the front line lacked combat skills.

“We had guys who didn’t even know how to take a gun apart and put it back together,” Schmidt told the Post.

He added that if there was a breakthrough in the town of Chasiv Yar and the new recruits were forced into the front line, “they will be sent there to simply die.”

Reports also indicated that inexperienced soldiers would be deployed to replace experienced soldiers who are either dying, injured or increasingly burned out by the war, which has now entered its second third year.

Ukrainian soldiers, according to the Kyiv Independent, are worried that the army will run out of men trained to continue the fight.

“If combat-capable people like us run out, we could only be replaced by people who don’t know anything,” a soldier surnamed Roman, who has been serving since 2016, told the Kyiv Independent.

An infantryman who served in the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade told the Kyiv Independent that only four of the original 110 people serving in his unit as of June 2022 remain in action because everyone was either dead or wounded.

Ukrainian military officials did not immediately respond to an after-hours request for comment from Business Insider.