what does the 155th Ukrainian brigade trained in France look like?

France is the first country to have offered military training on a brigade scale to kyiv. Emmanuel Macron visits them in the Grand-Est.

It is a military camp placed under very high security. Despite the presence of Emmanuel Macron, the Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu and his Ukrainian counterpart Roustem Oumerov to meet the executives and trainers there, Wednesday October 9, the Elysée refuses to give the exact location and simply specifies a visit “somewhere in a military camp in the Grand-Est“.

Handling of weapons, combat tactics… It is in an incessant din, with simulated explosions and drone flights that part of the future Brigade 155, which will eventually be made up of 4,500 soldiers, trains. , of which 2,300 are and will be trained in France. This is a first for kyiv: Paris was, in fact, the first country to have offered the Ukrainian army military training on the scale of a brigade.

In total, there are therefore three infantry battalions with their artillery support with the French Caesar cannon, 18 of which will be given to the brigade as well as around twenty Milan anti-tank firing posts, but also their engineering units and reconnaissance -, 18 AMX-10 RC light reconnaissance tanks which will also be allocated to the 155th Ukrainian brigade. And to transport all these units, some 128 VAB type armored personnel carriers are also provided.

New in these training courses: all of them are based on feedback from the Ukrainian theater of operations. The maneuvers or even the defensive trench networks are, in the French camp, the exact replica of what the Ukrainians find on their battlefields, including the observation or attack drones, now omnipresent on the front.

Until now, all the training provided to Ukrainians, mainly in Poland, but also in Germany, Great Britain or France, was at the level of a company – around a hundred men and around fifteen managers – , or a technical specialty, such as precision shooting on Caesar cannons, for example. The “155th” will be the first of some 78 brigades in the Ukrainian army to have been trained abroad.