Kiwi troops training Ukrainian soldiers on Salisbury Plain, southwest England, in November 2022. Photo / Tom Mutch
Kiwi troops have been training soldiers in the UK as part of our Government’s support for Ukraine since the middle of 2022.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced in April that New Zealand is extending its deployment of 100 Defence Force personnel in the UK and throughout Europe to December next year.
Kiwi photojournalist Tom Mutch was there from the beginning.
In this extract from his new book, The Dogs of Mariupol, he goes inside their efforts.
Salisbury Plain, England, November 2022
The New Zealand soldiers lined up in formation, legs akimbo, clad in camouflage and thumbed their chests. “Ah ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora”, or “it is life, it is life, it is death, it is death”.
The haka, made famous by the All Blacks, is a war dance, and you slap your chest to indicate that you will live and point at your enemy to let him know he will die. It was being done to greet a series of visiting dignitaries.
The crack of rifle fire echoed over Salisbury Plain and, in the background, we could hear the whirr of helicopter blades as a large, dark green military helicopter carrying the Defence Ministers of New Zealand and the United Kingdom landed. I was proud to see my country doing its part. Here, about 130 Kiwis had been training greenhorn Ukrainian troops in the basics of combat. My countrymen were impressed.
Nathan, one trainer, said the Ukrainians were far more impressive than the Afghans or Iraqis he had trained on previous missions.
“They’re really hungry to learn; they have a passion and a thirst for knowledge.”
Between breaks, the recruits would come to the instructors and bombard them with questions and demand explanations and extra rehearsals of what they had been learning.
Nathan said it was astonishing that “we haven’t had people pulling sickies or trying to get out of the field. They hate it if they have to leave for some medical thing. Whereas back home, if things are going hard, you might get up and say, ‘Oh, I’m feeling sick today.’”
After Ukraine’s stunning successes in Kharkiv and Kherson, many in the West had finally come around to the possibility of Ukraine not just keeping itself alive but even winning back territory, possibly kicking the Russians out of the territory they had stolen in 2014. There was one military objective over all others. The only real prize the Russians had captured – outside some ruined husks of cities in the Donbas – was the land bridge to occupied Crimea via southern Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. An attack here could potentially cut off the Kremlin’s access to Crimea.
Ben Wallace, then UK Secretary of Defence, was about as gung-ho as it gets about Ukraine’s chances. He said that, in weekly conversations with his Ukrainian counterparts, he’d urged them to “keep up the pressure”.
The Ukrainians were taking an operational pause, but he seemed to think this was unwise. “Given the advantage the Ukrainians have in equipment training and quality of their personnel against the demoralised, poorly trained, poorly equipped Russians, it would be in Ukraine’s interest to maintain momentum through the winter. They have 300,000 pieces of arctic warfare kit, from the international community.”
The British had always been the most bullish about Ukraine’s chances. The US, by contrast, was beginning to show a note of caution. Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that Ukraine should consider negotiating, now that it was in its strongest battlefield position yet.
Vitaliy Krasovskiy, Ukraine’s defence attache in London, who worked on liaising with foreign militaries, was full of praise for his British counterparts, saying that British commitment went “well above” that of most other countries. He noted that officials at the UK’s Ministry of Defence were “extraordinarily committed”, regularly working overtime and at weekends at key points of the military campaign.
“If our armed forces need a particular vehicle or piece of weaponry, the Brits will search through the military catalogues of different countries and find what we need,” he added, citing the Australian Bushmaster armoured vehicle as an example. The difference, he explained, was that, while the US saw Ukrainian success as in their own interests, the Brits had a passionate emotional attachment to a full Ukrainian victory.
He also mentioned former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s early and regular trips to Kyiv to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as an important factor in boosting Ukrainian morale and demonstrating international support. While Johnson is mostly disgraced at home, he remains a folk hero in Ukraine, appearing on murals, T-shirts, coffee mugs and beer cans.
Despite the professionalism of the Western trainers, and the thoroughness of their instruction, they privately admit there is a gaping hole in their ability to teach. “Quite frankly, we’ve never fought this kind of war before,” one instructor said.
Western militaries’ combat experience in recent decades has been fighting counter-insurgency battles against the Taliban in Afghanistan. But this was a war being fought largely through massive artillery barrages from a powerful state military, which most Western soldiers have never faced.
One trainer told me: “They are practising artillery on the light-fire range at the moment, and we do fire manoeuvre ranges as well as battle simulation. We’ll have loud bangs that simulate artillery. We have exercises where we bring in amputees and dress them to make it look like that amputation was caused by artillery and make the recruits responsible for treating that individual.”
He is confident that, despite the short training time, “after five weeks, they come out combat capable. They can shoot straight, communicate and medicate.” There were already some grumblings that not all of the preparations were going right. One of the Ukrainian soldiers on the base complained that, when they were on the battlefield, reconnaissance drones were the big new thing, and so learning to navigate through binoculars and maps seemed completely anachronistic.
Cutting the land bridge was a daunting prospect, with considerably different battlefield contradictions from either Kherson or Kharkiv. Kherson had been a particularly tough nut to crack. Ukraine was fighting well-trained Russian airborne troops, who were well dug in and took heavy casualties at first. It took months to make a breakthrough – and that was only because the Russians had their backs to the river.
Russians had mobilised 300,000 additional troops, and while the process had been bedraggled and chaotic, bringing in a lot of low-quality troops, it allowed them to plug the gaping holes in their front line. This situation would not be replicated in Zaporizhzhia.
Russian General Sergey Surovikin had invested huge amounts of work in building an extensive fortifications network stretching across Zaporizhzhia, where the Ukrainian Army was expected to come from. To make matters worse, the outlines of the Ukrainian plans were leaked to the Russians months in advance, so they knew exactly where, and close to when, Ukraine would attack.
To counter the Russian advantages, the Ukrainians and their supporters in the West embarked on a campaign to get Ukraine an extraordinary number of armoured vehicles and the latest Western tanks, along with F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles like the Army Tactical Missile System. The exact process of what was delivered when is a complicated and dull affair, but suffice to say that the timelines were far too slow. There was a large delay caused by the international effort to convince Germany to allow the transfer of Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
But there were larger strategic errors as well. The Russians had begun ramping up their industrial production for artillery shells and drones and importing extra weapons from North Korea and Iran.
It was reasonable to think that Ukraine could establish an advantage in artillery fire, and the risk of a Russian counteroffensive was low. Western support, which has been essential to Ukraine’s war effort, was also likely to peak in summer 2023. The US was burning through its stockpile of ammunition, while European states had failed to ramp up munitions production in 2022 and were just beginning to make the required investments, with lacklustre results. With elections looming in 2024, the political headwinds in Western capitals also suggested that funding to support Ukraine would decline after this operation.
The US borrowed ammunition from South Korea, and other Western countries made efforts to contribute as part of a crash train-and-equip programme for Ukrainian forces. All told, the West trained and equipped nine brigades for the offensive. Ukraine would field several additional brigades from the armed forces and National Guard, organised under two corps, and a reserve task force.
Tom Mutch is a war correspondent who became embedded in Ukraine just before Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his military might on the country in 2022. He has written countless articles for the Herald through a Kiwi lens. He went on to cover the war in Gaza.
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