Canadian Troops Heading To U.K. To Train Ukrainian Forces To Fight Russia

Canada’s military is restarting its training mission to help Ukraine in its fight with Russian forces.

Defence Minister Anita Anand says up to 225 members of the Canadian Armed Forces will be sent to the United Kingdom for an initial period of four months.

She says the trainers will depart Edmonton and work alongside counterparts from Britain, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

The Ukrainian troops will be trained on the basics of soldiering “relating to frontline combat, weapons handling, first aid, field craft, patrol tactics, and include the law of armed contact,” says Anand.

The defence minister also says the federal government will be providing the Ukrainain military with 39 armoured vehicles, on top of the training.

“We are also equipping these vehicles with additional, modern, state of the art armour and machine guns,” says Anand.

In June, Ukraine reported that 10,000 of its soldiers had been killed since Russian forces invaded in February, with thousands more wounded and missing.

An earlier Canadian military training mission based in Ukraine was suspended only weeks before the invasion began.

That mission, which also included 225 Canadian military trainers, was launched in 2014 after Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula and started supporting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The federal government says the mission, known as Operation Unifier, helped train more than 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers before all Canadian troops were withdrawn ahead of Russia’s attack.