Kyiv Post has fact-checked The Sunday Telegraph’s report claiming NATO is frustrated with Ukraine’s battlefield tactics and weapons use. The article, which cites unnamed British defense sources, alleges that Ukraine’s armed forces (AFU) misuse Western-supplied arms and resist the adoption of NATO training.
Notably, defense experts, including military analyst Nicholas Drummond, have challenged the claims in the Telegraph article, calling them baseless propaganda intended to weaken Ukraine’s war effort.
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“This is utter nonsense. It’s Russia trying to create a plausible narrative to discredit Ukraine, divide NATO, and help secure a peace deal that favours Putin’s agenda,” Drummond wrote on X.
Below, we examine the claims made in the report and the reality behind them.
The Telegraph: “Kyiv’s troops are understood to be combining Western-donated weapons with Soviet-style tactics, in a misstep which has led to a significant amount of squandered Nato weaponry.”
KP: This is wrong. The Ukrainians do not use Soviet tactics; instead, they use their own take on the tactics necessary in a situation where they have a firepower deficit. The main Ukrainian battlefield weapon is drones, which obviously were never part of the Soviet army.
The Telegraph: A British soldier who trained Ukrainian troops said that Kyiv’s forces were using UK-supplied NLAWs costing around £20,000 each like RPGs – cheap, reusable Russian grenade launchers. The source claimed Ukrainian troops had to provide videos showing correct usage but were instead seen firing multiple NLAWs at once – salvos worth over £100,000.
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KP: This is a single unnamed source and a video of a single engagement. This is not to say the incident did not happen, but, by doctrine and general practice, Ukrainian soldiers are careful with the use of NLAWs and similar weapons because they are so rare and powerful.
The article offers no evidence to support the argument that the wasteful tactics in the video are widely practiced across the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).
Also, the “efficient” use of expensive weapons is often set aside in war when lives are at stake. In Afghanistan, NATO forces routinely used Javelin missiles, which cost about four times that of NLAW, to attack individual Taliban fighters. It is unfair to generalize about the entire AFU based on actions that NATO troops may have also taken in combat.
The Telegraph: Sources said there wasn’t enough time to fully teach Ukrainians advanced NATO tactics. Training in the UK and Ukraine was compared to the fast-tracked courses for British reservists, where months of instruction are condensed into just two weeks.
Besides the time shortage, some Ukrainian troops reportedly resisted NATO tactics, arguing they didn’t suit battlefield conditions that Western trainers hadn’t experienced. Tensions sometimes ran high. In one instance, British Army trainers in Ukraine allegedly reached for their sidearms, fearing possible violence.
KP Debunking: There is no evidence that these events happened, and military commentators are divided on the view that [unproven] NATO tactics are suitable for Ukraine in the real-life battlefield that none of the quoted experts have experienced.
NATO can call on support from the world’s most powerful air force, while Ukraine has next to none. NATO units and, more importantly, their combat leaders train for years in peacetime while the AFU is fighting a real war with continuing losses to soldiers and commanders who have to be replaced in weeks, not years.
The NATO “system” is based on the assumption that casualty rates will be low and claims that Ukraine’s resistance to conducting operations using NATO procedures are a mistake and a shortcoming.
However, the AFU has three years of experience against a peer opponent, while NATO has none. Ukraine has accepted much of what they have been taught but uses tactics that are more appropriate to the circumstances they find in this unique situation.
The Telegraph: “The Russian army probably has more Javelins than the British Army now,” a British source said, adding that although he and his colleagues supported Ukraine’s fight against Russia, the effort to support Kyiv “was built around lies.”
KP: This claim from an unnamed source is speculative, as no one can precisely know how many Javelins are in the British army or how many Russia has captured. Over three years of war, no source has published text, video, or photographic evidence of more than three Javelin missiles purportedly captured in combat by Russian troops – and that was in 2022 and 2023.
It’s reasonable to say Russia has captured a few dozen Javelins, but claims of hundreds or thousands are unsupported – with no evidence of the weapons being used against Ukraine.
Though the exact number of Javelins in the British Army is not public, estimates based on open sources suggest the UK likely has between 1,000 and 5,000 Javelins – far more than Ukraine is likely to have lost to Russia.
The Telegraph: “It is alleged that Ukrainian troops would often miss targets with Brimstones as they were using older Soviet-era mapping systems.”
KP: This claim is unsourced. The article does not specify who is making the allegation and does not give details of when this is said to have occurred.
The Telegraph: “Sources also described instances of corruption when training Ukrainian troops in Ukraine. Lorries carrying equipment would occasionally go missing, and shipments of vehicles would arrive at units stripped of parts, ‘including seatbelts.’”
KP: This claim is difficult to credit because the sole source of the information are unnamed and unidentified “sources.” Further, this statement gives no context of the scale of alleged corruption. A single instance of such apparent corruption in a military the size of the AFU – some 800,000 men and women – would be evidence of a force run to standards higher than NATO. “Instances” are a quantity of more than one.
The Telegraph: “After Ukraine’s 155th Brigade, which was entirely NATO-trained in France, disintegrated this winter due to ‘complete organizational chaos’ and heavy losses, some Ukrainian officers spoke out against NATO training methods.”
KP: The claim that the 155th Brigade “disintegrated” is misleading. While Ukrainian media reported issues with its organization and training, these were addressed with command changes. The brigade is now holding positions successfully, and despite some cases of soldiers leaving or refusing to fight, describing it as having “disintegrated” is an overstatement.
The Telegraph: General Oleksandr Syrsky, who is ethnically Russian and trained at the Moscow Higher Military Command School in the 1980s, became Ukraine’s commander-in-chief in 2024.
In 2023, a leaked German army document claimed that Ukrainian forces were not following lessons from Western training, reducing the effectiveness of NATO weapons and tactics. It said that Ukraine was breaking up NATO-style formations into smaller units and not adopting Western maneuver warfare, blaming this on long-standing traditions within Ukraine’s military leadership.
KP: This is yet another misleading passage. General Syrsky led Ukraine’s successful offensives in Kharkiv, Kherson, and Kursk, using combined arms and mobile tactics, not Soviet-era doctrine. The policy of breaking large units into smaller ones is a practical response to frontline crises and manpower issues, not a preference.
While the article claims AFU doesn’t apply NATO tactics, it overlooks the fact that NATO trainers lack the experience of the type of conventional war that AFU commanders have gained over three years of fighting. Additionally, comparing a two-month AFU training program to a full NATO brigade’s readiness is an unfair comparison.
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