Ukrainian troops will receive Patriot training in Oklahoma
WASHINGTON — About 100 Ukrainian troops will head to Oklahoma’s Fort Sill as soon as next week to begin training on the Patriot missile defense system, getting Kyiv closer to obtaining a long-sought protection against continued Russian missile attacks.
Ukraine has for months requested that the United States provide the Patriot surface-to-air guided missile defense system because it can target aircraft, cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles. During his late December visit to the U.S., Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the battery would make a significant difference in bolstering Kyiv’s defenses against Russia’s invasion.
The number of Ukrainians coming to Fort Sill is approximately the number it takes to operate one battery, and they will focus on learning to operate and maintain the Patriot, Pentagon spokesman Air Force Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday.
Kyiv’s decision to take troops off the battlefield to train across the Atlantic in the U.S. is unusual, although it has sent forces for short-term training at European bases for other more complex systems it has received such as the longer-range High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.
Patriot training normally can take several months, but “the longer those troops are off the line, they’re not actually engaged in combat,” Ryder said, so the training will be shortened.
Fort Sill was selected because it already runs Patriot training schools, Ryder said.
The U.S. pledged one Patriot battery in December as part of one of several large military assistance packages it has provided Ukraine in recent weeks. Last week Germany pledged an additional Patriot battery.
Each Patriot battery consists of a truck-mounted launching system with eight launchers that can hold up to four missile interceptors each, a ground radar, a control station and a generator.
Meanwhile, Kyiv officials said Russian forces are escalating their onslaught against Ukrainian positions around the city of Bakhmut, bringing new levels of death and devastation in the grinding battle for control of eastern Ukraine that is part of Moscow’s wider war.
“Everything is completely destroyed. There is almost no life left,” Zelenskyy said late Monday of the scene around Bakhmut and the nearby Donetsk province city of Soledar.
“The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes,” the Ukrainian president said. “This is what madness looks like.”
After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson in November, the battle heated up around Bakhmut.
Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said Russia has thrown “a large number of storm groups” into the fight for the city. “The enemy is advancing literally on the bodies of their own soldiers and is massively using artillery, rocket launchers and mortars, hitting their own troops,” she said.