Ukrainians Get Weeks to Train on Military Equipment That Takes Months to Master

• Ukraine’s counteroffensive appears to be less effective than expected, CNN reported.
• Troops in Ukraine are receiving just weeks to learn to use advanced military equipment.
• Bradley fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, for example, take US troops months to master.

Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive currently appears to be less effective than Western allies expected — though it’s likely not due to lack of equipment.

CNN’s Jim Sciutto reported that Ukrainian troops are not receiving adequate training to use the donated munitions and equipment fast enough to push back Russian forces.

“Ukrainians have been supplied with highly advanced US Bradley fighting vehicles, for instance, armored personnel carriers, and German Leopard tanks, but what I’ve been told is the training on those systems has been quite short, eight weeks on some of these systems,” Sciutto said in a Tuesday broadcast of The Lead.

He added: “And it seems there’s now a growing feeling that the attempt to transform Ukrainian armed forces into large mechanized fighting units — which takes US forces months, even years of training to do — to try to do that in weeks may have been a bridge too far.”

Ukrainian servicemen continue to face vast mine mazes and booby-trapped fields, which, despite their arsenal of high-powered weapons, slow advancing troops navigating through them and, when they aren’t discovered in time, cause significant fatalities and injuries.

Instead of conducting head-on attacks on Russian positions using complicated Western maneuvers, Ukrainian troops encountering heavily defended Russian positions are trying to wear the enemy down with artillery and missile barrages.

“What I see in that military is that it’s just very uneven,” Insider previously reported Michael Kofman, director of the Russian Studies Program at the CNA research organization, said. “It’s very uneven because there are folks that have come from civilian life and some have had a bunch of training and some had very little.”

Due to the slow progress of its counteroffensive as they face Russian positions protected by minefields, helicopter gunships, and artillery fire, Ukrainian troops are abandoning US tactics to seize back territory from Russia, Insider previously reported.