NATO hub has trained 59,000 Ukrainian troops

NATO’s command for coordinating military support to Ukraine has now overseen the training of more than 59,000 Ukrainian personnel and grown to 31 nations in around eighteen months of operation, a senior NATO military official has said.

On the sidelines of the NATO Defence Ministers’ meeting, the UK Defence Journal was told that the NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine command, known as NSATU, was now “a fully functioning organisation” with more than 300 personnel from 31 nations working around the clock alongside embedded Ukrainian liaison officers in what the official called “a really very close partnership”.

The official said Japan had officially joined the previous month, becoming the third NATO partner nation alongside Australia and New Zealand, a step the official said underscored a wider truth that support to Ukraine “extends well beyond the alliance”, with such partners deeply committed to Ukraine’s defence and to the stability of the Euro-Atlantic area.

On training specifically, the official said that since NSATU was stood up more than 59,000 Ukrainian personnel had been trained through its coordinated programmes, delivered by 34 nations across more than 1,800 courses, with the command having helped consolidate training from over 200 locations down to fewer than 60 to improve efficiency and standardisation, covering everything from basic recruit training to brigade-level leadership, combat medic training and specialised weapon instruction.

The command acted as the central hub connecting Ukrainian demand with allied support, the official said, providing Kyiv with a single interface to coordinate logistics, supply, training and capability development, and had run five iterations of its Operational Force Development Framework, the most recent drawing nearly 800 participants from 28 nations, including almost 90 general officers and senior political leaders.

The official was emphatic that the effort was in the allies’ own interest, saying support to Ukraine was “not charity” but a matter of collective security in which “the cost of not supporting Ukraine now would be far higher later”, and pledging that the command and its partners would keep working to translate Ukraine’s requirements into concrete capabilities until a durable peace was achieved.