WASHINGTON — A new joint training center in Poland that NATO is setting up with Ukraine would ideally be used to provide military training to potentially “millions” of Ukrainian citizens living abroad who would be willing to come home to join the fight against Russia, a senior Polish security official said.
Jacek Siewiera, head of Poland’s National Security Agency, spoke to the Associated Press news agency during the NATO summit in Washington.
Siewiera is one of the officials most closely involved in his country’s work in support of the fight against Ukraine. building up his own defense against Russia. He spoke about the possible use of the new training center, which NATO announced earlier this year, while pointing to Russia’s success in vastly expanding its military ranks during the war in Ukraine.
After more than two years of war, Ukraine, with a population much smaller than Russia’s, is struggling to recruit enough troops. Eastern European countries, including Poland sounds the alarm on strengthening the Russian military, saying President Vladimir Putin might target more countries if his fight against Ukraine’s Western government is successful.
The new NATO-Ukraine center in Bydgoszcz, Poland, is itself intended to strengthen NATO’s long-term commitment to Ukraine. That’s because the possibility of a new Donald Trump presidency has thrown the future of U.S. support for Ukraine and NATO into some doubt.
The joint training center is intended, among other things, to allow Ukrainians to teach NATO member states some of the lessons they have learned about how to combat Russian forces in an affordable and effective way, such as using civilian drones on the battlefield, Siewiera said.
For the militaries of NATO member states, “those details … are absolutely crucial,” he said.
In his conversation with AP on Tuesday, Siewiera also spoke about a second possible application of the new NATO center in his country.
The West should also view the NATO center as a potential center for training Ukrainians for volunteer forces, “the volunteers who are now in European countries and are ready to defend Ukraine in the future, because there are millions of them,” he said.
Some of those troops would prefer to do their training in European countries, he said. The Ukrainian military is working to make inexperienced recruits battlefield-ready, even as it fights Russia.
Siewiera also spoke out in favor of allowing Ukraine to use weapons it receives from NATO allies against Russian military targets in Russia. The Biden administration is significantly limiting Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons in Russia out of fear of a larger Russian escalation.
“It is up to the Ukrainians how they use their weapons” once they have them in their hands, he argued.