Some Western trainers working with Ukrainian soldiers first assumed their trainees were “a bit lazy” when they insisted on moving slowly, a former instructor told Business Insider.
But as the British military officer helping lead the training watched them meticulously secure everything and learned why the Ukrainians were doing what they were doing, he realized it all made tactical sense. Rushing can be fatal, as a soldier could miss a trip wire, bunker, or some other danger lurking on the battlefield.
Maj. Maguire, who spoke to Business Insider about his Operation Interflex experience on the condition that just his rank and last name be used, said there was a “mindset difference” between the Ukrainians and the British. It is distinct because Ukraine is in an existential fight with practical combat experience.
From their experiences battling Russia, the Ukrainians had discovered that speed isn’t always best; sometimes, moving slowly with patience is key to surviving the fight. Clearing a trench is an activity that demands soldiers move quickly, but others demand a slower pace, a higher degree of caution.
In an urban environment, they were fine with moving at a crawl — seizing a building and sitting on it for hours until they’d coordinated everything and fully understood their next step.
“They are very happy being slow,” Maguire said.
He said the Ukrainians would take a long time to go through a door, “because they will stop. They will look for wires, they will check absolutely everything on it.” Doing all of that in a tactically safe way “takes a long time.”
Viktor Fridshon/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
For six months, until July 2024, Maguire led leadership training for Ukrainian soldiers who already had combat experience. His experience was the Ukrainian troops would not move on to the next house “until they had every single potential firing hole, point, position, mine suppressed and looked after. They won’t move until they’ve aligned the drones or the artillery behind it to do it.”
Maguire said that the British trainers were a bit impatient, as the mindset is “you get in there, let’s do it,” but attitudes shifted as they talked to and learned from the Ukrainians. He said they realized the “take your time” approach was actually “pretty good.”
The Ukrainians have been battling Russia’s full-scale invasion for years now, but fighting in eastern Ukraine has been ongoing for over a decade. Maguire said that the Ukrainians have a “greater understanding of what it takes to win” and a “sheer determination” compared to the UK armed forces.
“That’s not to say the British Army doesn’t have it,” he said. But the Ukrainians he trained had come straight from “hardcore conventional fighting,” bringing a level of instinctive aggression and combat readiness that he said exceeded what British troops typically display, having gone years without engaging in a high-intensity conventional fight.
Ukraine is fighting a very different kind of war compared to those its partners in the US and across Europe have in recent decades. It’s confronting one of the world’s largest militaries, with massed fires, armor, and significant airpower. This war is not the counterinsurgencies Western forces have spent years preparing for.
Joe Giddens/PA Images via Getty Images
This large-scale war, with the return of old features like trench warfare and the introduction of new tech like drones, is a far cry from what Western militaries have been focusing on. This is a clash of old and new in a brutal, grinding attritional fight.
The UK and other allies are watching the war closely, warning that Russia may attack elsewhere in Europe and spark a wider conflict. They want to understand what a fight with Russia would require, and Maguire said Interflex is teaching Western forces while it is teaching Ukrainians.
Interflex has become a two-way exchange. Many of the Ukrainians going through the program have front-line experience their instructors do not. Maguire said that Ukrainian insights — including what worked against Russia — were absorbed into Interflex’s curriculum and even fed back into the UK’s own training programs.
He said that training sergeants who already had “wounds of war” was intimidating for the Western trainers. “There are things that they are much better than us at,” he said.
Interflex has trained more than 56,000 Ukrainians, both new recruits and experienced soldiers, with support from 13 partner nations, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Lithuania.
Maguire said there were many differences between the British and Ukrainian approaches, and those differences have begun to influence British thinking.
He described the Ukrainians as being “far more comfortable in taking tactical risks” and said the most skilled among them are “just able to show a bit more imagination.” That willingness to innovate and experiment, he added, is a lesson Western forces are paying attention to as the war evolves.
