U.S. to move ahead with training Ukrainian guardsmen: Pentagon

[WorldNews]

About 290 U.S. Army paratroopers will travel to western Ukraine next month to train three battalions of Ukrainian national guard troops, the Pentagon said on Thursday, moving ahead with a long-planned mission that was delayed due to a peace deal. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said 290 members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade based at Vicenza, Italy, would carry out the training at the Yavoriv training center in western Ukraine, probably sometime in late April. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the head of U.S. Army troops in Europe, told reporters this week the training mission had been delayed in part to avoid giving Moscow a reason to back out of a peace deal agreed last month between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists.

 

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