The European Union, as the continent shakes off its annual summer torpor, will seriously consider sending soldiers to Ukraine as trainers. Doing so follows months of pressure from Kyiv and would break a taboo in the war, although a small number of Western army personnel have been operating in Ukraine for some time. 

The discussion comes amid massive Russian drone and missile strikes across Ukraine on Monday, the Associated Press reported, with energy infrastructure the target. The attack appeared to be the biggest in weeks against Ukraine, and at least three were reported killed along with power cuts across the country.

Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper first reported that the European Union’s foreign and defense ministers will formally discuss the training issue for the first time on Tuesday. That is set for a meeting of the bloc’s Political and Security Committee. If that goes well, EU army personnel could be deployed to Ukraine before the end of the year. 

The 27 EU member states will issue formal review orders to the relevant diplomatic and military bodies at Brussels, with some momentum coming from the Netherlands.  That’s because the  head of the EU’s military staff is a  Dutch general,  Michiel van der Laan, who has previously spoken in favor of training Ukrainian soldiers on-site in Ukraine. General van der Laan happens to be the  commander of the EU’s current Ukraine training mission.

Kyiv pressed its demand for more training support  in May in a letter to the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell. The stakes are only getting higher, because despite Ukraine’s unprecedented incursion into Russia’s neighboring Kursk region the war is still looking dicey in the country’s embattled east.

Part of the problem stems from what Ukrainian military commanders have called “poorly trained recruits,” in addition to “Russia’s clear superiority in ammunition and air power.” Those assessments came in part from a recent AP report, according to which some new Ukrainian soldiers are even refusing to fire back at the Russians. 

Other troops, according to commanders and fellow fighters cited, have struggled to coordinate basic combat movements and a few, according to the report, “have even walked away from their posts, abandoning the battlefield altogether.”

While the Kursk incursion clearly caught Moscow on the back foot, the fate of Ukraine’s east is still up in the air. The AP reported that commanders say that newer recruits have contributed to a string of territorial losses that enabled Russia’s army to advance, including near Pokrovsk, a critical logistics hub. If it falls the defeat would imperil Ukraine’s defenses and bring Russia closer to its stated aim of capturing the whole of Donetsk.

So from Brussels the movement in respect of army trainers obviously can’t come soon enough. In mid-November, the mandate for the current European training mission for Ukrainian soldiers, called EUMAM Ukraine, has to be extended.  So far those training efforts, while not insignificant, have taken place only on EU territory — mainly in Poland and Germany.

The  mandate will likely be modified so that training can also take place in Ukraine in the near future. EU soldiers would then be officially involved in the war on Ukrainian soil for the first time. Whether that would paves the way for American troops to be involved in the war is a question that, for now at least, few are asking — at least not publicly. 

Right now it’s European soldiers that will be in the game. According to multiple French and German reports, France is said to be eager for Europeans to comply with Kyiv’s request. The Baltic states back Paris as do Poland, Denmark, and Sweden. 

With Germany, it gets more complicated. The German government has so far been against training Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine itself, fearing further escalation. Berlin’s stance is more or less shared by Austria and Hungary, as well as Slovenia and little Malta.

A recent document from the EU’s diplomatic service explains that some of that apprehension stems from “the fact that Russia can reach any location in Ukraine with ballistic missiles and drones,” which “would lead to the highest level of threat for EU military personnel.” Thus, EU soldiers “could be seen by Russia as active participants in the conflict and could therefore trigger unpredictable kinetic reactions.”

Those reactions could include drone and missile attacks from the Sea of Azov, Russia, and Belarus, but also “grenade explosions, sabotage, and cyber attacks.”

Some of the German worry could be overblown, though, because Ukraine is also taking steps of its own. Following a new mobilization drive in May it is expecting up to 150,000 new conscripts, plus ten new infantry brigades are in the works. 

The same document from the EU’s diplomatic service stated that “Ukraine’s structural disadvantage compared to Russia in terms of personnel numbers makes high-quality training and equipment very important for Ukraine’s military response.”

That is an implicit green light for dispatching trainers, but not the only one. Continued Ukrainian success on the Kursk front is making Moscow wriggle, which will add to the impetus at Brussels to get things going. 

President Putin, clearly, is not having a good week. Last Thursday he opened a video call with top security advisors by saying, “I have gathered you in order to discuss the situation that is developing at the moment in the border regions of Russia.”

Russia’s deputy prime minister, Denis Manturov, said that more than 100,000 Russians have already been evacuated and that “Kyiv’s incursion shows no sign of going anywhere.”