TOLEDO, Spain — The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said on Wednesday he was proposing to lift the target of Ukrainian soldiers to be trained by the bloc to 40,000 by the end of the year.
In November 2022, the EU launched a training mission for Ukrainian soldiers with an initial target of 15,000 soldiers. In February, the target was doubled to 30,000 soldiers by the end of the year.
The mission “has already trained 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers — some of them here, in Toledo, thanks to the Spanish army,” Borrell told reporters during a press conference at the end of an informal meeting of defense ministers.
It “will reach the objective, which was programmed for the end of the year, at the end of October, [when] we will have reached the 30,000 soldiers trained by this mission” he added. He then announced a new target: “I proposed to the ministers to raise the objective of the mission to 40,000 Ukrainian soldiers trained by the end of the year.”
The training mission could also be expanded to train Ukrainian pilots after the Netherlands and Denmark announced they would provide F-16 airplanes to join the fighting against the Russian invasion.
