Ukrainian Combat Veterans Expert Exchange Study

Executive Summary

Since February 2022, Ukrainian forces have fought roughly four years of high-intensity war against a peer-state adversary. The lessons cover small-drone strike (FPV) operations, electronic warfare under constant Russian jamming, casualty evacuation under fire, and trench combat at a scale not seen in Europe since 1945. Roughly ten thousand Ukrainian officers and non-commissioned officers carry that experience first-hand; many are rotating out, recovering from injury, or returning to civilian life. Lithuanian training relies on Cold War doctrine updated with theory rather than recent combat. Operation Interflex, the United Kingdom-led programme, has trained around 56,000 Ukrainian soldiers since 2022, but the reverse flow — Ukrainian veterans embedded with Lithuanian battalions — remains ad-hoc. The recommended next step is a Ministry of National Defence feasibility study, with input from the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy, the Iron Wolf Mechanised Brigade, and the KASP volunteer force, that scopes a permanent exchange framework against the 2026 defence budget of 4.79 billion euros. The structure is a Lithuanian determination.

The Problem

Russian forces are reconstituting and could reach offensive readiness toward the end of the decade. The combat profile is no longer the one NATO trained for: cheap first-person-view drones replace mortars in many roles, jamming is constant, the front line is saturated by reconnaissance drones, and casualty evacuation often happens at night because daytime movement is fatal. Ukrainian brigades publish after-action reviews and open-source intelligence reports (groups such as DeepState UA and the analyst Tatarigami_UA) that document this combat reality week by week.

Lithuanian units receive theoretical updates and short observer visits, not embedded instruction by people who fought through the changes. A Ukrainian veteran trainer, attached to a battalion for several weeks, can compress months of doctrinal lag into hands-on drills. Visiting staff officers and conference briefings cannot. Some allied programmes show the value of this transfer (Polish drone-trainer cohorts, US Army studies of combat-veteran instructors), but Lithuania has no permanent channel to bring Ukrainian operators into its training cycle.

Without action: Lithuanian conscripts and professional units enter any future conflict with doctrine one war out of date. The institutional cost of learning under fire is paid in casualties in the first weeks. The knowledge transfer ends when the war does.