However, the absence of US soldiers on the ground to protect the trainers leaves them vulnerable to attack. The compromise solution is to provide US fighter air cover, although the generals warn that there is little a fighter aircraft, however sophisticated, can do to protect a few men on the ground from 20,000 feet. Only too aware that the American people in general, and the House of Representatives and the Senate in particular, will not countenance US “fighting” soldiers stationed in Ukraine, the President tells the generals to stop complaining and make it work. Anyway, the 2014 Minsk peace accord is still holding and not even the most hawkish US general is suggesting that Russia is about to attack.

The equipment and the trainers are sent, their mission specific: get the equipment installed and working, get the Ukrainians trained and then get out as quickly as possible.

In the UK, the new Prime Minister is distracted by the consequences of the UK electorate’s vote to leave the EU in the June 2016 referendum. In an attempt to enhance their “special relationship” with the United States, the UK timidly sent a small team of medics and supply officers to help train the Ukrainian army in 2015. However, far from sending a signal of strength and resolution, these efforts appear weak and the force a potential hostage to fortune. Just as bad, this move reinforces the Russian narrative of NATO trainers being Ukraine’s “foreign legion,” an insult that plays particularly well with nationalist forces at home.

In Ukraine, despite the political ambiguity of the 2014 Minsk ceasefire, major fighting has ceased and the war settled down to a semi-frozen conflict, with both sides— Ukrainian Army and “Russian Separatists,” although supported by Russian regular forces— occupying entrenched positions. Behind Ukrainian government lines a form of normality has emerged, which allows US trainers to work with the Ukrainian army under near peacetime conditions.

Unaccountably, the strident Kremlin propaganda of two years ago, portraying the deployment of trainers as evidence of the NATO threat to Russia, has recently gone quiet, helped no doubt by increasingly close cooperation between Russia, America, France, and Britain over air strikes in Syria. This absence of vitriol and threats gives the US president further confidence to send more US equipment and trainers, although still without proper “boots on the ground” protection in case it is deemed “provocative.”