At an unnamed and undisclosed location in western Ukraine, British and Ukrainian engineers work side by side to repair damaged military equipment, crawling under the chassis of artillery systems and dismantling the insides of howitzers donated by Britain.
Until now, the existence of this facility, along with three other similar sites inside Ukraine, has been kept secret, hidden in neutral language to avoid drawing too much attention to the sites, given the sensitivity of all military-linked work inside Ukraine.
However, The Guardian was invited to see the site earlier this week – the first time media access has been granted – during a visit to Ukraine by UK Defense Minister Luke Pollard. The facility was an example of Britain doing things that “no other nation has been willing or able to do,” Pollard said.
While there are no British military personnel on site, there are British engineers, employed by the Ministry of Defence, working in the country. For security reasons, other countries have often preferred to repair the kit outside of Ukraine, causing longer journeys and delays to return it to the front.
The facilities visited by The Guardian have repair areas for up to 30 vehicles and can repair various weapons systems, including British-made AS-90 self-propelled howitzers. The AS-90 was initially planned to be withdrawn from service in the British Army in the 2030s, but in recent years a decision was made to donate the entire stock of the system to Ukraine.
“There are some things that in military times we don’t talk about, but when it comes to industry partnerships and the legitimate question of ‘You donated all those AS-90s, what happened to them?’… we want to start telling the story,” Pollard said.
He acknowledged there was a risk in having the facility inside Ukraine, but said it was a “risk worth taking and managing” in the interest of supporting kyiv. “Any operation or support provided inside Ukraine is clearly going to have a higher risk than if it is provided in Poland or anywhere within NATO’s Article 5 protected area, but it is precisely this type of support that Ukraine needs to stay in the fight,” he said.
Engineers and technicians from two British companies, BAE Systems and AMS, are working together with Ukrainian colleagues to repair the kit. Many of the Ukrainians hired by the companies were previously employed at Ukrainian military companies that have since been damaged or destroyed, and are now being trained to work with British and other equipment donated from abroad.
Much of the equipment used by the Ukrainian armed forces is now obsolete, meaning a new supply chain for spare parts had to be established. BAE was involved in the original manufacturing of the AS-90 and had access to technical drawings, but other systems required more creative approaches. For the Tunguska, a Soviet-era anti-aircraft platform also fixed at the facility, and for the Soviet T-72 tanks used by Ukraine, engineers visited the Bovington tank museum in Dorset to examine versions of the vehicles on display there and find out how they could manufacture spare parts in the UK.
Swedish Archer artillery systems are also repaired at the facility, under a cooperation agreement in which the Swedish government pays but British and Ukrainian engineers do the work. In the future, the hope is that the project can expand to more sites and with more countries involved. “We want a structured and organized approach, where any nation providing equipment has a structure they can plug into,” Pollard said.
Facilities like this give an idea of what Western support for Ukraine could look like after a possible peace deal. A so-called “coalition of the willing” has been formed, of nations prepared to offer support to Ukraine to prevent Russia from attacking again, should Donald Trump’s efforts to reach a deal between Moscow and kyiv prove successful.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed his desire for any post-war agreement to include a provision for Western troops to be stationed in Ukraine, and last September Finnish President Alexander Stubb told the Guardian that a coalition of the willing would involve “real security guarantees” that would force Western nations to fight Russia if Moscow violated the ceasefire.
However, recent years have shown that no Western country is willing to go to war in Ukraine, and that calculus is unlikely to change. “We know that our only real guarantee of security will be a strong Ukrainian army,” said a Ukrainian security source.
Last month, UK Defense Secretary John Healey said he hoped to deploy British troops to Ukraine following a peace deal, but those troops were not expected to confront Russian forces. “UK forces are not the deterrent, the deterrent is a stronger Ukraine,” Pollard said, hence the focus on regenerating Ukrainian equipment as well as training Ukrainian troops.
Currently, Ukrainian units use their materiel “to the point of destruction,” he said, and the task after a ceasefire would be to quickly restore all equipment to the front, something that is not possible when used during daily operations.
“For the UK, one of the key roles in the coalition of the willing is to regenerate the Ukrainian armed forces, and to do that we need to have the infrastructure ready to go on the first day of peace,” he said.
