U.S. Soldiers in Poland Are Helping Ukraine, Albeit With Slimmed-Down Training

Posted: June 27th, 2023

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010. He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.

OPINION — In Jasionka, Poland, a small town of 2,700 just 60 miles west of the Ukraine border, a little-publicized unit of U.S. soldiers from the 405th Army Field Support Brigade have been using encrypted digital chats and videos to assist Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) inside Ukraine in the maintenance and repair of American-provided military equipment.

I first learned of this unusual American military unit, called the Tele-Maintenance and Distribution Cell-Ukraine (RDC-U), and its location from a single paragraph in the Defense Department Inspector General’s Audit of DoD Training Ukrainian Armed Forces, released on June 15.

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