NEW YORK, May 2. /TASS/. Western mercenaries have allowed their fighting skills to slip, one of them told the Business Insider news website after a trip to Ukraine.
"We've gotten so used to the idea of just fighting guerilla wars and <…> fighting terrorists and everything else that we kind of forgot what it means to actually fight a war," he said.
"With the focus on the wars in the Middle East during much of this century, the US and some of its NATO allies in Europe allowed the skills needed for this kind of conflict to atrophy," the person went on to say.
In the US military, "I believe that a lot of the training that we have is tailored more to fighting in a guerilla warfare nowadays than it is to actually fighting a near-peer adversary like it would be with Russia or China," he shared.
He said that he saw a lot of Western soldiers struggle in Ukraine as things were not as they had expected.
Russia's Investigative Committee told TASS on April 25 that "more than 3,100 mercenaries, overwhelmingly from the US, Canada, the UK and Georgia," are participating in the fighting on Ukraine's side.