The opening ceremony of the exercise was held at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center of Yavorivsky Proving Ground, Lviv oblast. Overall 900 Ukrainian servicemen from the police, National Guard Azov Regiment, the Omega and Jaguar special-purpose units, and the Kulchytsky Battalion, as well as 290 US paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, will take part in a joint war game.
Among the officials who attended the event, there were President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. Addressing the exercise participants, the head of state said: “The circumstances under which the exercise is being held are unique. There is a full-scale aggression on Ukraine’s eastern borders on the part of a foreign state which has unleashed a multidimensional hybrid war against this country. It is symbolic that in the year of the 70th anniversary of the anti-Hitlerite coalition’s victory over Nazism Ukraine is again the venue of a civilization battle which is deciding the destiny of Europe and the world.”
“It is quite natural that strategic partnership between Ukraine and the United States of America is assuming a new meaning and totally different quantitative parameters in these conditions. This is being done in various forms and at different levels – from the presidents and supreme commanders-in-chief to soldiers,” Poroshenko pointed out. “It is the first US-Ukraine event of this level, which shows that bilateral military cooperation is assuming a qualitatively new practical dimension.”
During the ceremony, the president also handed governmental awards to the Ukrainian officers – Colonel Stepan Lohush, Lieutenant Colonel Oleksii Melnyk, Sergeant Roman Petrovsky, and Lieutenant Oleh Vikhtiuk – as well as residence permits and apartment keys to the servicemen who were wounded or showed conspicuous gallantry during the counterterrorism operation in eastern Ukraine.
