Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis backed Macron’s stance in an interview with The Guardian last week. “Our troops have been training Ukrainians in Ukraine before the war,” he said, adding, “So returning to this tradition might be quite doable”.

The US military has done training for Ukrainian troops in Poland, Germany and at home, but pulling troops out of Ukraine is time-consuming. American officials now acknowledge that the current training by Ukrainian forces is not sufficient and that they need better and faster training to push back on an expected Russian drive this northern summer.

The US used to help run a NATO training program at Yavoriv, in western Ukraine, but US troops were pulled out from there at the start of the war.

US and allied training has not always been successful. Before a Ukrainian counteroffensive this past summer, US soldiers provided training in Germany to Ukrainian units on manoeuvre warfare, mine clearing and other tasks. But learning how to use tanks, artillery and infantry troops in a coordinated way is difficult, particularly in a short 12-week period. Compounding the problem is that Ukrainians are facing a battlefield far different and more intense than what US forces have fought on in recent years.

Moving the training into Ukraine, military officials acknowledge, would allow American trainers to more quickly gather information about the innovations occurring on the Ukrainian front lines, potentially allowing them to adapt their training.

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NATO last month asked General Christopher Cavoli, the supreme allied commander for Europe, to come up with a way for the alliance to do more to help Ukraine that would mitigate risks. A US official said Wednesday that one possibility could be training Ukrainian troops in Lviv, near the country’s western border with Poland.

But Russia has already bombed Lviv, including a few weeks ago when Russian cruise missiles struck critical infrastructure there.

Some officials say that large numbers of new Ukrainian recruits might still be sent to training ranges in Germany and Poland.

But logistically, that requires transporting the troops to the US Army’s training grounds in Grafenwoehr, Germany, putting them through complex manoeuvres meant to teach them combined arms warfare and then sending the troops nearly 1,000 miles through Lviv and then Kyiv for deployment to the front lines.

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“Remember, when Russia first invaded Crimea in 2014, we sent increased troop numbers into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine, and we kept rotating them in all the way to 2022, when we got spooked and withdrew them,” said Evelyn Farkas, the former top Pentagon official for Ukraine during the Obama administration. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone now, when manpower is in short supply at the Ukrainian front, that NATO members and the alliance leadership consider how to help again from the rear.”

Other NATO allies, including Britain, Germany and France, are working to base defence contractors in Ukraine to help build and repair weapons systems closer to the combat zone — what military officials have described as a “fix it forward” approach. Current and former US defence officials said the White House is now reviewing its ban on allowing US defence contractors in Ukraine, although a small number have already been allowed in, under State Department authorities, to work on specific weapons systems like Patriot air defences.

“There is an element of ally malpractice in the fact that we’re providing masses of Western equipment to Ukraine but not giving them the resources to sustain it,” said Alexander Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a Ukrainian-born American combat veteran.