About 50 Edmonton soldiers returned from Ukraine Tuesday morning after a six-month training mission.
The soldiers were in Ukraine as part of Operation UNIFIER to support Ukrainian armed forces. The operation’s focus was to assist Ukraine soldiers with military training in order to improve and build their military capability.
READ MORE: Edmonton soldiers leave for 6-month mission to train Ukrainian troops
The operation’s commanding officer said the training involved combat, tactics, combat engineering and medicine and logistics.
“I think we got done most of the stuff that we needed to do, and the Canadian Forces is doing it again for another couple years so we’ll get more done. But right now I’m just too distracted by my wife,” soldier Quinton Stender said.
“It was a very positive experience. I learned a lot personally and I think we did a lot of good work, so it was a really good deployment,” soldier Matt Burke said.
Burke left on the mission when his wife, Emer, was seven months pregnant with their daughter. He returned for a few days for his daughter’s birth before returning to the mission. Burke is thrilled to be home, as is his wife.
“Thankfully, technology is so good nowadays that we got to FaceTime pretty much every day, but it’s still nice to see him. We missed him,” Emer Burke said.
The Canadian government started sending troops to Ukraine in the summer of 2015 as part of Operation UNIFIER.
READ MORE: Soldiers from Edmonton’s 3rd Canadian Division deploy to Ukraine
On March 6, the Liberal government announced it was extending Canada’s military mission in Ukraine for another two years to show continued solidarity with the eastern European country.
Canada first deployed about 200 troops to Ukraine in the summer of 2015 to help train government forces after Russia annexed Crimea and began supporting separatist forces in Ukraine’s Donbass region.
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