"There is no real Ukraine military to speak of," Steinberg said.
The publication's senior editor sees parallels between Ukraine and Iraq in terms of the United States trying to engage in a limited military training program while simultaneously negotiating with non-governmental armies and gangs.
"This [US training program] is more a matter of ‘showing the flag’ to support the government in Kiev, which faces both the pro-Russian insurgency in the East and the neo-Nazi criminal gangs, run by private oligarchs in the West," Steinberg added.
Johns Hopkins University Professor and military historian Michael Vlahos told Sputnik that the most accomplished military trainers on Earth cannot motivate Iraq’s regular army units to fight as effectively as the Shia private armies.
"[P]eople fight for their identity, their community, for everything they hold dear. That is why the Shia militias are so much more effective in battle than the so-called Iraqi Army, and always will be," Vlahos said.
On Sunday, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the Iraqi army, which the US military helped train following the 2003 US invasion, lacked the "will" to defeat the Islamic State jihadist group that seized large areas of Iraq last year.
The major underlying issues as to why Shia militias outperform the regular army in Iraq, Vlahos argued, is the power vacuum in Baghdad and the alienation of Sunni fighters who lack trustworthy political leaders and commanders.
"An absent working fraternity of battle is indicative of a much bigger vacuum [in Iraq], that of a regime in which no one believes, and for whom all trust has been irrevocably lost," Vlahos said.
In March, Washington said it would redeploy up to 300 military instructors from Italy to the Ukrainian city of Yavoriv, near the Polish border, as part of a mission to train the Ukrainian National Guard. The United States committed $300 million worth of what it termed defensive weapons as part of its 2016 defense budget.
Russia has argued that the US legislation could provoke further escalation of violence in Ukraine. President Obama has currently not acted upon the legislation to send lethal arms to Ukraine.