As part of the six-month Operation Fearless Guardian, 290 paratroopers from the US army's 173rd Airborne Brigade will hold joint exercises with 900 Ukrainian soldiers in Yaroviv near the Polish border.
US paratroopers have started training national guard units in Ukraine, despite Moscow's warnings that it could destabilise the peace process with Russia-backed rebels in the east of the country.
"The participation of instructors and specialists from third countries on Ukrainian territory, where the internal conflict remains unregulated, where problems with realising the points of the Minsk agreements persist, definitely doesn't help resolve the conflict," president Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists after the US paratroopers first arrived in Ukraine on Friday.
Nationalists believe it is a site of centuries of oppression - including the massacre of unarmed civil rights protesters by British paratroopers during Bloody Sunday.
Shortly before he was killed, Nemtsov reportedly scrawled a note reading: "Some paratroopers from Ivanovo have got in touch with me.
In August, Kiev exchanged 10 captured Russian paratroopers whom the Kremlin claimed had accidentally wandered into Ukrainian territory for 63 Ukrainian soldiers who had crossed into Russia to flee fighting.
Nearly 300 American paratroopers will work with some 900 Ukrainian national guardsmen over a six-month stretch, building up from individual weapons skills to company-level command and control.
When American paratroopers began a training mission in western Ukraine earlier this week, the Kremlin said it could "destabilize the situation".
IN THE early afternoon of August 18th 2008, a reconnaissance unit of about 100 French paratroopers, accompanied by a small number of Afghan and American soldiers, was ambushed by a similarly sized Taliban force in the Uzbin Valley, not far from Kabul.
Last week three paratroopers were shot dead (one in Toulouse, two others in nearby Montauban) and a fourth was seriously injured.
"At a minimum, Americans should understand the consequences of substituting generals and Green Berets for diplomats, and 19-year-old paratroopers for police and aid workers on nation-building missions," she says.
