Ukrainian civilians train for a fight to the death

In a forest on the outskirts of Kiev civilians are training to defend their city and resist a Russian occupation.

Ukraine residents train on the outskirts of Kiev on Sunday with wooden replicas of Kalashnikov rifles. Picture: AFP

Denys Semyroh-Orlyk, a 46-year-old architect, has a message for Russia: “We will never surrender. We are using every opportunity to train. So I think Putin should be afraid of us.”

He speaks from the woods on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on a frigid Saturday in January, alongside a large group of camouflaged civilians. They’re training to defend their city and resist a Russian occupation. Their weapons are decoys, at least at the session I attended, but their ferocity is genuine and aimed straight at the enemy. They practise an attack and counter-attack, making a stark contrast with Kiev residents taking their dogs out for a morning walk.

The training session reveals much about the strength of Ukraine’s civil society and the citizenry’s determination to remain independent from Russia.

Meanwhile, the government’s approach to this civilian defence and resistance movement says something about Ukraine’s current anxieties.

Mr Semyroh-Orlyk says that before 2014 he was a “cosmopolite”. Bearded, burly and at ease in command, he looks far from one now. Everything changed when Russian fighters – “green pieces of shit” in his words – seized Crimea. He would like “to thank Mr Putin for helping us wake up”.

Mr Semyroh-Orlyk began attending weekly training sessions taught by retired military men, organised in co-ordination with the Territorial Defence Forces, a part of Ukraine’s military. He’s now a platoon sergeant of the 130th Territorial Defence Battalion, as well as the head of a non-governmental organisation, Territorial Defence of the Capital.

The NGO’s training sessions bring together reservists with combat experience and civilian volunteers – several dozen Kiev residents, men and a few women, mostly in their 30s. Some train with the goal of joining the active-duty ranks, while others belong to a pool from which the army can draw if hostilities flare up.

Some were experienced hunters, while others had never used a firearm before they showed up here. Together they learn and drill to handle a weapon, defend buildings and infrastructure, patrol, ambush adversaries, staunch a battlefield wound, lead and communicate, and other valuable wartime skills.

Training entails a major commitment of time, but Mr Semyroh-Orlyk says he believes Russia will invade eventually, and “we have to do what we can to help Ukraine”.

Other Ukrainians told The Wall Street Journal they are prepared to support Ukraine’s defence by donating blood, money and time.

A December survey by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology found “every third respondent” of some 2000 it polled “is ready to put up armed resistance” against the Russians. The Warsaw Institute estimated in 2018 that Ukrainians have “almost 4½ million weapons at their homes”, most of them unregistered. That’s in line with estimates from Ukrainian defence experts.

There are risks to a bunch of gun-toting Ukrainian civilians willing to lace up their boots and fight – especially when a bellicose Russia is run by a KGB alum such as Vladimir Putin. Discipline matters as Ukraine faces an adversary looking for a plausible excuse to launch an attack.

Ukrainians also worry that Mr Putin will try to destabilise their country. Chaos, panic and violence could provide an opening for him to promote one of his puppets here as a peacemaker, who would then invite Russian intervention to restore stability. So it’s important to guard against Russian infiltration of these civilian defence and resistance groups.

A new law took effect on January 1 that seeks to impose structure, military control and a chain of command on would-be civilian fighters. The NGOs that train them must register with the government, participants undergo background checks and the training itself is prescribed by the military, says Victor Muzhenko, a former top commander of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Civilians wouldn’t decide when they fight. Instead, Ukraine’s President would declare war with the approval of parliament, and the military would decide how to mobilise civilians and give the orders. “The trigger would not be their trigger,” General Muzhenko says. “It would be the military trigger to say, ‘Now pick up your arms and go to this place’. ”

That all looks neat on paper. “How it will work now that we have this law – I don’t know, nobody knows,” says Valeriy Kravchenko, a senior research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a governmental think tank. “We have manpower capacity. We are not sure about the capability of that capacity.”

Sannikov Oleksii, of the Ukrainian Legion, another NGO involved in training civilians, expressed uncertainty how groups such as his would be funded, among other areas of legal ambiguity. But “at a minimum, Putin has to know that nobody will welcome him here”, he says. At maximum? “Ukrainians will cut the throats of the Russians.”

The Wall Street Journal