Politico Magazine:
It is here in the forest that you leave behind, once and for all, Ukraine’s cosmopolitan present and take a step back into its violent past—as well as glimpse what could become its bloody future. It is here, locals say, where Ukraine’s fate could be decided once again.
The training camp for Ukraine’s new generation of partisans—mostly young people who are signing up to fight the Russians in anticipation of an invasion—sits in a grassy clearing in the forest. A few dilapidated buildings given to the group by a Ukrainian non-governmental organization of mysterious origins, sitting on private land loaned to them by a local businessman, make up the “headquarters.”
An old army mobile kitchen (designed to be pulled by a jeep) is parked up outside the canteen: a long, rectangular room where the partisan trainees break for lunch to eat thick, potato-heavy vegetable soup. A hose resting on a chopped tree trunk provides the drinking water. The people here are preparing to live rough—and, they say, to die fast, if necessary.
“Many of us are here learning the basics so we don’t get killed in the first minute of the war,” says Tanya, a 38-year old graphic designer and the camp’s coordinator. “Maybe with what we’ve learned we might last one or two days.”
An advisor close to Kyiv’s security establishment told me that dozens of these camps are springing up around the country—with more opening every week—but they are all organized by private citizens working in informal groups without funding or oversight from the state, making reliable information as to their extent almost impossible to find.
What is clear is that the idea of partisan war has taken hold among the people. In the bars of Kyiv, men talk to me about going to east to fight a guerrilla war, while a senior advisor close to Kyiv’s security establishment assures me that Moscow will face widespread partisan resistance if it continues its aggression.
Forgetting for a moment about the loser Obama and how his weakness has catapulted the world in chaos, the upshot of this is watching the Ukrainian unorganized militia become organized and learn to fight and survive – or perish for their cause.
One very important point should be made here. If they are training this hard for the purpose of lasting a few days to kill the enemy, the Russians are in for a hard time. While it’s certainly more effective to live for your cause than to die for it, a man who is willing to lose everything is a very dangerous man.
