David Patrikarakos is author of Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State, a Poynter fellow in journalism at Yale University and associate fellow, School of Iranian Studies, at the University of St. Andrews. You can follow him on Twitter at @dpatrikarakos.

You have to drive about 30 miles outside Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv before the smooth, straight motorway dotted with billboards featuring Ralph Lauren and Versace finally comes to an end. The country soon becomes rougher, more atavistic. Soviet-style architecture dominates the landscape: squat, concrete houses worn with age and covered with mold sit alongside long-abandoned steel factories and municipal buildings. From there you make your way along a series of smaller, cratered roads and then, finally, a succession of dirt tracks that lead deep into a forest.

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.” In the camp’s center—an open patch of field—flies the Ukrainian flag, as ubiquitous in Western Ukraine and the areas around Kyiv as the Russian and Soviet Union flags are among the pro-Russia separatists across the East. It is yet one more reminder that, superficially at least, this is a battle of competing nationalisms, a war of iconography.

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.”

The changing landscape, the passage from images of Versace to potato soup, seems almost to evoke the changing mindset of the people in this part of the country: from a 21 st century Westernized lifestyle to preparations for partisan warfare, all in the space of six months.

It is difficult to assess the scale of Ukraine’s neo-partisan movement. For a start, it is too new; it really began only after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March when the fear of invasion emerged for the first time. Then there is the more general problem of the availability of information in Ukraine—rumor and hearsay now dominate here. The central government is barely able to preserve what remains of its sovereignty in the face of Russian aggression and central authority is limited.

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.

Uniforms in the camp have British and German flags on them—army surplus. | Photograph courtesy of the author

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. This is perhaps unsurprising. Ukraine has a long, albeit controversial, tradition of partisan warfare that dates back to 1942 with the establishment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army—a nationalist, paramilitary group that fought for an independent Ukraine against the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during World War II. Led by the controversial Stepan Bandera, the partisans fought in Western Ukraine against the Soviets and Poles (whom they ethnically cleansed at Volhynia and East Galicia) long after the war’s end. It took until 1949 for Moscow to finally defeat them, by which time the Ukrainian partisans had inflicted a higher mortality rate against their troops than the USSR would suffer in its invasion of Afghanistan almost 40 years later.

The “students” here are certainly reflective of the population: ordinary citizens, young and middle-aged, split almost equally between men and women, dressed in a mix of camouflage and jeans. A group of about fifteen people arrives for lunch from the forest where they have just completed a war game. Several young, twenty-something girls, march in step, swinging their hips as the AMK-47 machine guns slung across their backs bounce in time. In this sense alone they remind me of the many Israeli soldiers I have seen.

“We want to build something like the Swiss or Israeli army—a people’s army. That’s the long term goal,” says Tanya. “And we have to be creative—we cannot fight the Russians head-on. This type of warfare may be the only chance we have.”

Target practice at the training camp. "Maybe we will last one or two days," someone told me. | Photograph courtesy of the author

Usually the partisans train in groups of 40, but today there are only 20 here. They have two working machine guns—an AK-47 and its newer model, the AKM-74—between them; members buy their bullets on a weekly basis, with each person being allocated 20 with which to train. There are also several replica and decommissionedguns that are used to practice assembling and disassembling. Some of the instructors have British flags on their uniforms while others have German insignias—everything here is army surplus, sourced from wherever they can find it.

Drills take place in a scrub of woodland on the edge of the forest dominated by a makeshift assault course. Some tires are scattered along the ground but most of the obstacles have been built from the land. Tree trunks laid over the ground have to be negotiated like tightropes while several ditches have been dug into the earth to practice forest warfare.

Tanya tells me that funding is provided by the members themselves and some local ‘patriotic’ businessmen. At present there is no organized system of donations, though this is, I am assured, the goal.

The instructors are mainly ex-Ukraine army soldiers and they are teaching the basics: shooting, hand-to-hand combat, first aid, and, critically, the elements of guerrilla or partisan warfare. “I am teaching them to fight as civilian units under occupation,” says Mikola, a 47-year old retired lieutenant colonel with 26 years experience. “This means fighting with all the means at their disposal. Partisan and urban war are different. Odds matter less. You can make effective home-made bombs; a pretty girl can entice an enemy soldier back to her home and kill him there.”

First they practice how to fall. The goal is to keep your gun facing forward at your presumed enemy at all times. The technique is simple: first you fall onto the knees, then elbows, then stomach; gun facing forward at all times. Then comes hand-to-hand combat training. Today the instructor is teaching them to use their machine gun as a close quarters weapon and the students practice several moves: driving the butt upwards into the chin, jabbing it squarely into the face like a bayonet and sweeping the butt in an arc across the face.

Everything is geared to urban and forest warfare—the expected fields of engagement. At shooting practice the guns are put on single shot settings for accuracy and students lie flat on the ground or kneel, firing as if from a concealed position.

I watch “Dmitri,” a young man in his twenties, practice throwing a “grenade” as he crouches in the ditch, before popping up to throw it quickly and then rapidly taking cover in a crouch once more. The grenade is a canned drink called “Mojito Royce Ice,” which is the exact size and weight of a can of Red Bull. I ask if they have any real hand grenades. They don’t.

All the people I speak to tell me the same thing: that they don’t want to fight but that they have no choice. “After Maidan I thought we would be able to build a better country and a better future for ourselves,” says Tanya. “But Putin has given us no time. I don’t want to shoot people, but it’s a different world now.”

She continues: “In Europe the people are able to separate themselves from the state. We don’t have that luxury. There are no effective structures to protect the country here—either government or military. There is only us.”

She may well be right. Last month Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchynov ordered an “anti-terror” operation that—despite an intensification today—has yielded little except confusion, recrimination and a general lowering of Ukrainian morale. Ukraine army divisions have surrounded the occupied cities for weeks but have so far done little to remove the separatists. More setbacks came in recent days as Russian insurgents shot down a Ukrainian military helicopter in the separatist stronghold of Slovyansk. Some soldiers have defected (though only a small minority) while others say they are reluctant to attack pro-Russian citizens that gather outside the occupied buildings. Some units have even been forced to surrender by unarmed gangs of civilians.

Trainees practice assembling AK-47s. | Photograph courtesy of the author

Ukraine inherited its army in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR. With around 780,000 personnel, and almost 7000 each of tanks and combat armored vehicles (not to mention 2,500 tactical nuclear missiles) it was, on paper, a powerful force grouping that had been trained with one objective in mind: to wage combined war against NATO forces on an external front.

But as the senior advisor close to Kyiv’s security establishment explained to me, the truth was somewhat different. “The army had been in decline for 20 years,” he told me. “And things only got worse. The [former President Viktor] Yanukovych years were a disaster—corruption was rife. We couldn’t afford to fix our vehicles and we had a huge problem with many soldiers who were just walking into army storage units, stealing military equipment and selling it on the black market.”

Ukrainian soldiers are terribly underpaid. An army private earns just 100 euros a month, an officer just 200 euros. It is little surprise, the senior advisor told me, that many feel tempted to “supplement” their incomes with illicit dealings.

Hand grenade training, with a canned drink. | Photograph courtesy of the author

Ukraine has 130,000 personnel in its armed forces that could be boosted to about one million with reservists, but few troops are battle-ready while much of their equipment is outdated and unable to function effectively in a modern war situation. Ukraine’s parliament recently allocated six billion hryvnias (about $523 million) for the repair and restoration of military equipment, but given time constraints, improvement is likely to be limited.

As a result, the single biggest threat to a further Russian invasion remains the possibility of a militarized population in urban areas and perhaps the forests—and Moscow knows it. The epicenter of the struggle for Ukraine’s east these past few weeks has been the small, seemingly unimportant town of Sloviansk. I was there the night its central police station was stormed by pro-Russia separatists, and it was a clear turning point in the crisis. The baseball bat-wielding militia I had seen in the eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk had been replaced with professional soldiers clearly dictating events on the ground.

Kyiv has a large strategic reserve of Kalashnikov assault rifles and other light weapons—around 5 million pieces—as a mobilization reserve dating back to Soviet times. It has made clear to the Kremlin that it is now considering the possibility of opening up this stockpile to its citizens in East Ukraine. At least half this reserve is concentrated near Sloviansk and it is the reason that Russian special forces were sent there to secure the area.

As I finished my interview with the security advisor I asked him straight out if he genuinely believed Ukraine could resist the Russians. By way of reply he quoted a local aphorism: “They call us a country of sleeping angels,” he said. “It is hard to wake us up. But once we rise we do what needs to be done.”