A motley crew of U.S. military veterans are training Ukrainians to fight Putin’s forces. Will they help the cause, or make things worse?
Two days after calling to tell me of his plan, Hannibal had assembled a small team of battle-tested former elite combat officers. Two days after that, I was standing with him and his crew in an old Soviet factory building on the outskirts of Lviv, in western Ukraine. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in its large empty rooms, thick dust clinging to their clothing as they planned a crash course in guerrilla warfare.
I had my doubts. The most obvious recent example of a large influx of foreign fighters, weapons, trainers, and proxies into a conflict had been during the Syrian Civil War. That hadn’t stabilized anything. But it had made the conflict more brutal: Religious extremists ran wild; spy services funded training and provided arms; the armed groups backed by foreign cash fought one another; and all the while, civilians were slaughtered in greater numbers.
B.A., a former cavalry officer, also served in Iraq and conducted intelligence operations targeting insurgents. He’s now a novelist with several books under his belt. Despite the pseudonym, he’s a photographic negative of Mr. T.: laid-back, thoughtful, and anything but intimidating. “And when they get here, my father-in-law is going to kill me for bringing his daughter into a war zone,” Hannibal added.and there was nothing normal about the city now. Checkpoints guarded its entrances. Soldiers, police, and random security teams patrolled with guns and yellow armbands. Public spaces have been commandeered as collection points for humanitarian supplies. Few restaurants or shops were open.
The semicovert operation required a certain level of comfort with ambiguity, and the embodiment of that was the other English speaker: Mykyta. He had an impressive beard and dressed in “operator chic” — baseball cap, cargo pants, boots, parka, and lots of pouches — and no one could pin down any precise details about his role or background. But he could get things done.“Can we make sure the volunteers bring weapons to train with?” Hannibal asked.Weapons, vehicles, food. Whatever.
Looking at the 40 or so Ukrainians who showed up for the training, however, that victory seemed less than assured. The youngest was a boy “who looked like he was 14 years old,” one of the Taras said , the oldest looked to be in his sixties. They were shopkeepers and office workers, waiters and warehouse managers. Many were college students.
After a full day of training in small-unit tactics and weapons handling, the team was back at its apartment eating tacos thrown together by Murdock. Tawnia said that word had started to spread, and the deputy governor of another province was asking whether the team could come and train his people, since a nuclear-power plant was located there.“You know you’re never leaving, right?” Faceman told Hannibal.Faceman watched closely as his two teams of four“Don’t bunch up,” he told them.
And it is hard to remain a neutral participant in a war. American history — from Vietnam to Syria to Niger — is stuffed with incidents of “trainers” who wound up in the middle of the fight. That rattled the team and the Ukrainians. There was reasonable cause for concern. Irregular, hastily formed military groups like this one have traditionally been the softest of targets for spies. A few days prior to the start of the training, according to Stacy, two Russian infiltrators had joined a group of volunteers for the Territorial Defense Force in Kyiv.
“I literally didn’t know that we were independently standing up a militia,” Faceman said. “I thought it was going to be coordinated. But fuck … we are doing this on our own. We are basically creating an army.” “We aren’t doing anything that NATO isn’t on a larger scale,” he said. “These volunteers are going to fight. They will do it without training, or they can do it with some training. But they’re going to do it.”