“Your mother would do it too.” Valentina Constantinovska, an unspecified age but sufficient to be “a great-grandmother”, thus replied to the journalist Richard Engel. She was lying on the floor, propped up on a mat. A rifle in hand.
Engel is one of the foreign correspondents of the NbcNews television network and is located in Odessa, one of the routes from which the invasion of Ukraine by Russia could start. The Russian ships of the Black Sea Fleet are lined up in front of the port, a few minutes away by boat. Citizens know the risk, also because after the sea in front of Odessa there is Crimea, the territory annexed to Russia in 2014. Since then, the Ukrainian army and paramilitary groups have regularly organized military training days dedicated to civilians, a course that can be taken on a voluntary basis. Not only in Odessa, but also in other territories, such as in the fields near the capital Kiev.
The training
The program summarizes all the bare essentials. The basics of first aid are taught and you learn how to shoot. For veterans, on the other hand, we also move on to more specific courses, from updating war material to urban warfare tactics. Some call it the “Territorial Defense Force”. It is not clear what their exact role will be in the event of a conflict but meanwhile, according to the results of a survey, 24 percent of the Ukrainian population is determined to take up a weapon in the event of an invasion. On Twitter, several images of these trainings begin to shoot. We see men and women learning to aim with a semi-automatic rifle, people bent over in the snow to give a mannequin a heart massage and civilians in walking clothes holding wooden guns to try out the formations to follow in the event of an attack. .
