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'I said, 'Well, yeah, but you're talking to the alive ones,' ' Kilhoffer recalls. He says the officer insisted the conscripts learned a lot during their three days of training and would learn more on the job. 'I'm like, 'Look, if we had more time, these guys would last longer,' Kilhoffer recalls. Kilhoffer, who has since returned to the United States, raised his concerns with a Ukrainian officer. Far more often, he says, he got three to five days. On a couple of occasions, he says, he was able to get three to four weeks to train a group of soldiers. Army Reserve, volunteered with the team last year. Kelly Kilhoffer, a retired colonel in the U.S.

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The trainers refer to themselves, tongue-in-cheek, as the 'A Team,' a reference to the popular 1980s action-adventure TV show about a motley crew of former special forces soldiers trying to clear their names of a crime they didn't commit. Team members also rely on personal savings and donations from friends and family back home. In addition to providing training, Ek has a website called Stop the War, which raises money to support the trainers and purchase gear for Ukrainian soldiers. He works with a small team of foreign trainers, who are funded by donations to a website, their savings and help from friends and family back home.Įk is part of a small team that operates out of a two-bedroom apartment in the city of Kramatorsk, the Ukrainian army's military hub in the eastern Donbas region. The Mozart Group, one of the best-known American organizations operating in Ukraine, trained Ukrainian military and evacuated civilians, but collapsed amid acrimony, defections and a lawsuit in January.įrank Langfitt/NPR Magnus Ek has spent months as a volunteer training Ukrainian conscripts in basic weapons handling. The war in Ukraine has been a magnet for foreign retired military. Three to five days is often all the conscripts receive, foreign trainers say 'I'm a bit concerned, I just hope that everything we give them they will use in battle and it will help them to do their tasks to the maximum potential.' Andrusenko says he'd like to provide at least 35 days of training and appears uncomfortable with the short time frame.

Vyacheslav Andrusenko, deputy head of combat training for Ukraine's Border Force, says these conscripts will get about 17 days of instruction. The pressure to train civilians quickly and then send them to the front is tremendous as Ukraine faces an enemy with four times the population. Ukraine is conscripting thousands of new soldiers to help replenish huge losses on the battlefield here in the country's east as the war grinds into a second, bloody year. 'Maybe some other time,' Ek says wistfully.

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He won't even have the opportunity to show them something basic: how to adjust the sights of their rifles so they can aim accurately. Most have no experience with weapons and Ek has only a few hours to expose them to as much as he can. He is teaching a group of 15 conscripts who were assigned to Ukraine's Border Force a week earlier. 'So funny, so funny,' says one of his students, a Ukrainian conscript.Įk, who has served as a volunteer military trainer for months in Ukraine, uses physical comedy to hold the attention of his students. 'You will find yourself in many strange shooting positions,' Ek says, as he tromps around the snow-covered firing range where the temperatures hover around 16 degrees. Ek, who spent a decade as an instructor in Sweden, is among a group of foreign military volunteers who have gone to train Ukrainians how defend their country from Russia's invasion. KRAMATORSK, Ukraine - Magnus Ek, 53, a retired Swedish lieutenant, is teaching a group of Ukrainian conscripts how to fire an AK-47 in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region.