kyiv, Ukraine (AP) — They are old, young, local, foreign and often new to a war. Thousands of people have voluntarily joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces to resist the Russian invasion. This week, The Associated Press spent time with some of them.
Sergiy Volosovets, a 30-year-old actor, now leads an 11-man unit and oversees the military training of other volunteers at a base northeast of the capital kyiv, a few miles from the front. After training, they can join the fight or guard the checkpoints.
“They never thought they would have a weapon in their hands,” Volosovets said. But “this desire is what brought them all here.”
At the start of the war, he said, combatants were sent to the front with just two days of accelerated training. Now, the instruction is more exhaustive. “We need conscientious people who know what they’re doing,” he said.
Among the volunteer fighters is a 24-year-old sound engineer, Kostyantyn Kovalenko. “As a sound engineer, I hear the sounds of war, I think, a little differently,” he said. Those noises annoy him as much as anyone, but he studies them and tries to identify weapons. “I’m just sorry I don’t have my tape recorder to record them and use them in a patriotic song,” he added.
Anton Grom and Valya Gromovytsya, both in their 30s, joined the fight after leaving their 11-year-old son with his grandmother. “I want to defend kyiv and expel the Russians,” Gromovytsya said.
Jraven Gerber is one of the aliens in the volunteer forces. At first, this 21-year-old American from Seattle tried to join the Ukrainian International Legion, but was always told “tomorrow, tomorrow”. Impatient, he decided to look elsewhere for action and contacted the Territorial Defense Forces.
“I think it’s better to fight when you’re young,” he said. Some of his teammates are younger than him, 18 or 19 years old, and “if they fight, why not me?”
Spaniard Francisco Floro, 30, works in security in his country and, like Gerber, saw a just cause in defending Ukraine.
“I think the entire West has a responsibility to Ukraine,” Floro said. “We have to participate in this and tell the world what is happening here.”
He entered the Forces after speaking with the Ukrainian embassy in Spain. Despite the drama of the war, Floro said that the life he wants to have is peaceful. “I don’t aspire to much more than that,” he assured.
Like many of the volunteers, Vadym Kovalyov, a 29-year-old local businessman, never expected to go to war. “These people, my brothers, are in the right place,” he noted. “They made the right decision not to go abroad. They stayed with the people and on our land to defend it.”