With his face turned toward a house from which assault rifle fire resounded, a young man in fatigues whistled through his teeth: "Damn, it's a good thing I'm not in here." There was a muffled explosion. "300! 300! [the code for wounded in the Ukrainian army]," several voices shouted.

A small group pulled themselves out of the house, dragging a boy and a girl by their bulletproof vests. Dressed in combat gear, Mykyta Anikanov pounced on them, applying a tourniquet to one leg before asking the wounded girl, breathless: "Do you have a tourniquet?" "I don't," she said. "What do you mean, you don't have one? Fuck! Who's got a tourniquet?"

A faint smile appeared on the flushed face of 20-year-old Roksolana Surmenko, who played the role of the stricken soldier, before giving way to a chuckle. It was a light-hearted interlude – a reminder that this was just a training session.

The two-hour outing through woods and clearings, in conditions close to the "reality" and violence of the war taking place a few hundred kilometers from the training camp, in the Poltava region, 200 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, was the culmination of a three-day training course reserved for civilians.

Here, eight young people aged between 20 and 30, all from the Ukrainian capital, were taking part in the program. On the menu: war medicine, shooting with different weapons, explosives training and use of live ammunition on balloons representing the enemy. On October 15, the final stage, led by inflexible military instructors, consisted of a simulated assault by a small group of soldiers. Just beforehand, BetaTactic camp director Mykhailo Slusarenko had warned his "students": "If you tell me you're tired or fed up, please understand that I don't give a damn."

Ready to fight

The end of training amid shouts of joy, and the photos and videos that inevitably end up on social media, concealed another, far less cheerful reality. That of the young city residents who come to the center to be "ready" to fight: "Motivated and intelligent people, artists, programmers, designers, the flower of the nation," as Petro Khimich, an instructor in charge of mine training, described them.

"Civilians understand that they will be mobilized sooner or later," said Dmytro Satskiy, one of the soldier trainers. "There are things they can only learn on the front line," said Slusarenko, who reported an increasing number of civilians interested in such training. "But we try to teach them the basics as much as possible. And then here, they can make mistakes."

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