"I pray they never have to utilize anything we worked on with them, but if the war comes to Lviv, they'll be ready."

Former Army captain Adrian Bonenberger and his wife had begged their in-laws to get out of Kyiv, but they refused to leave Ukraine. Then the Russians launched a full-scale attack on the country.

After several sleepless nights, Bonenberger suggested to his wife that they travel to a relatively safe part of Ukraine and hire someone to drive her parents from Kyiv to a place where they could meet. He said his wife agreed, adding: “We should also plan to do something when we’re there. If we’re going to go there, we’re not going to just sit there waiting for my parents.”

And that is how Bonenberger, who deployed twice to Afghanistan while he was in the Army, and two other American veterans spent two weeks in the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine training about 50 civilians on small-unit leadership and other military skills. The youngest trainees were teenagers and the oldest were in their 40s and 50s. Most of them had never carried a weapon, and none of them had any recent military experience.

One reason why Bonenberger was motivated to provide military training to Ukrainian civilians was that he remembered a video he had watched early in his Army career that showed an Iraqi teenager armed with a rocket-propelled grenade getting shot, falling to his knees, and then collapsing onto his face.

“As soon as I heard about the details of the people that we were going to be training, I remembered that video and I just thought to myself like: People defending a democracy deserve more than that,” he told Task & Purpose. “These are people who would defend the city – they would run out into the street with an RPG and they would get shot down immediately. And if we could train them to be careful, then they wouldn’t do that. They’d be able to survive war and keep to the shadows, keep quiet.”

U.S. government officials have urged Americans not to travel to Ukraine because the country is far too dangerous, but so far, they have not publicly threatened anyone who goes to the warzone anyway. Justice Department spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle refused to answer a question from Task & Purpose about whether Americans who provide medical support in Ukraine or fight against the Russians could be punished when they return home.

Image: Flash 90

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