Originally published at Judgenap.com and reprinted with permission
Losing a limb on the battlefield has become so common for Ukrainian soldiers that military instructors in the UK have hired amputee actors to prepare the young men for what they will see in war.
Col. Boardman, commander of the UK’s training program for Ukrainian soldiers, told Business Insider:
“Quite a lot of them are amputees. That adds a real sense of realism to the exercises: When you come across the casualty and it’s someone with a leg missing at the knee and lots of theater makeup all over them.
And the idea is to bring a bit of shock and a little bit of reality to really get the recruit into the moment to make them really think it’s a genuine casualty they’re having to deal with.
Actually, putting a tourniquet on a stump is different to putting a tourniquet on a healthy leg.”
NATO members have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers to feed into the meat grinder with Russia. Many Western politicians tout the proxy war in Ukraine as successfully weakening Russia without their own soldiers dying.
Some, such as Senator Lindsey Graham, have criticized Kiev for maintaining its minimum age of conscription above 18. Many of the young men dying on the front lines were not willing recruits, but draftees forced to fight.
Col. Boardman said the UK trains the Ukrainians to be prepared for battle immediately following basic training. “We probably teach them more than we would teach our British Army recruits because our British Army recruits don’t go straight to war off the back of their basic training,” he told BI. “We’re trying to make the soldiers not only able to survive in the environment but also be as lethal, as effective, as they can be.”
