The recruiting drive of soldiers comes as Kyiv faces growing challenges recruiting new troops. Reuters.
Cherkasy Region (Ukraine): One of Ukraine’s newest military units — Border of Steel- is one of eight new storm brigades totalling 40,000 soldiers that Ukraine wants to use during a counter-offensive against Russian troops in coming weeks or months.
The units have benefited from an aggressive recruiting campaign on social media and billboards with the aim of attracting highly motivated volunteers.
The recruiting drive of soldiers comes as Kyiv faces growing challenges recruiting new troops.
The new brigades, drafted by the Interior Ministry, will fight alongside regular army units held up by new Western battle tanks and thousands of fresh troops trained by allied armies outside Ukraine.
The brigades have catchy names: Hurricane, Spartan, Chervona Kalyna, Frontier, Rage, Azov and Kara Dag, a mountain in Crimea.
More than a year into the conflict, the country’s forces have been facing a Russian onslaught for months in towns like Bakhmut in the east, where thousands of soldiers have already been killed. Ukraine does not disclose its military losses.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko has said he believes Ukraine still had considerable mobilisation potential and that his recruits included women, people with no military experience and former police officers and servicemen.
A lot is at stake for the war-ravaged country and a successful counter-offensive may swing the war in Kyiv’s favour.
Ukraine beat back Russian forces from Kyiv last year before liberating swathes of the northeast and of the southern Kherson region. But Russian forces still occupy tracts of the east, the strategically important south and the key Crimean Peninsula.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine wants every inch of its land back from Moscow, which has unilaterally declared five regions of Ukraine to be part of Russia despite not controlling them all.
“For them, the objective is to liberate Ukraine,” Klymenko said of the recruits during an interview in Kyiv. “We are writing the great history of our state for many future decades.”
Ukraine launched its recruitment campaign for the storm brigades at the beginning of February, this year. The Interior Minister said it would take up to four months to train civilians without experience, but that ex-police officers or soldiers could be trained in two.
Border of Steel is commanded by Valeriy Padytel, who led Ukraine’s border guard forces in the defence of now-occupied Mariupol where he was captured after holding out in a huge steel works. He was freed in a prisoner swap last September.
He did not reveal as to when or where Ukraine would launch its counter-offensive. “We will keep training, will train all the time while the brigade is being formed and while we are waiting for battle orders.”
Klymenko said 2.5% of the brigades were made up of female fighters: “Our women are patriotic enough, strong and they hate the enemy no less than men, they want to serve.”
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