Inside the British Army base training Ukrainian civilians to be battle-ready in just five weeks

A squad of six Ukrainian soldiers slowly but confidently approaches a seemingly abandoned house. Inside there may well be Russians, men who have invaded their country with the utmost savagery for the past two years. The Ukrainians are not minded to show them any mercy, and they know that they will need to go in hard and fast.

With a silent signal from their leader, they enter the building. Far from bursting in, screaming and yelling like something from a hackneyed war film, the soldiers infiltrate silently and gracefully.

Like ballet dancers, they glide into well-rehearsed positions that will give them the greatest chance of neutralising their enemy but also prevent themselves from being killed.

Within less than a minute, the Ukrainians have swept through the house. This time, it is empty, but there are many more buildings and there are many more villages, towns and whole cities that will need to be checked house-by-house. 

This particular house, however, is in fact nowhere near Ukraine. This scene is playing out many thousands of miles away in the muddy flats in southern England. It is not even a real house, but a dummy erected in a British army training area in order to teach troops urban warfare.

But while the house is not a real one, the squad of Ukrainians is very much so. It consists of six young men who are on the British armed forces’ training programme and have five weeks to become “battle-ready”. Known as Operation Interflex, the programme has been running since shortly after the Russian invasion, and it has trained 34,238 Ukrainians up until Valentine’s Day this year. 

This is an intensive course that takes civilians straight from their jobs and homes and turns them into soldiers in just five weeks. In a matter of hours, a 24-year-old postman or accountant will be whisked from Ukraine to an airfield in Britain, where he or she (1 per cent of recruits are women) will be issued with 65 items of kit, shown their bunk bed and start 35 days of solid intensive training. 

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The regime is tough, and necessarily so, because within a few days of completion, many will find themselves on the front line against the Russians. While the exact number of losses after two years of war remains unconfirmed, the latest reports suggest that more than half a million troops have been killed or wounded in the past two years. While a larger number of Putin’s soldiers have been killed or injured, in terms of proportion of population size, the Ukrainians are taking heavier losses.

Recruits have to absorb an enormous amount. As well as learning how to handle weapons, they have to acquire all sorts of skills, ranging from urban warfare, battlefield first aid, dealing with mines, and how to fight in trenches.

For the standard training of an infantryman in the British army, all this takes some 12 to 18 weeks, whereas with Interflex, men and women are turned into soldiers in far less than half that time.

While some naysayers may have doubted that it was possible to deliver, you only have to take the words of a senior Ukrainian officer to expunge such misgivings. “Our best recruits come from Interflex,” he says.

The officer commanding the Interflex Training Delivery Unit, Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, says that he can see the obvious difference in the demeanour of the recruits at the end of the course. “They come out walking taller and prouder,” he says. “We do the basics really well, and we’ve been doing this for a really long time. And the feedback we get back from the Ukrainians is very positive.”

It is often observed that soldiers who have been through Interflex can outshine those who have been trained “properly” and it should be stressed that the programme is developed and run hand-in-hand with some 12 other nations, including Australia and Romania, and most recently, Kosovo.

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What is happening in several locations throughout the UK is in some ways a huge military experiment and could well be the blueprint for a type of voluntary National Service that is finding increasing traction amongst the very highest levels in the army.

Indeed, the model for a British “citizens’ army” that is being talked about most is a five-week course, almost identical to Interflex, but along with some form of tax-free lump sum and various other employment perks.

Last month, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing chief of the general staff, highlighted the threat from Russia and pointed to steps being taken by other European nations to put their populations on a “war footing”. While he said he was not making an argument for conscription – where people of fighting age are required to enlist in the military – he did make a case for laying the foundations for a voluntary call-up if war broke out.

“We will not be immune and as the pre-war generation we must similarly prepare – and that is a whole-of-nation undertaking,” he said. “Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.”

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The thinking is that it is better to have, say, several thousand civilians who have done five weeks of training than to have none at all. And, as has been observed with the young Ukrainian recruits, 35 days of intensive military training certainly can promote confidence, and even foster some social cohesion.

The senior NCOs who are training the Ukrainians observe that the Ukrainians are far more attentive than their British army equivalents, doubtless because they know that what they are learning they are really going to need, and imminently.

But even then, I am told that on some of the more advanced courses on Interflex, the NCOs can tell the difference between those who have already been in combat and those who haven’t, because the former tend to sit up and listen to everything, less distracted by their phones.

Joining them on their course earlier this week, it was clear that many had already experienced frontline activity. There was little bolshiness or reluctance on show when they were made to practise the house-clearing exercise ad nauseam.

The troops are accompanied by interpreters, whose ability to translate pure Glaswegian uttered by the Royal Scots is a thing of linguistic genius. What, for example, can the Ukrainian idiomatic equivalent be for, “When you get that squeeze, you f****** attack that crack”?

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Discussing their experiences doesn’t come easily to the Ukrainian recruits who have been living with the reality of intense fighting for two years, not least because they are young men of few words, and do not come from backgrounds that lend themselves to chatting easily to the media.

Take Vlad, 23, from somewhere in central Ukraine. Until a few weeks ago he was an IT technician, but as an almost graduate of Interflex he will be on the front line in perhaps a fortnight or so. Tall, slim, and handsome, he tells me that he volunteered for the simple reason that he wanted to fight for his homeland, and he knows what this means in the most stark sense. He has lost friends in this war. 

Then there is Vitalii, 25, a digger driver, a bit more burly than Vlad, now four weeks into Interflex. Like Vlad, he had volunteered for all the right reasons, but he had not lost anyone close to him. He too had learned a lot, and had found the course tough.

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What was striking about both was that they already possessed that thousand-yard stare that is so often observed in soldiers who have seen intense combat. Perhaps that is too much to read into their eyes. Perhaps they were just shy or a bit knackered.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t that. After all, these are young people who have been shaped by living in a state of war with a vile regime for two long, bloody years. And unlike their trainers and their interpreters, there’s an appalling, brutal chance that these are young men who may never see another summer. The fact they could lose their lives remains unspoken, but known.

The military’s request that another 450,000 to 500,000 soldiers be called up brought to a head tension between president Volodymyr Zelensky and his popular commander in chief General Valerii Zaluzhny. The front line has hardly shifted and Ukraine is dealing with manpower and ammunition shortages as it faces a renewed Russian onslaught. 

Whether they can afford extra soldiers remains to be seen, but they know the recruits I meet today know the training they’re getting here is the best there is and will improve their chances of making it through.

One can only hope that in another couple of years, there will be no need for Operation Interflex. But for now, it seems likely that it is not just the Ukrainians who need their new citizen army, but other nations as well – and that includes us too.