Inside a Ukrainian nationalist camp where kids are trained to kill Russian invaders
Most of the children at the camp were in their teens, but some were as young as 8 years old.
Mykhailo, 18, the oldest of the campers, said the training was necessary.
“Every moment things can go wrong in our country. And one has to be ready for it,” he said. “That’s why I came to this camp. To study how to protect myself and my loved ones.”
“We never aim guns at people,” instructor Yuri “Chornota” Cherkashin told the kids. “But we don’t count separatists, little green men, occupiers from Moscow as human beings, so we can and should aim at them.”
Cherkashin is a veteran of the fight against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine; he was wounded in combat and later came to lead Sokil, or Falcon, the youth wing of the Svoboda party.
Cherkashin said it's important to inculcate the nation’s youth with nationalist thought so they can battle President Vladimir Putin’s Russia as well as “challenges that could completely destroy” European civilization.
Among those challenges: LGBT rights, which lecturers denounce as a sign of Western decadence.
“You need to be aware of all that,” instructor Ruslan Andreiko said. “All those gender things, all those perversions of modern Bolsheviks who have come to power in Europe and now try to make all those LGBT things like gay pride parades part of the education system.”
While some youths dozed off during lectures, others paid attention.
During a break in training, a teenager played a nationalist march on his guitar. It was decorated with a sticker showing white bombs hitting a mosque, under the motto, “White Europe is Our Goal.”
Aside from the lectures — and songs around the campfire — life for the several dozen youths at the Svoboda camp was hard.
At night, the children were awakened with a blast from a stun grenade.
Stumbling out of their tents, soldiers in training struggled to hold AK-47s that were, in some cases, almost as tall as they were.
They were required to carry the heavy rifles all day, and one of the girls broke down in tears from exhaustion.
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