KYIV — Falling snow clouded Marta Yuzkiv’s line of sight as she moved in formation with seven other fighters down a narrow road. Rifles at the ready and communicating with hand signals and whispers, they scanned their surroundings for the enemy stalking them in the nearby bushes.
Then, without warning, an ambush came from behind the pine trees. A Russian team of saboteurs gunned down four of Yuzkiv’s comrades. She dropped to the ground. But within seconds, she was shot and killed, too.
The fighters weren’t actually dead. The ambush was part of a series of war games held Saturday — on the grounds of an abandoned factory outside Kyiv — by veteran instructors overseeing a ragtag group of Ukrainian volunteers.
Russia is massing some 100,000 troops and military equipment around Ukraine, possibly mobilizing 75,000 reservists to join them, and threatening its neighbor with another large-scale attack unless the Kremlin’s demands for the US and NATO to abandon support for Kyiv are met. And fighters like Yuzkiv fear they could soon find themselves engaged in guerrilla warfare with highly trained soldiers under Moscow’s command.
