Report on the training of Ukrainian snipers

Vörös Szabolcs | 08.08.2023 | report

The war in Ukraine is spurring action among civilians who remained in the country. There are those who are not satisfied with simply volunteering or weaving camouflage nets. They would rather go and study to be a sniper, even if they don’t end up in the army. The Válasz Online reporter was able to see a German veteran of Ukrainian origin training near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, at a shooting range provided by the Ukrainian army, under the supervision of the SBU. What distinguishes a good sniper? How does a woman dare to do this? Before getting answers, our colleague also visited Mykolaiv, which for a long time was a front-line city, the cradle of Ukrainian military shipbuilding…

Report on sniper training

… We didn’t come to Mykolaiv to see the city. During our stay in Odessa, we managed to agree with some cadets to take me to sniper courses for civilians. It was important to get the approval of the SBU, which oversees education. I feel the excitement in my fellow travelers’ SUV, packed with equipment for sniper training. As everywhere in Ukraine, our Hungarian origin arouses increased interest. After Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, and Donbas, we now feel it in the Odessa and Mykolaiv regions. Our explanation – “Many in Hungary do not like the pro-Moscow military policy of the Prime Minister” – is without a doubt. This makes the atmosphere even more friendly. Shooting range near Nikolaev. Participants in the training of the sniper academy “Edelweiss” are already gathering at one line. There are several dozen of them; young and old, women and men, different.

“I’m Alla, 33 years old. I come from Nikolaev, working in the IT field. Why am I here? There’s a war going on. I have relatives and friends at the front. It’s a difficult feeling. I don’t know what awaits us in the future, but I want to be able to protect them. Why a sniper? It seemed interesting, working remotely gives some security. Will I be able to make a fatal shot? I think so! I protect my family and my country. Right now I’m not a perfect shooter, but with practice I’m getting better. I can already confidently hit at 300 meters and I’m already planning to buy a personal weapon. Last February, my sister called me, she lives not far from the airport. They were the first to shell it. “Alla, the war has started!” she said. But I didn’t believe her, because I hadn’t heard it with my own ears. We left the city, to the Ivano-Frankivsk region. But I couldn’t be far from my mother, so we returned two months later. I’ve been here ever since. Since June last year, the city has been bombed almost every night, sometimes five, sometimes twenty explosions. You never know what can happen and where the next “arrival” will be. At first, of course, it was scary, but then you get used to it. I don’t go to the bomb shelter – there isn’t one in our house – so I just lie in bed. If I die, I die. Honestly? I don’t know if I can go to the front. I don’t want to be a burden to people in battle. A woman can’t carry the wounded, on an equal footing with men, and if there’s only one woman in a unit, all the men pay attention to her, protect her, and want to protect her. This is our basic mentality, but it can also be a source of problems in combat conditions. My sister thinks I’m a bit strange because I’m a sniper. Her husband is at the front, and she’s worried that I might end up there too. I also worry about my family, but not about myself.

Sniper Training Report

The head of the academy is 37-year-old Vasyl. Although he is not the oldest in the rifle team, it is immediately clear who everyone here is paying attention to. There is a reason. The man, who was born in Kazakhstan, but whose family originally comes from Mykolaiv, is a retired Bundeswehr sniper with combat experience in Afghanistan. At the beginning of the war, he transported humanitarian cargo to Ukraine, and on the way back – refugees to Europe. He opened the academy six months ago. “What distinguishes a good sniper?” – Motivation. Of course, it still needs to be supplemented with some physical data, because equipment and gear weigh a lot and you also have to prepare for the harsh conditions of combat in our realities of war. But without a high level of motivation, this is impossible. “Why are snipers so needed?” “A sniper’s job is not only to shoot, but also, for the most part, it is reconnaissance.” Due to their technical limitations, drones are not always effective, especially for long observation. And a sniper can be kept in position for several days. Vasyl’s school lasts four weeks – one week of theory, three weeks of practice. The course is not expensive, the full cost is about 270 euros, the main thing is the purchase of equipment. Those who already come to the academy with their weapons had to invest about 5-6 thousand euros in it, but full equipment for a sniper can cost much more. A full set of sniper pairs – with optical observation devices, thermal imaging sights, night vision devices, etc. – can cost 30-50 thousand euros. One .338 caliber cartridge, designed for a distance of 1500-2000 meters, costs about 10 dollars, and a .308 cartridge for entry-level training costs 2 dollars. During one training session, one student spends several dozen of them.

A German veteran says that it is important to sometimes “demotivate” cadets: “This is part of psychological training. This is war, not a Hollywood movie. You need to realize that you can die here. If 30 people start the course, about 10 will stay. The goal is for those who lack motivation to realize in time how difficult and dangerous sniping is. You need willpower, then you will succeed and then you will be able to survive in combat conditions. “At the beginning of the approximately three-hour session, balloons are hung and targets are placed at different points of the shooting range, and then they are fired at from several positions. But it is not easy: you need to take into account the strength of the wind, breathing is important, and coordination of actions with a partner, working in pairs. After each unsuccessful shot, Vasyl corrects the cadets and gives advice, but there is also a separate drone operator who launches the device over the targets, and they can observe live how accurate each shot was. By the way, the academy also trains military snipers, because there is not always enough sniper instructors and training centers.

Currently, Edelweiss has trained at least seventy people for the army. However, Vasyl says, training is also important for civilians who do not plan to join the army right now, since they cannot be sure that the war will not affect them and they will not be mobilized. After all, in his opinion, the war will last at least 1-2 more years and there is no guarantee that even if it subsides, the Russian Federation will leave Ukraine alone after that. So the training will not be in vain. Why is the Bundeswehr veteran not on the front lines as an experienced sniper? “The war is for a long time, I try not to even think about when and how it will end, I do not know. Therefore, now I am trying to do what I am good at, not paying attention to the many problems, including in the army, for example, such as cases of corruption, you should not think too much about it so as not to lose motivation. It is important to do everything in our power at our level now. This is a real big war. If in Afghanistan we always had an advantage, then here we don’t have it and there was no such artillery there, the scale here is absolutely not comparable. So what about joining the army yourself? I constantly think about it, but here and now what we do on a scale is much more important: the work of one will definitely not be as effective as the work of all the snipers taken together that we can train.