Mr. Milburn wants America to go all in. Short of that, he has decided to deploy himself.
“The alternative for me would be to be in the States just reading about this” and “being frustrated and angry,” he said. “I know we’re not changing the course of the war, but for the individual people we’re helping, like those we evacuate, it has a very direct impact.”
Reporting From Afghanistan
And, he was quick to add, “I feel far better than I did in the last deployments in Iraq.”
Though Mr. Milburn is not involved in the actual fighting, he is constantly risking his life. On a recent day in Soledar, he and his colleagues were nearly hit by Russian rockets. Minutes after that, as they were changing a flat tire that had been shredded by shrapnel, a fighter jet swooped down on them, shooting more rockets and sending them scurrying into the bushes.
He and his men admit there’s an adrenaline component to all this.
“You’re always looking for it, right?” said one of Mr. Milburn’s trainers, an American sharpshooter named Rob. “You’re always wanting to be where it is.”
For Mr. Milburn and Mozart — and many in the West, for that matter — Ukraine is it.
‘You just got killed about 100 times’
One afternoon earlier this summer at a riverside park outside of Kyiv, Mozart held a series of combat drills. The Ukrainian recruits, many of whom had never touched a gun before, were assigned with running around the park and surrounding one of Mr. Milburn’s trainers in a mock assault. Just a few yards away, ordinary people rode scooters and pushed baby strollers along the park’s shaded paths. It was the two Ukraines — the normal life people were striving to maintain, and the war that had been foisted on them — unfolding in the same place, at the same time, almost without recognition of the other.
The recruits moved fast and with enthusiasm. But they moved in clumps and didn’t seem to have a plan.
“You just got killed about 100 times, by your own guys,” bellowed one of Mr. Milburn’s trainers, an enormous Estonian.
