Teaching kids to kill: 8-year-olds trained to shoot Russians at Ukraine nationalist summer camp

Organisers want to indoctrinate youth with nationalism to battle Putin’s Russia and ‘challenges that could destroy’ European civilisation, like gay rights

‘We never aim guns at people, but we don’t count separatists, little green men, occupiers from Moscow, as people. So we can and should aim at them’

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A July 2018 photo of children armed with AK-47s at the ‘Temper of Will’ summer camp near Ternopil, Ukraine, which is organised by the nationalist Svoboda party. Photo: AP

Published: 5:40pm, 12 Nov 2018Updated: 7:35pm, 12 Nov 2018

The campers, some clad in combat fatigues, carefully aim their assault rifles. Their instructor offers advice: do not think of your target as a human being.

So when these boys and girls shoot, they will shoot to kill.

Camp participants practice tactical formations with AK-47 riffles. Photo: AP

Most are in their teens, but some are as young as eight. They are at a summer camp created by one of Ukraine’s radical nationalist groups, hidden in a forest in the west of the country. The camp has two purposes: to train children to defend their country from Russians and their sympathisers – and to spread nationalist ideology.

“We never aim guns at people,” instructor Yuri “Chornota” Cherkashin tells them. “But we don’t count separatists, little green men, occupiers from Moscow, as people. So we can and should aim at them.”

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