"It looks like total idiocy, but it’s only way to teach" – Chekh, instructor from Rubizh brigade

Author: Iryna Storozhenko

"Throw your damned ’I’ in the trash and finally remember the word ’we’! Then you stand a chance of surviving and winning. Not just you, but our entire army."

Chekh, a tactical training officer and instructor with the Rubizh brigade, prepares civilians for combat.

Serving in the brigade’s reconnaissance unit, he saw action at the Svitlodarsk Bulge, Sievierodonetsk, Rubizhne, Lysychansk, Kupiansk and Lyman. On the training ground, he shares experience you will not find in any manual.

These days, those whom commanders want to punish are sent to his training range. He creates the toughest possible conditions to teach a unit to act as a single organism and survive.

I am a tactics instructor. But in practice, we train people in everything they need. My main task is to share information and my combat experience. A book is a good thing, but my job, in addition to the book, is to explain when something should be used, at what moment – sharing my own experience and stories from combat, when it can work and when it cannot. Getting across to a person that nothing is straightforward and that the more you know, the better off you will be in the future.

Mostly, I hear people say they want to send someone else to my course, arguing that for them it will feel like punishment.

So you’re a "bad cop" instructor?

Very. It happens that if someone fails to carry out a certain order, they don’t sleep until four in the morning, five in the morning. They may not sleep at all. If I see that they have ignored one of my orders or slacked off in training, failed to complete a task or done it badly, they know they are in for very serious punishment. And it is quite amusing when you first meet them: you can see them still trying, like a dog, to show off their "I", their character – that you won’t bend them, that it’s hard. And then, after a week, you see how a person changes completely, once they understand that you can’t play games with me.

Do you think discipline through force is more effective than encouragement?

Force is one of the tools. When someone under me messes up, they have to know one thing: wrongdoing must be followed by punishment. You must always face consequences. They take their punishment, I explain to them why they got it and what it was for, in terms they understand. They agree with my reasoning – and after that, well, their guilt is lifted.

When you are an instructor, you have a lot of people – they can come from different units, or straight from civilian life into the army. And our task is to do everything possible to give them the maximum amount of knowledge in the minimum amount of time, and to reinforce it. And here we have to understand the main thing: the harder it is for them here, the easier it will be for them in the combat zone. The less they sleep on the training ground, the easier it will be for them to endure sleepless nights in the combat zone in direct confrontation with the enemy. The colder it is for them outside, when they are shivering, the less harsh the physical strain and weather conditions will seem to them later on the positions. So my main task is not to pamper my subordinates and the people I train, but to do everything so that they are ready for all the hardships that lie ahead. As the saying goes: "Don’t ask God for an easy life, ask Him for harder trials."

I spent a long time trying to find myself. I studied architecture and thought that would be my calling. But the army attracted me much more. I wanted to run around with a rifle, however, that may sound. And at some point, I realised that university was clearly not for me. I froze my studies completely, returned to Ukraine and went straight into the National Guard.

Back in 2018–2019, we did joint training with the guys from the Rubizh brigade, and they really sold me on this unit. I thought it over for a long time and then, one day, simply decided: why not?

I really liked the training they had at the time the guys were recommending them. I saw them in action when we worked together, and I saw their level of professionalism – it was much higher compared to other military units.

I transferred to the Rubizh brigade, and a week later, I found myself in the combat zone at the Svitlodarsk Bulge. It’s one thing to watch films or videos about the war, or to listen to stories from more experienced comrades. It’s quite another when you actually arrive there for the first time.

Your main task at that stage is simply to watch what others are doing. Very few people will walk you through detailed instructions on what to do and when – your main task is to adapt quickly to the combat zone.

They don’t do things for no reason – they do them to stay alive. Copy them and you’ll stay alive too. At first, the sound of gunfire, the first mortar rounds landing nearby, felt very strange and unreal. For me, it was a real shock, but the adrenaline you get in those first moments when you come face to face with real combat and with the enemy is beyond words.

The intensity was incredible, and time flew by – which actually worked in our favour. After just six months with the brigade, I could see how fast I had grown thanks to my commanders and my brothers-in-arms.

We were in Sievierodonetsk when the full-scale invasion began. We had arrived there literally a day before, setting up in a temporary deployment point. At about five or six in the morning, we were all woken up by an alert. In line with the alert plan, we left the temporary location and dispersed into the nearby forest. Only later, from the media and from our commanders, did we understand that the war had started.

We hoped, believed and assumed that if heavy fighting started, it would be in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. That we had been sent there for a reason, and that the fiercest battles would be in eastern Ukraine. So it was a real shock when we were told that the enemy was advancing on Kyiv and landing at the Antonov airfield in Hostomel. We were stunned and had mixed feelings: why were we in the  Luhansk region when we felt we should be defending our home? But orders are orders.

I was serving directly in a reconnaissance unit.

For the first two days, we basically played cat and mouse with the enemy. Our main task was to slow him down and block his advance until a new defensive line and a new front could be formed, where we would be able to fight the way we were used to fighting.

We didn’t have that many forces in Rubizhne, and we had no fully prepared defensive positions – just observation posts whose fields of view barely overlapped. In other words, we really didn’t have enough people to establish a solid defensive perimeter around the city. But we had our orders, and the city had to be held.

We are professional contract soldiers. We knew what we were signing up for, we knew what we were doing when we signed that contract. We understood that war could come. Hiding from what you’ve been preparing for all this time makes no sense. We were trained for exactly this. And you know, it’s like when you’ve been boxing with a punching bag for eight years – sooner or later, you want to step into the ring. Sooner or later, you want to feel your training for real and see how far you’ve come. And that’s how it was: in those first days, you were partly gripped by horror and fear, because you didn’t understand what was happening. But then you come back alive, you come back having completed the mission and taken out the enemy, knowing you were better than them, better prepared, that there was a reason you didn’t sleep on the training grounds, ran through the woods like the damned and yelled. It paid off, and that was the result of our training and our work. So yes, it will always give you a kind of enthusiasm.

We started right from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, in February, and finished somewhere around mid to late June. We pulled out of that entire urban area once the order came.

Strange as it may sound, when a person says they can’t go on, they’re only about 20% spent.

In moments like that, in real combat, when your life depends on it, a kind of second wind opens up. The adrenaline kicks in, you throw in everything you’ve got, and afterwards you’re amazed at what your body can do, at what kind of load your body, your mind and your thoughts can actually take. And through all those days, you live on a single breath.

We fought under Sievierodonetsk. I’d say it was one of the more frightening episodes, mainly because our primary task at that time was to bring the infantry in and, from time to time, mount raids. These were urban battles, and the city itself was tricky. I remember that throughout the fighting for Sievierodonetsk, we went around just in shirts. We understood that our camouflage didn’t work there anymore, and shirts were simply cool. Everyone dug out a shirt – white, black, checkered, with sleeves rolled up because it was already summer – and that’s how we ran around. At one point we even heard the enemy shouting: "Someone please kill these mercenaries already!" At a certain moment we’d become a real thorn in their side.

Our task was to hold out there as long as possible while a new defensive line was being built behind us. Those five days – what we called our "five-day stretch" – were probably the most intense fighting of all. The enemy tried to storm us in every way he could think of. Once, we were sitting in a building when we heard a tank pull up. It started firing, emptying its full combat load – about thirty rounds. It kept firing and firing, and we just sat there with the guys, filming on our phones and laughing about it, realising they weren’t shooting at us but just, well, somewhere out there. Obviously, no one was going to step outside. Then we heard it finish and drive away. We moved into...a room with a window facing the enemy. Our building stood here, and another one stood parallel to it. We looked out and the building parallel to us had been completely obliterated. We just stood there with our jaws on the floor. A young reconnaissance soldier walked in and asked: "What was he doing?" We look at him and, in unison with the commander, say: "Loophole." In other words, he had simply levelled the building in front of him, because there was no other way to reach us without being destroyed himself. So he chose to wipe out the building that stood in his way. We’re still standing there, jaws hanging, and he asked: "What does that mean?" We went: "That we’re next…"

And I remember Yurii Butusov running with us through courtyards that were already being raked with fire from every direction.

There were four of us left, holding, literally, a courtyard of four buildings.

But no matter how frightening it was, I kept looking at Raptor, at Royson the commander, at all my comrades. I understood one thing: I was scared, they were scared too; if they didn’t fall back, I wouldn’t fall back; if they went forward, I went with them – I simply had no choice. That, probably, is the only thing that held us together as a unit and allowed us to keep carrying out the mission. It only takes one person whose confidence charges everyone else, and then the rest will be just as sure of themselves, however scared they may be.

There’s a saying that if a unit has at least one truly determined fighter, everyone else will follow him. The Americans even use the so-called three rules of a Marine. Rule one: always look cool. Rule two: always know where you are. And rule three: if you don’t know where you are, still look cool. It means you must always be confident. Never be afraid, never show fear – you must always look cool, as if everything is going exactly according to plan.

The army, the war, the start of the full-scale invasion changed everything completely. It forced all of us to grow from boys who just liked running around with rifles into men ready to make decisions and ready to take responsibility, understanding that lives – not only your own, but others’ as well – may depend on them. You know, when you play Counter-Strike on a computer, you bear no responsibility, because it’s just a game. But when you’re playing Counter-Strike for real, every step you take, every action, every word is your life and the lives of your brothers-in-arms. And whether you like it or not, you have no choice but to grow up.

Once they understand that no matter how hard it gets, they can always deal with it. However much life, the instructors, combat zone try to break me, as long as I’m alive, I can get through any problem. And the instructor’s main job is precisely to break a person down completely, to push him to his absolute limits so that afterwards he can sit there and realise: however hard it gets, I will cope with anything.