Ukrainian volunteers, once ordinary citizens, now find themselves fighting on frontline

KYIV (NYTIMES) - Three months ago, Private Roman Verediuk worked as a ranger in a national park in western Ukraine.

Now, he is part of a two-man team operating a Browning machine gun on the war's front line, in the eastern Donbas region. His partner, Private Ivan Ilkiv, used to drive a tractor.

They are members of the Territorial Defence Forces, an all-volunteer military organisation whose ranks swelled in the first days of the war. The force handed out rifles to civilians who wanted to defend their towns or villages against the Russian invasion, and no military background was required.

Most Territorial Defence Force volunteers operate in their hometowns or at checkpoints far from the front, but some have become combatants in the east.

Mr Verediuk, 32, said he had volunteered to come to the front to avoid fighting the Russians near his home in the country's west. "If the enemy will reach my home, it will be too late to protect it," he said.

This week, the two volunteers were guarding a position observing the road that the Russians might take to advance on the village of Novopil in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. They had received their machine gun three days earlier and welded a mount to their personal car to allow it to be fired from the vehicle.

The fields around them were dotted with craters from shelling earlier in the day, and the smell of smoke still hung in the air.

Novopil, a dot in a sea of farmland in the wide-open steppe of eastern Ukraine, is next to a road that Russian forces had used to control access to areas to the north. As the Ukrainians sought to regain control over the road, the village became a major battlefield for a month.

No regular soldiers could be spared for the counterattack on the village, so a brigade of Territorial Defence Force volunteers recaptured Novopil last week, in a significant battlefield success for the organisation.

"It's not ideal that a Territorial Defence brigade had to fight for such an important bit of the front line, but it's not like there was a choice," said Colonel Oleksandr Ihnatiev, the brigade's commander. The fighters were supported by artillery, the air force and tanks, he said.

On patrols, the brigade is a ragtag group. Older men with greying beards walk on footpaths through the tall spring grass on the steppe, past houses damaged by shelling. The fields stretch to the horizon with no natural barriers, creating a sense of exposure.

In the village, volunteers patrol past the body of a Russian soldier lying beside a cinder-block shed and stop to rest in the shade inside abandoned, damaged houses.

They wear helmets with green ribbons woven into them, to blur the profile of their heads as protection against snipers.

The group may be inexperienced fighters, Col Ihnatiev said, but "their training was already in battle".