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‘My name is Andriy and I’m 40 years old today.’

The man standing in front of me on a wind-driven hilltop in southern England looks every inch the soldier – Kevlar helmet, camo body armour, AK slung across his chest.

In fact, just a matter of weeks ago, Andriy was a banker – 16 years in risk management. Now, along with dozens of other men just like him, he’s learning how to attack a trench.

‘As any human being, I am scared of going to the front line,’ he says, then after a deep breath he adds: ‘But I’m sure I can convert my fears into fuel that will spike my best skills and drills in combat.’

His helmet hides his brow and an olive-coloured neck scarf covers most of his face, so it’s hard to read his expression, but his eyes seem to betray a deep sense of unease.

It’s not hard to understand why. Three years ago, when Russia marched across Ukraine’s borders to try and wipe the country off the map, it was met with the kind of heroism that seemed to come straight from the pages of a movie script.

‘I need ammo, not a ride,’ was President Zelensky’s retort when the Americans offered him a way out of Kyiv on the first day. With leaders like that and an army fighting well beyond what experts thought it capable of, it seemed victory might actually be within reach.

The war is now in a very different place. For all Ukraine’s bravery, Russia’s sheer weight of numbers and willingness to sacrifice men over mere feet of ground is starting to tell. Inch by blood-soaked inch, they’re turning the map of the Donbas red.

Meanwhile, each day seems to bring fresh horrors to the battlefield: Human wave ‘meat assaults’, FPV drones hunting men for sport, ‘unstoppable’ hypersonic missiles, and lurking somewhere behind it all, the spectre of nuclear armageddon.

That is the war that Andriy and his new brothers-in-arms are going to fight – a fact he won’t quite acknowledge, but which he seems painfully aware of.

‘I feel like it’s every respectable, decent man’s job to protect their country and their homeland,’ Andriy replies when I ask him what he thinks of the war.

He’s in the UK as part of Operation Interflex, the British training programme that began in June 2022 and has so-far turned out 50,000 fresh recruits for the Ukrainian army.

The training is just five weeks long and is designed to get the recruits through their first five weeks of battle – the thinking being that after that they’ll either pick up everything else they need to know or the job, or… they won’t.

When I meet Andriy in mid-October he’s already done two weeks which focused on the soldiering basics like operating a rifle, moving across the battlefield, and something the military calls ‘conditioning’.

This is designed to adjust civilians to the chaos and blood of battle, essentially so they don’t freeze up when confronted by it for the first time.

It involves things like completing an assault course that has been smeared with animal guts and blood from local slaughterhouses, whilst instructors shout orders and rifles are let off close by.

How has Andriy coped with that? ‘The training is hard and demanding,’ he says, as if reading from a textbook. ‘However, I feel like it’s actually doing good for me!’

Also on-base with us are Ukrainian veterans who are training how to become instructors for the newly enlisted.

Among them is Alexander, who volunteered for the army ahead of Putin’s full-scale invasion and who has – it seems – survived virtually every major battle of the war.

‘I was well aware that the full-scale invasion will start sooner or later,’ he tells me.

‘So I had a choice to make, whether I’ll join the cause once it already starts and basically just die, or I start preparing myself prior to it and join the armed forces of Ukraine as a fully skilled prepared soldier.’

I glance over at Andriy and his cohort of new recruits who are now being walked through a trench, learning how to clear bunkers and corners without getting shot.

They don’t seem to have heard what Alexander just said, which is probably for the best.

He continues: ‘On the first day we had to get into contact with the enemy just a few kilometres from the borderline with Russia. One of the tank convoys was on its way. And we engaged in a firefight with them. One of the forward observers of the convoy located us.

‘We had to arrange a hasty ambush. We succeeded, successfully destroying the convoy. However, when we were breaking contact with the enemy we had to cross open ground and I got shot in my right side.’

Alexander spent two months in hospital, after which he rejoined his unit in time to fight in the Kharkiv counter-attack – the breath-taking dash eastwards in late 2022 that saw Ukraine recapture thousands of square miles of its territory in just a few days.

When that advance eventually stalled on the borders of neighbouring Luhansk oblast, Alexander was sent to the bloodbath of Bakhmut.

What that experience left him with, he says, is a respect for his Russian enemies. If there are weaker or untrained Russians on the battlefield, then he hasn’t dealt with them.

‘I have to respect the enemy’s skills in combat, because if you do not respect the enemy and you underestimate them, then that’s how you die,’ he adds.

Trying to get a sense of what the fighting is like, I suggest the West hasn’t fought this kind of war for decades. My follow-up question was going to be what we can learn from the Ukrainians, but before I can get there he cuts me off.

‘The West has not taken part in such a war ever,’ he tells me, ‘because the war that we’re fighting at the moment is the war of drones and robotics.

‘The task now is very different. For us to hold a position is not a problem. It’s fairly easy. The problem is to get to the position and to leave it once you’re done.

‘Especially when you look in the sky and then you see so many drones flying around and you cannot tell apart which ones are yours, which ones are enemy drones. It’s very hard to process it.’

When I ask if Alexander is afraid of getting killed by a drone, he relies matter-of-factly that he has ‘no right to die’ until the Russian invasion is over.

Given the battles he’s already survived, you get the feeling he really means that.

I wonder whether the same will be true of Andriy and his cohort of conscripts. By now they will no doubt have been deployed to the frontlines.

If they were lucky, they may just be coming to the end of their first five weeks in combat.

Of the two-dozen or so men I saw training that day, how many of them are left – did they actually get to put their training, and how well did it serve them, if they did?

Before we leave, I ask Alexander and Andriy what they would say to the Russians if given the opportunity.

‘It seems that the answer should be very straightforward and easy,’ Alexander says. ‘However, it’s not the case.’

‘I have seen mass burials of women and children and it is very hard to find the words of how to respond to that. So if I’m completely honest, I probably would not want to say anything.

‘All I can do now is just keep fighting and keep killing every single one of them that are on my land that have been in my country.’

Andriy takes a second to think about it. ‘I was imagining what I can shout into the back of a Russian soldier that’s retrieving from the battlefield in fear,’ he says.

‘And I just wanted to tell them that we will never forget what they’ve done to us.

‘We will never pardon them taking away the childhoods of our kids. And them taking away a peaceful retirement from our parents.’