You're reading: Washington Post: Canada’s colder war in Ukraine

This classroom is much like any other - there are tables, benches, a whiteboard, students, and a teacher up front. There is also gravel, and a smell of wet dog with a hint of gun oil. The classroom is a big green tent buffeted by wind and rain on the abandoned remains of what was once a Soviet military base in the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. Within a hundred paces of the tent, 1980s-era rubber gas masks lie in the dirt around an entrance tunnel leading down to a bunker with a blast door as thick as my torso. The students in class today are Ukrainian soldiers plucked from the front lines to learn how to be soldiers from Canadian instructors.

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