Western trainers use amputee actors to prep Ukrainian recruits for the 'shock' of blown-off limbs and other war wounds

Business Insider

08-07-2025

To prepare Ukrainian soldiers who come through the UK for training for the horrors of war with Russia, trainers have been employing amputees as wounded soldiers to make it feel real and introduce a bit of "shock."
Col. Boardman, the commanding officer of the UK-led training program Operation Interflex, told Business Insider that the training for Ukrainian recruits includes a first aid course using actors.
"Quite a lot of them are amputees," he said. "That adds a real sense of realism to the exercises: When you come across the casualty and it's someone with a leg missing at the knee and lots of theater makeup all over them."
"And the idea is to bring a bit of shock and a little bit of reality to really get the recruit into the moment to make them really think it's a genuine casualty they're having to deal with."
"Actually putting a tourniquet on a stump is different to putting a tourniquet on a healthy leg," he said. For the training, fake blood and burn makeup create the perception of a severe war injury.
The UK and partner nations have trained more than 56,000 Ukrainians to fight against Russia's invasion as part of Operation Interflex. Ukrainians have come to the UK to learn from the militaries of the UK and 13 other allied nations, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Lithuania. The training is provided to new recruits, as well as ones with combat experience.
A dangerous, brutal war
Drones that scream as they dive into vehicles and dismounted troops and explode, close-quarters combat in trenches, artillery raining down along the front, the war in Ukraine has been a grinding, horrific fight with tremendous losses.
The UK Ministry of Defence said last month that Russia is estimated to have suffered around 1 million combat losses in Ukraine. Ukraine and its partners do not share figures for Ukrainian losses, but a recent study put its casualties at almost 400,000. Between combatants, the total war dead is in the hundreds of thousands.
This war has been catastrophic. Warnings from Western generals in recent years have come true in Ukraine. They had warned that soldiers in modern warfare may no longer have the lifesaving " golden hour," the first 60 minutes after getting injured, the window when higher-level care and treatment can drastically increase chances of survival.
Soldiers and combat medics in Ukraine previously told BI that the ability to receive trauma care during the so-called "golden hour" that Western militaries enjoyed in conflicts in recent decades simply doesn't exist in this war.
Control of the air in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, meant warfighters could be medevaced to field hospitals and other facilities rather than, as it is in Ukraine, leaving troops dependent solely on first aid in the field, with proper care hours or even days away.
An American veteran of the conflicts in the Middle East who also served in Ukraine said injuries that could be easily treated if soldiers could get proper medical care quickly often instead result in amputations and deaths.
That puts pressure on combat medics, and fellow soldiers, to provide the best possible care they can in the field, making rigorous training crucial.
Boardman said instructors try to integrate medical training throughout the training. The Ukrainians consistently say that "they'd like more of it because they're very conscious that it is literally lifesaving treatment."
He said combat medicine is taught to Ukrainians from the very beginning, even in the course for new recruits. He explained that "it gives them enormous confidence in the event of themselves becoming a casualty or one of their colleagues."
Training Ukraine's soldiers
Boardman said that the course is structured around what any military recruit would need to survive and be effective, with some specifics for this war added, like drone warfare basics.
"We probably teach them more than we would teach our British Army recruits because our British Army recruits don't go straight to war off the back of their basic training," Boardman said.
He explained that "we're trying to make the soldiers not only able to survive in the environment but also be as lethal, as effective, as they can be." Much of the course is driven by what the Ukrainian soldiers say they need.
For the Western trainers, the war that Ukraine is facing is unlike their own experiences. Ukraine is facing a major land war featuring trench warfare and artillery battles reminiscent of the World Wars mixed together with drone warfare unlike anything the world has seen before. The Ukrainians are battling a much larger adversary with key advantages in manpower, equipment, and industry.
Boardman said that the dynamic is something instructors are aware of and act accordingly. He shared that Ukrainian commanders and sergeants often come from front-line units and "know very well how to clear a trench because they were doing it a few weeks ago. "
Sometimes, the Ukrainians will push back on certain theories of war, noting that they didn't work when employed in combat.
He said that the militaries doing the training hold institutional credibility from decades of experience, so "whatever the potential skepticism of experienced Ukrainian soldiers on arrival here, their chain of command, their senior headquarters have decided that it's worth their while to come here and be trained."
But that doesn't mean it's rigid. The training is flexible and subject to changes based on feedback received even from the lower-ranking Ukrainian soldiers. "That wouldn't need to come as a letter from Kyiv to tell us to change that" Boardman shared.
He said there is a "really rich mutual understanding going on" where the UK and partner countries carefully listen to the Ukrainians' experiences and share NATO doctrine in return, and "it ends up with the sum being much greater than the parts, which is really valuable for us."
Boardman said the UK is approaching training "with a humility" and that the trainers are "learning a lot from the Ukrainians."
Western nations, especially those in Europe, are increasingly concerned about the Russian threat, and their militaries are rapidly absorbing lessons from the war. "We are also feeding all that knowledge into the British Army," the colonel said.