Russian civilians 'spurred on' to receive military weapons training in Moscow

RUSSIAN civilians 'spurred on' by the conflict in Ukraine receive military weapons training in Moscow.

In a sports club just outside Moscow run by a former Russian special forces captain, 70 women and men turned out to train with automatic rifles on Saturday (December 3), many of them seeking military skills because of the conflict in neighbouring Ukraine.

The United States and its Western allies have condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a devastating post-imperial land grab, but inside Russia what the Kremlin calls "a special military operation" is seen differently by some Russians.

President Vladimir Putin casts the conflict as a watershed moment when Russia finally stood up to arrogant Western hegemony after decades of humiliation in the years since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia, Putin says, is defending Russians in Ukraine against a decadent West that ultimately wants to carve up Russia's vast resources and eradicate Russian civilisation. The West denies such a plot.