#Norway

From roughly 450 kilometers above Earth, Jannicke Mikkelsen was looking through the window of her spacecraft when she noticed something moving between her and the Earth below. She saw a fireball, a meteor maybe? But it behaved differently.

Less than a month after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Norwegian lawyer Ole Kvåle was on the road, driving his own car into a country at war. Packed inside were bulletproof vests, helmets, laptops, and walkie-talkies for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He had no ties to Ukraine—only the conviction that he could not stand by as Russia invaded a sovereign European neighbor. That first journey would change Kvåle's life and the lives of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers.

The smoke clears, the gunfire stops, and the exercise ends. For Ukrainian soldiers, the war continues. We went inside Operation Interflex, the UK’s military training mission, where Ukrainian troops prepare for the frontline through some of the most realistic combat training outside Ukraine.