o one was coming to help. Alexander Gorgan was lying in a three-foot-deep trench dug to defend a snow-covered village north of Kyiv in March, and Russian artillery shells were shattering the frozen ground on all sides. He could hear a platoon commander in a foxhole nearby shouting into the radio: “Can you strike back? Can you hit them? Can you cover us? Please give us cover. We need support. Cover us!” But there was nothing to hit back with.
Pinned down and alone in that hole, Gorgan’s thoughts turned to the savior he wished he could hear coming over the horizon: the low bbrrrrrrrtt of an American-made A-10 Thunderbolt II jet, known as the Warthog, a cold war relic designed specifically for destroying Russian tanks advancing on infantry units. As a kid, Gorgan saw news footage of American A-10s bombing lines of Soviet-made Iraqi tanks during the first Gulf War. Images flooded his mind of the stubby fighter with two bulbous jet engines mounted on its back and a gatling gun for a snout. Gorgan believes in God but at that moment, he wasn’t convinced God was going to save his life. “In that situation, there really has to be something tangible that can help you, and I thought about the A-10,” Gorgan told TIME. “I would be really lucky to hear the noise from his cannon.”
Over the next six months, Gorgan, 46, a low-level infantry officer in the Ukrainian military with high-level connections, would work with a band of other Ukrainians and retired American A-10 pilots to try and get their hands on some of America’s fleet of aging Warthogs. Their hope was to protect Ukrainian infantry units from devastating barrages of Russian artillery, and to turn the tide of the war. It hasn’t been easy. The U.S. is skittish about providing weapons systems and training to Ukraine for fear of provoking Russia into a wider war with the West. And while the A-10 is well-designed to attack tanks, it is vulnerable in contested airspace like that over Ukraine, where Russian jets and anti-aircraft missiles remain active. In recent months, officials in both Kyiv and Washington have put off decisions on whether to transfer the planes.
But working with a Ukrainian businessman and former classmate, Gorgan urged Ukrainian military leaders and their foreign allies to help set up a secret training center. The facility, which has been operating since early May, uses sophisticated flight simulators to prepare a cadre of Ukrainian A-10 pilots for the hoped-for day when the U.S. does supply Ukraine with the planes. In late July, TIME was allowed to visit the training center, on condition the reporter be blindfolded on the way to and from the facility to prevent knowledge of its location. Designed with help from open source YouTube videos of U.S. military trainers in action and built with off-the-shelf components and guidance by retired U.S. military officials, they’ve produced a Warthog training facility on the fly.