OSTROWIEC: Commandos sneak up on a fortress in southern Poland. Camouflaged behind sandbags, they fire their Kalashnikov rifles to free the hostages.
But the fortress is really a school and the machine guns are fake. The bullets are blanks and the hostages are there of their own accord.
The participants are all volunteers taking part in a military manoeuvre motivated by security concerns over the crisis in neighbouring Ukraine.
"I shot three," cries one of the weekend warriors at the elementary school in the southern town of Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, where the training scenario says "little green men" are pretending to hold Polish officials hostage.
The little green men are the enemy -- stand-ins for the real-life fighters with the same nickname who have been helping pro-Kremlin separatists battle government forces in Ukraine.
The West and Ukraine suspect them of being elite Russian special forces. Russia says this is absolutely not true.
The 200 men and handful of women taking part in the school yard smilitary manoeuvres are members of the Strzelec paramilitary organisation and have descended on Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski from across Poland to take part in their annual exercise.
The event has been organised annually since 2010 but this year there is added urgency from the Ukraine crisis.
"The geopolitical situation is what it is. There's an armed conflict is eastern Ukraine," says Adam Dluzniak, a 25-year-old who plays one of the bad guys.
"It's no surprise that large numbers of youths are joining our group to serve as back-up for our regular armed forces," the history professor by day tells AFP
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