A live, three-session online course for teams travelling into hostile environments. Not a webinar and not a compliance video — you finish it holding a completed risk assessment for your own next trip, a named decision-maker, and written conditions for turning back.
THE PROBLEM THIS SOLVES
Your organization is travelling again. Reconstruction, energy, procurement, due diligence, donor visits, media, site inspections — the trips are back, and the risk picture they were planned against no longer exists.
Distance from the front line stopped being a risk assessment. Warehouses, workshops, logistics hubs, exhibitions and passenger trains have all been struck this year, hundreds of kilometres from the fighting, in daylight, and in places that had been treated as rear areas for three years.
Meanwhile the decision to send people is still usually made the same way: a senior person says it felt fine last month, or that they have a bad feeling about this week. Both are guesses. Neither survives an incident review.
This course replaces the guess with a process — in six hours of live instruction online.
WHO IT IS FOR
People who are highly capable professionals and completely new to this kind of exposure:
- business delegations and investor or due-diligence teams
- reconstruction, energy, engineering and infrastructure contractors
- procurement, compliance and defence-adjacent corporate staff
- donor, institutional and diplomatic visitors
- newly hired media and humanitarian personnel
- executives and board members doing site visits
- the managers and HR and security leads who sign off on all of the above
If your instincts were formed in places where the worst case was a cancelled flight, this course is built for you.
WHAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO DO
By the end, every participant can:
- run a structured risk assessment on their own trip and reach a defensibl go / no-go recommendation
- name who can abort their deployment, and state the written condition that would trigger it
- tell alert types apart and act correctly on each
- find shelter and cover on arrival at a new location, before it is needed
- choose between rail and road for a given leg, and explain the trade-off
- pick accommodation, and a room, on safety grounds rather than on price
- recognise catastrophic bleeding and run the first ten minutes of an incident — who leads, who calls, where everyone goes
- apply communications and information discipline that assumes interception
- say clearly what they are not trained for
THE COURSE
PRE-WORK — 45 minutes, in your own time
Baseline self-assessment, current environment brief, alert typology, short video primers. Your worksheet is issued here.
SESSION 1 — THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE DECISION (90 min + Q&A)
How people are actually being hurt, through three real incidents. What is flying and what it means for what you do. Then the core of the course: you open a risk assessment worksheet on your own real upcoming trip and complete it live, with an instructor in the room, and defend your scoring to the group.
Between sessions, one task: find out who in your organization has authority to abort your trip. Most participants cannot answer. That discovery is the most valuable thing many clients take from the course.
SESSION 2 — GETTING IN, STAYING, GETTING OUT (90 min + Q&A)
Rail versus road. Border crossings and what happens when one closes. Checkpoints, documents, fuel stops, vehicles, curfew. Choosing a hotel and choosing the room — floors, window lines, corridors, exits. Finding shelter on arrival. Information discipline: what not to post, what not to send, and why the exhibition struck this summer had been announced nine days in advance.
SESSION 3 — WHEN IT GOES WRONG (90 min + Q&A)
What kills people in the first minutes, and why the window is shorter than the ambulance. What is in a trauma kit, what each item does, and where it is carried. The first ten minutes of an incident. Then a full scenario, run in small groups against live injects, debriefed against the worksheet you wrote in Session 1.
ADD ON: DRONE THREATS (90 min + Q&A)
The single most requested session we run, and the one you cannot get from a textbook.
What is actually flying — reconnaissance, FPV, fixed-wing one-way attack, jet-powered long-range types — and what each is used against. How you detect one: sound signatures, visual identification, what the alert channels tell you and what they miss, and how much time you realistically have. Then what you actually do: cover versus shelter, moving versus staying, vehicles, glass, upper floors, open ground, and behaviour at sites that are plausible targets.
Taught from current Ukrainian operational experience and updated monthly, because this subject changes faster than any other we teach.
Added at enrolment or after Session 1. Also available as a standalone briefing for European facility, logistics, airport and event security teams with no Ukraine travel planned.
FORMATS
ONLINE — the standard delivery
Live, instructor-led, English. Open enrolment by the seat, or a closed cohort for your team only.
COMPRESSED — a single four-hour sitting
For delegations travelling inside the week. Same material, less time for it to settle. We will tell you honestly that the three-session version teaches more.
IN PERSON, BY REQUEST — across the EU and in Ukraine
We deliver the same programme at your offices or at our facilities in Lisbon, Copenhagen and Kyiv, and at client sites across the EU. In-person delivery adds what a screen cannot carry: hands-on trauma practice with a medical instructor, movement and shelter drills at speed, vehicle and checkpoint work, and live FPV drone simulation. If your team can gather, this is the better option, and we will say so.
WHAT YOU TAKE AWAY
- a completed risk assessment for a real deployment, not a worked example
- the standing pre-deployment checklist, ready to pin up
- a pocket card: alert types, the first ten minutes, contact tree
- a certificate, valid 12 months
- for the organization: an aggregate report of completion, competency gaps, and exactly who on the team is still missing what — the document your compliance function has been asking for.