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Foreign warriors make a “big impact” in Ukraine
In a forest outside of Kyiv, a small group of Ukrainian soldiers with machine guns pads around silently, listening intently and sniffing the tree trunks.
“If you walk past a tree and it smells like urine,” says Jay, 30, a stoutly built former special forces soldier from Denmark, “that’s because urine starts to release a gas roughly 15 minutes after someone pisses on the tree.”
Jay is giving combat training to the Ukrainian soldiers, and in this lesson, he is teaching them how to detect the presence of Russian troops and patrol frontline areas.
“I want to see you move slow, silent, deliberate,” he tells the men as they fan out among the leafless trees, practicing their patrols and doing evacuation exercises.
Jay, who asked us not to use his last name, is one of the thousands of foreigners fighting alongside the Ukrainians as part of the country’s International Legion. He has seen combat on every major front of the conflict since signing up last March, just days after Russia invaded.
Training sessions like these are among the most important contributions that foreigners are making to Ukraine’s war effort.
One reason that training is so important is that many of the Ukrainians now fighting had no combat experience at all before Kyiv called a general mobilization in response to Russia’s invasion.
“There are some incredible fighters here,” says Michael, 38, an American who co-founded Task Force 31, a non-profit that helps to train Ukrainian troops. “But a lot of the people that are absorbing a lot of this fight were bakers, dentists, doctors.”
Getting the right equipment is also a challenge. For all the headlines about Europe and the US giving the Ukrainians advanced weapons like Leopard tanks, HIMARS rocket systems, and perhaps, soon, even fighter jets, many units in Ukraine still suffer shortages of simpler things like basic training and equipment.
“The Western support is mostly big, heavy armor and artillery pieces,” says Jay. “This is very needed as well, but it doesn't necessarily help the guys on the ground who have to go buy their own boots and buy their own helmet.”
René, a 20-year international legion member from Germany, is part of the effort to rustle up basic gear. He was a bike messenger before the war, but after seeing a now-famous video of a Ukrainian refugee child crossing the Polish border with a bag full of toys, he decided to go fight for Kyiv.
Today he is a drone operator attached to a unit that has seen combat in the Donbas. But he also works to secure, maintain, and repair pickup trucks, which are crowdsourced from elsewhere in Europe, painted in camouflage, and sent to the front.
DIY efforts are commonplace in this war. “It's not only the military that is fighting,” says Rene, “it's also civilians that are doing volunteer work, employed in cars, painting cars, organizing humanitarian aid, helping the civilians at the frontline, helping the animals that got left behind at the frontline.”
Why is Ukraine still in need of such DIY efforts even after a year of war and tens of billions of dollars in support from the US and Europe?
The scale of the effort that’s required to fend off a much larger adversary is one reason.
“They're still fighting a country that spends ten times as much on its military as Ukrainians do,” says Liam Collins, a retired US Special Forces officer who has advised the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. “So they're going to be behind even with a $100 billion investment by the U.S.”
Supply chain and distribution problems may also play a role, as Kyiv still struggles to apportion huge amounts of equipment to the right units at the right time.
There is also the specter of corruption. Despite improvements in recent years, Ukraine still ranks a lowly 116th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
And while there is so far no evidence of graft significantly affecting the provision of equipment, President Volodymyr Zelensky last month sacked senior defense officials implicated in the misappropriation of funds.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the work of guys like Jay, Michael, and René continues. If the money isn’t there, they raise it. If the training isn’t sufficient, they do it. If the trucks aren’t there, they find them.
“You don’t have to be shooting to be fighting,” says Jay. “When we train other people, they then pass that knowledge on to their friends. And that way we can make a big impact in this war.”
Michael Tucker contributed reporting to this piece from Ukraine.
A badge on a uniform of a foreign fighter from the UK arrived in Lviv, Ukraine.
The promise and peril of foreign fighters in Ukraine
Less than 48 hours after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to foreign volunteers for their help. He also established a new military unit, the International Legion for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine, for them to join. Visa restrictions were temporarily lifted, and a slick recruitment website went up. Some compared the foreign volunteers to those who signed up to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, as captured in Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
But with the war entering its fourth week, the implication of thousands of foreign fighters entering the fray – some from as far away as Florida and as close as Belarus – is less than romantic. What’s more, Russia is now deploying its own foreign recruits, and Vladimir Putin has given the go-ahead to dole out advanced weapons systems to foreigners willing to take up arms for Moscow.
Such an influx of foreign fighters to Ukraine, experts warn, will have both short- and long-term consequences for the war, the region, and beyond.
“The biggest threat from foreign fighters is that they intensify conflicts,” says David Malet of American University and author of Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts. “Foreign fighters help weaker forces fight more effectively. This prolongs the wars and sometimes the weaker side wins.”
“But the price of this is significantly more violence on the battlefield and against civilians too,” he adds.
Foreign fighters are not new to this conflict. Between 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and began supporting pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas, and 2019, at least 17,000 foreigners were engaged in eastern Ukraine — the majority fighting for Moscow. While most were Russian, hundreds hailed from EU member countries, the UK, and the US.
In addition, a number of far-right militants from abroad have come to Ukraine, some of them joining the notorious Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian paramilitary group with neo-nazi sympathizers that’s been used as casus belli by the Kremlin to “de-nazify” Ukraine.
The numbers on both sides are swelling. The Ukrainians now claim 20,000 fighters from 52 countries. These ranks include NATO veterans, neo-nazis, and even schoolteachers. So, can they really help?
“For those fighting on the Ukrainian side, the key is for them to be integrated into the Ukrainian military and kept under proper command,” says Daniel Byman, an expert on foreign fighters who teaches at Georgetown University and serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“Some with skills can help train others and play valuable roles, though language barriers will be a problem in some cases.” If you’re unskilled and don’t speak the right languages, he adds, it’s much harder.
Russia, for its part, announced last Friday that 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East were ready to join it in the fighting in the Donbas. Moreover, Putin wants to give them deadly weapons like Western-made Javelin and Stinger missiles captured by the Russians, man-portable air-defense systems known as MANPADS, and anti-tank rocket complexes.
On Sunday, Kyiv accused Russia of setting up “mercenary recruitment centers” across Syria and even Libya. Independent reports have established Russian headhunters active in Iraq, too. Also, British intelligence warned that personnel from private Russian security companies with checkered human rights records and links to Moscow are also being deployed in the conflict. Meanwhile, in a bizarre twist, members of Central African Republic forces have also pledged to join Russia.
So, what makes someone sign up to fight a war in a foreign country? In many cases, nothing good. Research shows that foreign fighters have some disturbing tendencies: they are more prone to committing atrocities, they often believe in extremist ideologies, and they have a higher mortality rate.
“Conflicts with foreign fighters tend to be more violent than others,” explains Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
“The bigger issue is what comes next now. What are these people going to do afterwards, and [what comes of] the huge flood of weapons that we’re going to see surge around this wider region, as well as people with battlefield experience, some of whom are linked to extremist groups?”