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KHARKIV, Ukraine — A 30-year-old former British military captain faced a personal crossroads a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine as he considered a desk job at a security firm and a future spent discussing small talk with his sisters and mother in their hometown across south-east England.
He was still struggling with the routines of civilian life when the chance to volunteer for the defense of Ukraine offered an alternative path. Now, after almost being killed in artillery fire in Bakhmut, the former officer, who has not been identified for safety reasons, said he was “happier than ever”.
The Ukrainian battle has given him purpose and he is excited by the danger. “This war has been a terrible, terrible thing for Ukraine,” he said in a phone interview last month. “But the last nine months have been the best, the most enjoyable of my life. I can’t sit in an office doing PowerPoints for the next 50 years.
“There’s a part of me that does it for the right reasons and there’s a part of me that does it because of the violence,” said the British veteran. “It’s a little bit of both.”
The complex motivations that led him to Ukraine’s blood-soaked trenches echo the experience of thousands who responded to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s call for volunteer fighters after Russia invaded last February. Some went to defend democracy, others to escape their own demons.
Between 1,000 and 3,000 such foreign fighters are believed to be active, with most serving in three International Legion battalions, according to analysts and academics who monitor them, who stress that the numbers are rough estimates. The Ukrainian military did not respond to requests for details on the volunteers or estimates of their numbers.
Compared to the battlefield contributions of hundreds of thousands of regular Ukrainian soldiers, the impact of volunteers is relatively small. But foreign fighters attract enormous attention in the West, especially when they are killed or captured, and raise a thicket of uncomfortable legal, moral and political questions for Ukraine and local volunteer governments.
The willingness of tens of thousands to respond to Zelensky’s call speaks to the resonance of Ukraine’s cause: a country aspiring to be a free and democratic member of the European Union, fighting for survival against a totalitarian regime with a history of brutally violating its neighbors’ territorial sovereignty .
When Russia bombs a building full of people, this is the consequence
But some volunteer fighters are breaking the laws of their home countries to fight in Ukraine, and experts note a risk that American volunteers may violate the Neutrality Act, a law passed in 1794 that aims to bar US citizens from potentially to involve the country in foreign wars.
Even if legal, the presence of Western fighters in Ukraine flies in the face of a concerted effort by the Biden administration and its NATO allies to avoid Russia’s direct involvement in the war. It is also unclear who is responsible for these volunteer soldiers during and after their dangerous combat service.
The choice of many troubled veterans to volunteer in Ukraine also suggests a failure by their own governments to deal with past traumas and reintegrate them into civilian life, experts said. Those who are not professional soldiers pose challenges to the Ukrainian military, which finds some fighters more cumbersome than useful.
Ukrainian officials said last spring that 20,000 people from more than 50 different countries had volunteered. But the vast majority appear to have returned home before the summer, according to scholars studying their involvement and interviews with more than a dozen foreign fighters.
Many seemed more interested in posing for Instagram than indulging in hard-hitting trench warfare. Others seemed all too eager to live out the fantasy of the Call of Duty video game. And some have faced more serious charges of theft or sexual assault, or have been found to be on the run from criminal cases at home.
The realities of war troubled many early volunteers. The intensity of the fighting and the high probability of death stunned even very experienced Western soldiers who found themselves in an artillery war without the air support they had relied on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But for many of the fighters, especially veterans struggling to integrate back into civilian life, the horrors of the bloodshed abroad in Ukraine still proved more appealing than the malaise of peace at home.
Hundreds of these better trained volunteers are also integrated into smaller units that operate independently of the International Legion. These include groups led by Moscow’s longtime regional adversaries, such as the Georgian Legion and the Chechen Battalions, as well as other Western-led units with names such as Alpha, Phalanx and the Norman Brigade.
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The Quebec-born commander of the Volunteer Normandy Brigade, who goes by the call sign “Hrulf,” said his unit includes fighters from Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Jordan, Egypt and Norway, in addition to the U.S., Canada and Britain .
Before the war, Hrulf, whom The Washington Post identified only by his nickname for security reasons, believed that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people, like brothers and sisters,” he said. Now he has a Ukrainian wife and daughter and is fully committed to the cause of Kyiv. “There’s no going back,” he said.
Joseph Hildebrand, 33, was working his family farm in the fields of Saskatchewan, harvesting lentils and durum wheat and tending to his cows after assuring his wife that he had come to terms with giving up his career in the Canadian Army, which included two tours in Afghanistan. Actually he wasn’t.
“He literally couldn’t handle it,” said Hildebrandt’s widow, Carissa. “He started talking to his friends who went and just felt he had to do it. … It just troubled his soul.”
Whatever their motives, the service and sacrifice of foreign fighters is real: an estimated 100 have died and more than 1,000 have been injured, according to Kacper Rekawek, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Extremism at the University of Oslo.
Hildebrand was killed in battle at Bakhmut, and it took his family more than five weeks to recover his body. A former Canadian paratrooper and close friend of Hildebrand said he was sent on a “suicide mission”. The paratrooper, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Ukrainian government, expressed disappointment that Ukrainian forces were not better prepared.
“There are really big problems because a lot of these guys are not trained soldiers,” the paratrooper said last month as he left Ukraine after four months of fighting. “It’s really hard for me to watch. There is a great panic. There is a terrible lack of training.
Despite the risks and official warnings, US veterans are joining the Ukrainian war effort
Other volunteers said the criticism of the Ukrainians was unfair.
“My biggest frustration was with the foreign fighters who complain, ‘We’re being sent on suicide missions.’” Yeah bro: What do you think war is? said Jason Mann, 37, an American who serves in a group called Phalanx. Mann served in Afghanistan, earned a degree in computer science from Columbia University, and worked as a software engineer at Google before coming to Ukraine.
Another British volunteer in Ukraine, who was on leave from fighting north of Kramatorsk in eastern Donetsk region and goes by the call sign ‘Swampy’, said he had had “quite an up and down time” after leaving the British army due to an injury to the knee. But the war in Ukraine gave him direction, he said.
“You know exactly why you get up in the morning,” said Swampy, who is 38 and identified only by his nickname for security reasons.
A 28-year-old American who has been fighting in Ukraine for about six months said that was a common sentiment.
“For a lot of guys, there really was a ‘Valhalla mindset’ of wanting to die as a soldier while destroying as many Russians as possible,” said the American, speaking on condition of anonymity for his safety. “I don’t want to put anyone down, but they felt alienated from what was going on in the world and there was no place or system for them outside of that.”
He added: “The people who show up – they were all romantics in some way and a lot of them were heartbroken. But they were all idealists who wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves.
With the war now in its 11th month, those volunteers still in Ukraine tend to be highly committed, ready to brave the winter conditions and overcome the language barriers and cultural tensions that sometimes flare up.
For some, the war in Ukraine provided a rare opportunity to put their training to good use.
A 23-year-old former member of the British Army’s Royal Corps of Engineers spent five years studying demining and building trenches and bridges, but had never put that knowledge to use in a way he found useful, he said. He spends some time in Eastern Europe training foreign troops, but finds it boring and pointless.
Ukraine liberated the city of Kherson. Now Russia is destroying it.
“To be perfectly honest, my main motivation for coming here was really to shoot people and get shot,” said the British soldier, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “I didn’t want to get my pension without having done anything useful,” he said. Now, however, he says he is committed to the Ukrainian cause.
Not all volunteers had no opportunities at home. When Russia invaded, 28-year-old Zachary Janes, a recent Dartmouth College graduate and former US Army Ranger, was about to begin a meditation…
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