1). “Foreign Fighters and the Ukraine Blowback — Lessons from Syria and Iraq”, Mar 17, 2023, Rania Khalek interviews Seth Harp, Rania Khalek Dispatches, BreakThrough News, duration of video 1:00:36, at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkqn6x9o0bI&list=PLwZtBKjGSMzW-grFNiIzMyvqBYznqN2dg&index=2>
Note: This is a Youtube Video of an interview. There is no transcript nor any text version available.
2). “Foreign Fighters in Ukraine Could Be a Time Bomb for Their Home Countries: Two killed in the Ukrainian Army’s International Legion may have been neo-Nazis”, June 30, 2022, Seth Harp, The Intercept, at
< https://theintercept.com/2022/06/30/ukraine-azov-neo-nazi-foreign-fighter/ >
3). “Putting Ukrainian battle successes into cold, hard perspective: While our media calls recent gains a turning point, be warned this might be headed for something more ‘frozen’ and less satisfactory”, September 19, 2022, Seth Harp, Responsible Statecraft, at <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/19/putting-ukrainian-battle-successes-into-cold-hard-perspective/> .
4). Army of Shadows, by Seth Harp https://harpers.org/archive/2022/07/searching-from-the-ukrainian-foreign-legion/
5). “A War Correspondent on Russia-Ukraine | Robert Wright & Seth Harp”, October 18, 2022, Robert Wright interviews Seth Harp, duration of video 1:23:39, Nonzero, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgDxtUYMiQY >
Note: This is a Youtube Video of an interview. There is no transcript nor any text version available.
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: Seth Harp brings a somewhat different perspective to the Proxy War by U.S. / Nato against Russia taking place in Ukraine. He is more sympathetic to the Ukrainians than any author or interview participant I have posted so far. But Harp is a very serious journalist who seeks out the truth and does not shrink from writing about it, or discussing it. I posted two YouTube interview videos, one from Rhania Khalek’s Dispatches show, and one from Robert Wright’s NonZero show. Wright is also much more sympathetic with Ukraine than he is with Russia. But again Wright is willing to face the ltruth even when it does not go where his sympathies lie.
1). “Foreign Fighters and the Ukraine Blowback — Lessons from Syria and Iraq”, Mar 17, 2023, Rania Khalek interviews Seth Harp, Rania Khalek Dispatches, BreakThrough News, duration of video 1:00:36, at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkqn6x9o0bI&list=PLwZtBKjGSMzW-grFNiIzMyvqBYznqN2dg&index=2>
Note: This is a Youtube Video of an interview. There is no transcript nor any text version available.
2). “Foreign Fighters in Ukraine Could Be a Time Bomb for Their Home Countries: Two killed in the Ukrainian Army’s International Legion may have been neo-Nazis”, June 30, 2022, Seth Harp, The Intercept, at <https://theintercept.com/2022/06/30/ukraine-azov-neo-nazi-foreign-fighter / >
11–14 minutes
The death of a French volunteer in Ukraine is the first clear evidence that there are at least some far-right extremists among the foreign fighters who have flocked there to fight Russian forces. Wilfried Bleriot, 32, was killed in action, according to Ukraine’s International Legion in a Facebook post on June 4, 2022. In the photo of Bleriot posted by the International Legion, which was formed after Russia’s February invasion and is open to volunteer fighters from all over the world, he displays front and center on his body armor the black-and-white patch of the so-called Misanthropic Division, said to be an overtly fascist volunteer wing of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov Battalion.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
This Text refers to the graphic posted below
International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine
The International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine honours the memory of our fallen brothers 🇳🇱 🇦🇺 🇩🇪 🇫🇷
We wish to remember and honour our fallen brothers, who travelled to Ukraine to join the bravest of the brave and fight shoulder to shoulder with the defenders of Ukraine.
They chose to defend Ukraine's sovereignty. They chose to fight and show the enemy that the values of freedom and democracy that the civilised world now defends together, cannot and will not be erased by missiles or artillery.
We lost our brothers in combat but their bravery, their memory and legacy will forever inspire us.
The Ukrainian people and the Armed Forces of Ukraine pay tribute to the sacrifice of the foreign heroes who have come to protect the Ukrainian people from this barbarous invasion but also to defend freedom and democracy everywhere.
We would like to honour the memory of our brothers in arms: Ronald Vogelaar, Michael O’Neill, Björn Benjamin Clavis and Wilfried Blériot. No words exist to express our gratitude for their service and ultimate sacrifice. These are the unsung heroes who came here to defend the values they believed in and stand up against tyranny.
Their memory will live on in the International Legion, in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and in the hearts of the Ukrainian people who will forever be indebted to the defenders who left their lives behind and chose to fight for light over darkness, for life over death. They will not be forgotten.
Glory to Ukraine! And glory to her heroes!
On behalf of the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine:
Damien Magrou, Spokesperson
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The Misanthropic Division’s violent, hate-filled Telegram channel was the first to announce Bleriot’s death, one day earlier, on June 3. The post said that he died on June 1 in Kharkiv and included a photo in which the thin and bearded Bleriot wears a T-shirt that says “Misanthropic Division” across the front.
In 2018, the Los Angeles Times described the Misanthropic Division as “one of many neo-Nazi groups that have mushroomed throughout Ukraine in recent years.” In 2020, the Daily Beast characterized it as “the militant foreign volunteer wing of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.” The Guardian, in 2014, also said that the Misanthropic Division “is linked to the Azov battalion.” There are few other mentions of it in the news archive.
Bleriot was a “man who fought bolshevism and antifascism all his life,” according to the Telegram post, a “brother-in-arms,” who died defending Europe and Ukraine from “Asiatic hordes.” Among members of the group chat, Bleriot has become a martyr, a fallen comrade to be mourned and celebrated. One meme shows a Black Sun wheel — an icon of Nazi occultism — behind his smiling face.
Bleriot was from Bayeux, a town in the north of France. In an interview with an Argentinian reporter, uploaded to Reddit on March 3, he identifies himself as a Norman, says that he is “ready to kill Russians,” and “ready to die.” He adds that he left behind two children at home, and starts to cry. Bleriot’s family could not be reached for comment. Efforts to reach French authorities for comment on whether Bleriot was known to them were also unsuccessful.
A spokesperson for the Azov Battalion, which began around 2014 as a far-right street gang and has since evolved into a professional special operations regiment of the Ukrainian army, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Bleriot and the Misanthropic Division. But back in April, I met with Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov movement, at their base in Kyiv. I had not heard of the Misanthropic Division then, but I did ask Biletsky about foreign fighters. “We have volunteers from different countries,” he told me. “We’ve had Europeans, Japanese, people from the Middle East.” He also mentioned Belarusian, Georgian, Russian, Croat, and British volunteers. He pointed out that some of them had been Jews. However, “I can assure you that there are no Americans,” he said. “Not even western Europeans for that matter,” he added, slightly contradicting himself.
The Azov base, in the semi-industrial outskirts of Kyiv, was in an abandoned Soviet factory compound. Inside the main building, a yellow flag with Azov’s notorious Wolfsangel symbol in the center hung from the rafters. In two places, there were Black Sun clocks on the walls; such sun wheels, or Sonnenrads, also found on the floor of Heinrich Himmler’s castle in Germany, are widely used by contemporary adherents of Nazi ideology to signal their Aryan supremacist beliefs. Azov apologists say that they are merely indigenous Ukrainian symbols that must be understood in an Eastern European context. In any case, the sun wheels, backlit by blue neon, certainly lent the Azov base a neo-Nazi aesthetic. There were soldiers in full battle gear walking around, looking as squared-away and intimidating as any in Ukraine, and two women who worked as secretaries. The ground floor was full of new recruits, exclusively young white men, speaking Ukrainian and Russian.
(Caption: A recruit to the Azov Battalion with a tattoo on his scalp depicting a Kalashnikov and the word “Misanthropic,” in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 14, 2015. Photo: Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
Since Azov formed about eight years ago, it has attracted relentless controversy for its quasi-fascist ideology, unapologetically espoused by Biletsky, and alleged abuses against the few minority groups that exist in Ukraine, including the Roma. There is plenty of photographic evidence of Azov fighters displaying Nazi symbols on the battlefield (often with the intent to troll Russia). Azov has tried to clean up its image in recent years and present itself as depoliticized, and it is now an official component of the Ukrainian military, not an independent militia. But it has far more autonomy than any other regiment of the army. It presents itself as an elite corps and has attained an extraordinary degree of prestige and admiration in the eyes of ordinary Ukrainians for its stalwart defense of Mariupol, its home base, which finally fell to the Russians on May 20, following a dramatic, three-month-long siege. Although many hundreds of Azov soldiers were taken prisoner, many more young Ukrainian men have signed up to replace them.
“Azov is growing,” Maksym Zhorin, the commander of an Azov special operations unit in Kyiv, told me in April. “Our emphasis is on the future.” He added, “It might sound weird, but the actions of the Russian federation have been beneficial for us.”
As I noted in a recent piece for Harper’s, when I left the base, I saw a small group of men hanging around outside the gate, and guessed from their appearance (paramilitary attire, neck tattoos, ball caps) that they were foreign volunteers. With several Azov soldiers standing next to my translator and me as we waited for a taxi, I didn’t think it wise to approach them, but I overheard them speaking English. The one phrase I caught distinctly, over the idling engine of an armored vehicle, was “foreign legion.” Also, who knows who was responsible for it, but “WHITE POWER” was spray-painted on the kiosk right in front of us, alongside the driveway — in English, no less.
(Caption: White supremacist graffiti is spray-painted on a kiosk outside the Azov Battalion’s base in Kyiv on April 6, 2022. Photo: Seth Harp)
Bleriot’s death, the possible existence of more extremists like him among the ranks of Ukraine’s foreign fighters, and the rise of Azov as an internal military power should not be taken as representative of Ukraine’s society, government, and armed forces as a whole. Russian propaganda would have people believe that Ukraine and its military are full of neo-Nazis and completely under the sway of radical Russophobes. These falsehoods evaporate as soon as you set foot in the country. Ukraine does have a notably vigorous and aggressive ultranationalist sector, but even Azov, the most powerful and influential far-right force, remains a fringe movement. Ukraine is one of the biggest countries in Europe and contains multitudes. Its president is Jewish, a former TV comedian. Before Russia invaded, issues like corruption and economic stagnation were much bigger problems in the lives of ordinary people than the specter of roving gangs of fascist youths. If the Russians were really worried about neo-Nazi, ultranationalist, and white-supremacist militants, they would look in their own country, where such movements flourish as much as, if not more than, in Ukraine.
Likewise, Bleriot should not be taken as representative of the Ukrainian Army’s International Legion. Amid the chaos of the first two months of the war, most of the foreigners who flocked to Ukraine to fight were turned away and went home. The International Legion only accepted those with substantial military experience, mostly from the U.S. and U.K. Bleriot, who told an Argentinian interviewer that he had served one year in the French army, would have barely made the cut. There’s little doubt that he claimed the Misanthropic Division’s neo-Nazi ideology, as articulated in spaces like its Telegram channel, but such extremists, isolated and small in number, also find their way into the U.S. military on a regular basis.
As for the Misanthropic Division, it’s hard to tell how real it is, and how sizable. The extent of its actual association with the Azov Battalion is also unclear. Take Bleriot, for example. There’s no indication that he was with any Azov unit when he died in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, far from Azov’s main areas of operation in the south. It may be that the Misanthropic Division is not a real-world unit with a leader and a chain of command so much as a twisted military clique that anyone online can claim.
Images readily available on the internet show young men from the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, and elsewhere displaying the group’s piratical-looking flag, often in conjunction with other hate symbols, and it’s possible to find photos and videos of Ukrainian soldiers, who appear to be engaged in actual combat, sporting its various badges, patches, and T-shirts. It could be a cohesive military unit made up of foreign volunteers, sheltered under the wing of the Azov Battalion, but I can find no convincing evidence, at the moment, that it is anything more than a toxic Telegram meme popularized by Azov’s most black-pilled fanboys, only a few of whom may really be serving in the unit.
The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers.
The real question, when it comes to Ukraine’s foreign legion and some of the more distasteful characters that its international call-to-arms has attracted, is how much of a threat they pose to their countries of origin. The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers. Radical miscreants from all over the world who subscribe to the blood-and-soil ideology of neo-Nazi subcultures like the Misanthropic Division have a very real opportunity to travel to Ukraine, get military training, and participate in intense armed conflict against a technologically advanced enemy. If they survive, their combat experience could give them the confidence and ability to carry out acts of political violence in their home countries. This is clearly cause for concern at a time when incidents of hate crimes and domestic terrorism are on the rise.
In the same Facebook post of June 4 that announced Bleriot’s death, the International Legion also disclosed the death of Björn Benjamin Clavis, a German of unknown age. The photo of him shows a man who looks about 30 with buzzed hair in the uniform of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force. On the back of his right hand is an unmistakable tattoo of an Iron Cross, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as a “commonly-used hate symbol” favored by “neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”
It’s possible that Clavis got the tattoo for innocuous reasons. It’s not that uncommon a symbol. The logo of the Independent Truck skateboard company, for example, looks a lot like an Iron Cross. So does the badge given out for marksmanship in the U.S. Army. However, the ADL’s analysis suggests that nonracist display of the Iron Cross mostly takes place in the United States. In Germany, where Clavis was from, it is very much associated with the Third Reich.
3). “Putting Ukrainian battle successes into cold, hard perspective: While our media calls recent gains a turning point, be warned this might be headed for something more ‘frozen’ and less satisfactory”, September 19, 2022, Seth Harp, Responsible Statecraft, at <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/19/putting-ukrainian-battle-successes-into-cold-hard-perspective/>
{Caption: Ukrainian soldiers in Kharviv, Ukraine, January 31, 2022. (Shutterstock/Seneline) }
7–8 minutes
Last week’s offensive to liberate the countryside east of Kharkiv was an impressive win for the Ukrainian military and government, as well as its sponsors and managers in the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Ukraine’s seizure of the Izium rail station was especially key, as Russian forces rely heavily on trains for transport and supplies. Not since the successful defense of Kyiv has the Zelensky government scored such an important battlefield victory. But triumphalist reports in the U.S. media portraying the counteroffensive as a major shift in the direction of the war overstate the significance of these developments.
Russia had already lost the war in the north. After the collapse of their assault on Kyiv in March, Russian soldiers abandoned the Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts, and never came close to full control over Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Their continued occupation of the countryside north and east of Kharkiv was a leftover vestige of that failed first phase of the invasion, which could explain why it was so lightly defended, and why Russian forces, caught off guard, were so quick to retreat.
Western press reports have portrayed Ukraine’s “lightning offensive,” as it’s invariably called, as a major turning point in the war. Nearly all of them use the word “humiliating” to describe Russia’s loss of the area. Russian defenses “collapsed” and they “fled in panic,” we’re told. This was widely attributed to the supposed “exhaustion” and “low morale” of Russian troops. As a result, the battle lines have been “redrawn,” the war’s contours “reshaped.” Putin is said to be “livid and “isolated.” In the maximalist language of the Atlantic Council, the “Ukrainian victory shatter[ed] Russia’s reputation as a military superpower.”
There’s a fair amount of wishful thinking in all of this rhetoric. Since April, it has been clear that Putin, after failing to take Kyiv and Kharkiv, pivoted to a downsized Plan B of securing a land bridge to Crimea in the south. Not only can this be gleaned from a glance at a map of troop movements, but Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said so explicitly in July.
Going forward, the success or failure of that strategic gambit is how the regime in Moscow will define victory or defeat. And Ukraine’s retaking of the Kharkiv countryside will have little significant effect on Russia’s ability to hold critical southern port cities like Kherson, Melitopol, Mariupol, and Berdyansk. At this point, Kharkiv is not nearly as important an objective as Mykolaiv or Odesa. The Russians can easily make do without the Izium railway.
The Ukrainian army and reserve militia showed extraordinary bravery and endurance in their defense of Kyiv — awe-inspiring courage, really — and punched well above their weight again in last week’s drive to push the Russians east of the Oskil River. But to win the war outright — which would be a miraculous underdog victory — they would need to break through to the Sea of Azov, or retake a major hub like the cities of Donetsk or Luhansk.
Under current conditions, that’s unlikely to happen. A Ukrainian offensive against occupied Kherson, launched in tandem with the blitz east of Kharkiv, has produced no appreciable gains. The battle lines around Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia have changed very little since March. Even if Ukrainian forces in the northeast conserve their momentum and continue to press the counteroffensive east of the Oskil, they could retake all of the Luhansk oblast north of the Donets River and still not seriously imperil Russian control of the coast and Crimea.
War is unpredictable, and it’s always possible that an unexpected concatenation of Russian losses really could precipitate a total collapse of Moscow’s expeditionary force, and a complete retreat from the Donbas. There’s a scary unanswered question of how the Putin regime would respond in that eventuality, because they have held certain highly destructive munitions in reserve, but it’s probably premature to go there unless and until Ukraine racks up additional territorial gains.
The coming winter weather, which can be brutally cold and icy in Ukraine, is likely to slow troop movements, and perhaps bring them to a near halt (as would happen in Afghanistan every winter). In a more metaphorical sense, the conflict might already be frozen. Since about May, this has increasingly seemed to be the cold, hard reality, loathe as propagandists on both sides are to admit it.
A “frozen conflict” is a term for a war whose battle lines have hardened and congealed, but without any truce or treaty to formally cede conquered territory to the aggressor, resulting in a kind of gray zone on the map of the globe — dead spots in the international order. Examples include ex-Soviet territories like Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, which legally belong to Moldova in the case of Transnistria and Georgia in the case of the other two, but which have been occupied by Russia for years.
Russia’s puppet states in the Donbas are only the most recent addition to this curtilage of quasi-sovereign vassalages in countries that used to belong to the U.S.S.R. It will be very difficult for Ukraine to win back the swath of coastal land from Luhansk to Kherson, in part because the people there are culturally, ethnically, and linguistically inclined towards Russia. That is why Putin targeted them in the first place.
“Frozen conflict” can also describe fractured, balkanized states like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Mali, and other sites of U.S. and NATO intervention. In these countries, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, often acting through proxies, successfully ousted or badly destabilized the existing government, but failed to fully install a replacement regime that was both subservient to Washington and able to govern effectively.
Warlords, gangsters, jihadists, mercenaries, slave traders, arms dealers, drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and spies flowed into the power vacuum. In Syria, which is partially occupied by U.S. forces to this day, Russia also intervened, resulting in a split with two-thirds of the country governed by a Russian-backed coalition, and the remainder controlled by American proxy forces and special operations soldiers.
That’s been the status quo in Syria for the better part of a decade; and at this juncture, the Kharkiv counteroffensive notwithstanding, it seems to be the most likely future for Ukraine, too: a war that never ends, in an unlucky country caught between two past-their-prime superpowers, neither of which has the ability to win outright, nor the humanity to negotiate a compromise, with the result that many thousands die in vain.
4). Army of Shadows, by Seth Harp
All artwork by Steve Mumford for Harper’s Magazine
Source photographs courtesy the author
My flight from Munich to Warsaw on March 13 was half-filled with English-speaking men in a motley assortment of store-bought paramilitary gear, cargo pants, and hiking boots. A faint odor of dirty laundry and stale cigarette smoke emanated from their general direction. One wore a cap that read in my defense i was left unsupervised. They appeared to be anywhere from twenty to fifty years old, and looked like they might have been dredged up from the aisles of sporting goods stores across the United States. Some snored; others watched videos. It was the last leg of a long journey.
After disembarking, I followed the train of men to the baggage claim. I introduced myself to one of them, a man in his late twenties with a reddish beard. His name was Ray Lehman; he was from Pennsylvania, and had served in the Marine Corps. “You look like a Marine,” I told him.
“I get that a lot,” he said.
“Where are you headed?”
Lehman looked away. “OPSEC, man,” he said. “OPSEC.” He walked over to a currency exchange window and produced four or five ziplock bags full of money from a variety of countries. “Do you take won?” he asked. Loose coins spilled out and rolled across the floor. “I have three thousand one hundred and seventy-five yen.”
Other Americans began to emerge into the dingy, ill-lit arrivals area: Jack Potter, a heavily tattooed thirty-two-year-old from Washington State, who owns a company called Guerrilla Tactical, and Kieran Atherton, a Texan whose fledgling business, The War Club LLC, sells night-vision goggles on Instagram. They were trying to rent a car, and suspected that they had been scammed by a company that turned out to have no location at Warsaw Chopin Airport.
Matthew VanDyke, a gaunt, bearded forty-two-year-old from Baltimore, grabbed his rucksack from the carousel and strode purposefully toward the exit. He was trailed by Lehman; a muscular man with a deep scar under one eye; an ABC News cameraman; and a Vietnam veteran wearing a crumpled pinstripe suit, his white hair in a ponytail. This was William Devlin, the co-pastor of Infinity Bible Church in the South Bronx, and a professor at Nile Theological College in Khartoum, Sudan. “I’m just here to pray and assess and share God’s love,” he told me.
These men were only a few of the great many Americans who sought to make their way into Ukraine via Poland in the weeks following Russia’s invasion. They were joined by disorganized groups of fighters from England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in Europe, with lone wolves trickling in from places like South Korea and Peru. Many were combat veterans or had military training. Some had fought the Islamic State in Syria with a Kurdish militia known as the YPG. A few had already seen action in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where war with Russia-backed separatists has smoldered since 2014.
They made the journey at the explicit invitation of the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Just days after Russian tanks rolled across the border from Belarus and Crimea, Zelensky declared the formation of a new military unit that would consist entirely of foreign volunteers: the International Legion for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine. “Every friend of Ukraine . . . please come over,” Zelensky said. “We will give you weapons.”
The Ukrainians created a recruiting website and put out a slick video describing 4 simple steps to join heroic army. Veterans with combat experience were strongly preferred, but anyone was welcome. A week after Zelensky’s announcement, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, told reporters that they had recruited twenty thousand troops from fifty-two countries—a figure roughly equivalent to one tenth of Ukraine’s active-duty army.
I had previously reported on the foreign volunteers fighting the Islamic State in Syria, a mix of black-bloc leftists and apolitical war enthusiasts from Europe and the United States who, at their peak in 2017, numbered less than two hundred. Few as they were, they had struggled to cohere as a group. A handful of bad apples had caused problems for the Kurds. An inability to speak Kurmanji or Arabic had limited their efficacy in battle. At least thirty were killed.
The wave of volunteers headed to Ukraine was supposed to be orders of magnitude larger. To muster a cohesive battalion out of such a polyglot rabble, and do so before what most analysts predicted would be a swift Russian victory, seemed all but impossible. Yet the Ukrainians purported to have already deployed foreign fighters. On March 7, the defense ministry released a photo of ten men from the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Lithuania, Mexico, and India, grinning in a sandbagged trench, armed and uniformed like soldiers of the Territorial Defense Forces, Ukraine’s rapidly expanding reserve militia. A statement from the defense ministry declared that the first volunteers were “already in position on the outskirts of Kyiv.”
I couldn’t tell if this was a pure propaganda stunt or if war in Europe might really bring about a twenty-first-century reprise of the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. To see for myself, I took the first of the “4 Simple Steps” and sent an email to my nearest Ukrainian consulate, in Houston, attaching a scan of my passport and U.S. Army service record. I received no response.
Judging from conversations on Reddit, where a message board for would-be volunteers had swelled to thirty-five thousand members, I wasn’t the only one whom the Ukrainians ignored. The prevailing opinion was that they were overwhelmed with emails, and determined volunteers should simply fly to Poland and make their way to the border. Though the Ukrainians had one of the largest armies in Europe and a hundred thousand new enlistees already in reserve, their presumed need for warm bodies went unquestioned. One American shared a screenshot of a reply he had received from Ukrainian officials who had urged him to be patient; if he tried to contact them again, the office of the defense attaché had warned, his application would be denied. “Go to the Ukraine Polish border and tell the border guards you are there to fight for Ukraine and they will direct you,” someone advised him. “Bring as much gear as possible.” I was skeptical, but could think of no better plan myself.
The creation of the International Legion set off a massive wave of positive press. Within a few days, hundreds of articles appeared in English-language publications, some offering how-to guides for those interested in enlisting. Practically every major U.S. periodical, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, published glowing profiles of the Americans who were “playing a growing role as the fighting spreads.”
Moscow took notice. As I made my way to Warsaw in the early-morning hours of March 13, a volley of Russian cruise missiles struck a training base in Yavoriv, a dozen miles from the Polish border, where foreign fighters had been congregating. None of the recruits, no matter how intense their experience had been in Iraq or Afghanistan, would have ever seen such an onslaught of precision-guided munitions. Footage of the aftermath showed buildings burning around a crater that looked to be forty feet deep. The Ukrainians confirmed that thirty-five people had been killed, but denied that any had been foreigners. Meanwhile, the Russian defense ministry claimed to have killed up to one hundred and eighty. “The destruction of foreign mercenaries who arrived on the territory of Ukraine will continue,” the statement promised.
The strike left the rapidly coalescing community of foreign fighters doubtful and demoralized, but in large part undeterred. On Reddit, they continued to swap tips and bicker about whether combat experience was really necessary. Some of them seemed woefully underprepared. One hopeful, who said that he could do push-ups and “used to go every month or two to a shooting club,” wanted to know whether the Ukrainian military would provide housing with private bathrooms, and whether he could bring his pet turtle. “You’ll sleep in a hole in the ground. You’ll probably die in a hole,” another user replied. “You can bring your pet turtle. . . . He’ll probably die with you.”
The Ukrainian flag was on display all across Warsaw. Blue-and-yellow bunting decorated lampposts and storefronts, and the villainous visage of Vladimir Putin appeared on wanted posters throughout the city. Hotels in the eastern part of the country were full of people coming and going from the war—mostly going. In 2015, some 1.3 million refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had sought asylum in Europe. In the previous three weeks alone, about 1.8 million Ukrainians had fled to Poland.
I reached the Medyka border crossing on March 17. Clusters of women and children, bundled in puffy coats and lugging suitcases and backpacks, passed through the pedestrian gate in an unending stream. A tent village of aid workers had sprung up on the Polish side with an abundance of bottled water, hot coffee, canned goods, toiletries, baby formula, and pet food. Police, soldiers, and firefighters shepherded refugees onto buses. Campfires burned in the median; an assortment of flags fluttered in the wind; hippie NGO types distributed hot soup; and a thin young man in a scarf and hoodie, who had somehow dragged onto the premises an impossibly battered grand piano with a peace sign painted on the lid, played an adagio rendition of “Lean on Me.”
The would-be fighters were easy to spot. They spoke English and hung out in small groups, never far from piles of tactical backpacks. The International Legion had set up a recruiting tent on the Ukrainian side of the crossing, I was told, but most of the volunteers I found on the Polish side had already tried and failed to join.
Some, like a forty-seven-year-old former helicopter mechanic from Manchester, England, who told me he wanted to “stop that dickhead Putin,” had been rejected for lack of combat experience, which the defense ministry had made a requirement in mid-March. Others had given up on joining after the strike in Yavoriv. “The night I got here, I ran into some American guys,” said a fifty-seven-year-old retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant from Chicago named Timothy O’Brien. “They told us they were at the base that got hit, and these guys were like, ‘Dude, do not go fucking join the legion.’ We’ve heard nothing but horror stories.” Rumor had it that the Ukrainians were using volunteers as cannon fodder. “They’re forcing guys at fucking gunpoint,” O’Brien said. “Putting you on a bus to the front with one AK and a magazine with ten rounds. I came here to fight. I didn’t come here to die.” Michael, a twenty-four-year-old Amazon driver from Massachusetts and a former U.S. Army infantryman, related the same hearsay. “The Ukrainians aren’t even fighting,” he complained. “They’re sending foreigners to the front as meat shields.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of these accounts, or of the tales I heard about the Ukrainians confiscating passports, requiring recruits to sign onerous contracts, and stealing gear. All the volunteers I met in Poland were under the impression that the legionnaires were getting slaughtered in ill-planned suicide missions. And yet the war had been going on for over three weeks, at an intensity comparable to World War II, and not one Westerner had been confirmed among those killed in action. Several weeks after the strike, the U.S. State Department told me they were unaware of any Americans who had died at Yavoriv. It wasn’t until April 29 that the Ukrainian defense ministry disclosed the first Western casualties: Scott Sibley, thirty-six, a British veteran of Afghanistan; an unnamed Dane, twenty-five, who reportedly served in the Jutland Dragoon Regiment in Holstebro; and Willy Cancel Jr., twenty-two, a former prison guard from Kentucky who had been discharged from the Marine Corps for bad conduct.
In the early days of the war, however, it seemed doubtful that any Westerners were in combat at all. The Ukrainians, as far as I could tell, were doing all the hard work of killing and dying. The foreign volunteers seemed to be little more than a media sideshow.
My first stop after crossing the border was Lviv, an ancient city of gargoyles and Gothic spires in the far west of Ukraine. It had been known before the war for its coffee roasters and breweries, and had since become a way station and clearinghouse for volunteers of all stripes. When I arrived on March 22, many of the city’s statues and monuments had been sandbagged and wrapped in plastic, and the stained-glass windows of its cathedrals had been boarded up. A Soviet-era trolley slid past a medieval battlement where soldiers stood vaping. At night, the wet cobblestones gleamed in the neon light of bars, which were limited to selling near beer on account of a wartime ban on alcohol.
Small groups of young and middle-aged men speaking French or English lingered in front of hotels, dressed in varying degrees of tactical attire and studying maps on their phones. They were easy prey for the hordes of reporters in town, who were busy filing dispatches with headlines like “Band of Others,” “Legion of the Damned,” and “Cappuccinos and Kalashnikovs”; or testimonials such as “I thought I was going to die,” “I just want to kill Russians,” and “I don’t want to be cannon fodder.”
The volunteers I spoke to mostly struck me as clueless or delusional, with no real connection to the armed forces. The Ukrainians were running a streamlined media operation, and press officers had little to offer other than what they released in daily briefs to reporters. No one could visit the front lines. Commanders did not give interviews. Field hospitals were off-limits. Soldiers repeatedly seized my phone and deleted photos and videos. No wonder regional American papers, such as the Delaware County Daily Times, were left to rely on the first-person accounts of hometown heroes such as Patrick Creed, a fifty-four-year-old Havertown man who told the paper that he was “constantly clearing houses and buildings of suspected Russians” in Kyiv. To its credit, the New York Times was careful to note that it hadn’t been able to “identify any veterans actively fighting in Ukraine.” But other outlets weren’t so cautious. The Washington Post, for instance, was eager to report that a Norwegian woman named Sandra Andersen Eira had “been on the front lines for the majority of the conflict.”
Other accounts, published in The New York Review of Books and New York magazine, portrayed some of the volunteers as antigovernment extremists, bloodthirsty psychopaths, or hopeless malcontents, but these accounts relied entirely on the dubious claims and social-media antics of would-be fighters in the United States, Poland, or Lviv, hundreds of miles from the front lines. If there was anything that could properly be called a foreign legion, I realized, I wasn’t going to find it here. I needed to go to Kyiv.
At the time, the capital was largely surrounded by Russian tanks and artillery, and the suburbs were getting shelled daily. Yet somehow the trains were still running. On March 27, I made my way to the Lviv station, which was filled with tense and exhausted men and women burdened with suitcases, children, and pets. Overhead was a high, ornate ceiling with peeling plaster arches and a Cyrillic timetable that I couldn’t read. I used a translating app on my phone to buy a ticket, and got directions from a handful of men from Canada, Sweden, and Ireland. Two of them had come to fight, including a savage-looking Swede with a Mickey Mouse tattoo on his temple. The other three were drone salesmen.
They directed me to the cavernous eastbound platform, where soldiers were checking documents. The air-raid sirens went off just as the overnight train to Kyiv arrived, but we boarded as scheduled anyway. There were few of us headed east. Half the berths in my car were unoccupied. Soon, I was fast asleep.
The minute I stepped out of the terminal the next morning, the boom of artillery was audible to the north. The city center, stately and ornate, studded with gilded citadels and domed cathedrals, remained unscathed, but the streets were nearly deserted, save for the masked soldiers manning checkpoints and machine-gun nests. The Russian offensive had faltered, but everyone seemed to agree that it was a ruse, and that the siege would be renewed. Martial law was in effect.
At a bar that was selling pints of ale despite the temporary ban, I met with a senior Ukrainian defense official who asked to remain anonymous. He was wearing a Stechkin automatic pistol under his zip-up jacket, and showed me photos on his phone of alleged Russian atrocities: a dead baby crushed under rubble; a confused civilian wandering through the wreckage; and the bodies of charred Ukrainian soldiers, the victims of what he claimed was a white phosphorus attack.
I asked him about the International Legion, and he said the government had not been prepared to receive so many volunteers. About a third of them had been turned back for lack of combat experience. “It would not be a good thing,” he said, “for them to be killed and us to have this reputation.” Another third left “after they saw real war,” by which he meant the strike on Yavoriv. The remainder had not been organized into a freestanding unit, he admitted. The volunteers were being housed at various locations around Lviv and Kyiv, and few had weapons, body armor, or helmets. There were a few highly experienced veterans at the front, he said, but that was it.
His account tracked with what I had heard from Matthew VanDyke, the freelance military trainer I’d seen at the airport. “The international legion doesn’t exist,” he texted me. “It was all propaganda to elicit international support, media coverage, and reinforce the idea that it’s the world vs Russia.” In Kyiv, he had met with a group of about sixteen legionnaires at a hotel on Peremohy Square. “Saddest group you’ll ever see,” he told me, “a clown car of misfits.” “The entire thing was an ill-conceived ploy to internationalize the conflict in the press,” he added. “They want people to apply through the Embassy because they aren’t really going to bring them here. The ones that came on their own, they’re not sure how to handle. It’s a mess.”
At Saint Volodymyr’s Cathedral, reputed to be the tomb of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners, armorers, and artillerymen, I met with Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of the Georgian National Legion, a militia of foreign fighters—mostly from the Caucasus—that has been in Ukraine since 2014. Mamulashvili, a burly, hirsute Orthodox Christian who has fought against Russia in four different wars (in Georgia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, and Ukraine), sometimes came here to pray.
I had heard that the Georgian unit tolerated foreign fighters of all stripes—including white supremacists from the United States—but Mamulashvili was quick to deny it. “We do not accept those radical organizations,” he said. “We tried to never accept them, neo-Nazis, or racists, or whatever. It’s totally unacceptable. We just kick them out.” Mamulashvili told me that of his seven hundred fighters, about one hundred and fifty were from somewhere other than Eastern Europe, and put the number of Americans at fifty. His men operate in small teams, he said, attacking Russian supply lines. During reconnaissance, they move on foot and avoid using radios or cell phones. They might spend a week in the forest, observing roads and tracking Russian vehicles before launching an ambush. They had just killed sixty Russians, he said, and captured three tanks in the village of Rudnytske. He showed me footage of the operation on his phone, and complained that Ukrainian security officials were always censoring his TikTok videos.
Zelensky’s announcement about the International Legion “fucked everything up,” Mamulashvili said. “It became a shit show because they were not prepared for so many volunteers.” Failing to locate any appreciable foreign brigade, droves of surplus English-speakers had tried to find a place in the Georgian unit. “We have no time to start training or to make new squads,” Mamulashvili said. After a few weeks, he suspended recruitment of Westerners. “I am taking only Georgians now,” he said. “To Georgians I can explain that you have to wait two weeks for a weapon to be issued. I can’t tell that to Americans. They are too impatient.”
Another unit known to accept foreign fighters is the far-right Azov Battalion, an elite militia whose neo-pagan, quasi-fascist aesthetic and Aryan supremacist ideology have long made it an embarrassment to Western liberals backing Ukraine. I found Azov’s base at an old Soviet compound on the industrial outskirts of Kyiv, where I met its founder, Andriy Biletsky.
Biletsky, dressed in an olive-green sweater, with a pistol on his hip, received me in the concrete hall of a defunct factory building, where Azov’s yellow flag, with its swastika-like Wolfsangel symbol, hung from the rafters. He denied that there had ever been Americans in his ranks. There had been U.S. trainers once, but that was it. “There are Croats,” he told me, “Belarussians, Georgians, some British if I remember well, but not many.”
As for the International Legion, “it does exist,” Biletsky said, “but it is more psyops,” intended to shore up global support for Ukraine. “It’s not practically relevant,” he said, noting that the reserve militia already had a surfeit of manpower.
While most of the Azov regiment was in Mariupol, surrounded by Russian forces and running low on water, Biletsky had come to Kyiv in search of new recruits. There were scores of frustrated foreign volunteers, I told him, looking to join any unit that would have them. Was Azov open to Americans, Canadians, Britons, and the like? Biletsky advised Westerners to volunteer in a humanitarian capacity, but he did not answer the question.
On my way out, I spotted four men in grungy paramilitary attire loitering by a wooden guardhouse. Spray-painted on it in block letters were the English words white power, along with a smiley face. I took a photo by pretending to take a phone call, but didn’t attempt to talk to the group. They were speaking English, but it was hard to hear them over the rumble of an idling armored vehicle. The only words I heard distinctly were “foreign legion.”
During my reporting in Syria, I had been able to tour the training base for foreign fighters, interview their commanders, and visit groups of them at the front, where they played a small but appreciable role in the liberation of Raqqa. Here in Ukraine, I had come to understand, I would find nothing so concrete. The main significance of the International Legion for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine, it seemed, was the win it represented for Ukraine in the information war. It had been so successful, in fact, that Russia had found it necessary to found its own international unit. Two weeks after invading Ukraine, Putin approved a proposal to deploy sixteen thousand foreign troops from the Middle East to fight alongside separatists in the Donbas, an unlikely plan that Moscow backed up by flying in a few hundred mercenaries from Syria.
The savvier Ukrainians put on a far more convincing show. The first volunteers to arrive had been interviewed, screened, offered proper contracts, and given housing. Some had been allowed to wear the Ukrainian flag and the patch of the Territorial Defense Forces. Perhaps a dozen or so had made their way to the front lines, attached themselves to Ukrainian units, and taken part in patrols. But the Ukrainians, busy with more urgent matters and deterred by the strike on Yavoriv, had done little to honor Zelensky’s promise to arm, train, and equip all the friends of Ukraine who had showed up at his invitation.
Zelensky’s move had been a brilliant exercise in wartime propaganda. The errant Westerners I had met knocking around Warsaw, the border, Lviv, and Kyiv in search of the International Legion were merely the unfortunate fallout. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for them. Few of them had college degrees or steady jobs. They had drained their bank accounts to buy winter gear, ballistic vests, medical kits, and plane tickets. A few may have been motivated by bloodthirst or white supremacy, but most I met expressed views that were centrist, liberal, or garden-variety conservative. By and large, they had simply been sucked into the spectacle. Those who were veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, a cohort now entering or well into middle age, might have felt the possibility of renewed relevance and the old thrill of being at the center of world events. Many of them are still in Ukraine, looking for something—anything—to do.
The way stations and safehouses where a few dozen of them were staying weren’t easy to find, but I managed to track one down in a converted art gallery near Saint Sophia Cathedral. It was a semiofficial base of the reserve militia, though it felt more like a clubhouse. Viacheslav Drofa, a twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian who showed me in, introduced himself as a special forces soldier but later clarified that he was a rapper waiting on his army paperwork to go through. He was dressed in a uniform of his own devising, with a knife and combat gloves attached to the front of his ballistic vest.
Inside, art featuring aliens and mathematical equations still hung on the gallery walls. Bedding, clothes, and bags were on the floor, cold pizza lay on a table, and pots and pans were stacked by the kitchen sink. Seven or eight men whose military statuses were unclear to me came and went in a patchwork of army attire, street clothes, pajamas, and shower shoes. Among them were an American named Will and a Pole named Robert.
The first question they asked me was whether I drank. A bottle of whiskey stood on a sticky table, surrounded by plastic shot glasses. I politely declined (it was two in the afternoon). Their next question was whether I smoked weed.
Down we went to a bomb shelter that they had dubbed the “smoking room.” There was a water bong made from a wine bottle immersed in a ceramic jar, and a baggie of a strain called AK-47. A bare lightbulb was set in a brick wall covered in graffiti: 4:20, mushrooms, Egyptian hieroglyphics, a star of David, a skull and crossbones. The air vents had been painted to look like vein-blown eyeballs.
A few Ukrainian soldiers, wet from the rain, came in to get high. My translator, a law student named Ihor, declined to take a rip, but I gave in. Unused to being stoned in a war zone, I stared at all the loaded guns in the room and noted with rising discomfort the carelessness with which they were handled. One soldier had a Futurama sticker on the magazine of his AK and carried a dagger with a pommel shaped like a boar’s head. A political banner depicting a blond woman with braids hung on the wall. Ihor had his arm over a box containing a DJI Air 2 drone, which we would later hand off to soldiers in Kherson. His hair was buzzed and he wore a navy trench coat with oxblood Doc Martens.
I turned to Will, the American. He wouldn’t say where in the United States he was from, or give his surname. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He was in his mid-twenties and had an air of optimism about him, dressed in a beanie, base-layer shirt, and cargo pants. He had a speech impediment, and one of his eyes was slightly crossed. Though he had never been in the army, he said, “I have more experience with guns than most of the military guys coming here.”
In search of the International Legion, Will had tried to join the Georgians, who sent him to the Red Cross, who in turn gave him the address of a hospital in Kyiv that was said to be taking volunteers. He was turned away there too. “It took me a while to get the right connections,” he said. He had finally made his way to the base, where he helped the reserve unit deliver food, bottled water, and other supplies to the besieged outskirts of Kyiv. It wasn’t the front lines, but it was still dangerous work. Only a few days earlier, Robert, the Polish volunteer, had been thrown into a brick wall by the detonation of an artillery round. A doctor had spent an hour removing shrapnel from his leg, he said. His wrist and ankle were still bandaged.
Roils of smoke enveloped the crowded basement. Guys were coughing and choking, passing around a pistol for inspection. Someone turned on techno music. A lanky, haggard Ukrainian with a big beard, named Jura, sank down in a busted chair wedged between a refrigerator and the wall, a cigarette in his fingers and a Kalashnikov between his knees. He was thirty-three, and before joining the Territorial Defense Forces he had been a developer of nonfungible tokens. Jura said that the Ukrainians were using cryptocurrency at every level of the war effort, from receiving donations to buying boots, vests, and gloves. But what they needed most, he said, was antidrone technology, “good info about Russian numbers and telecoms systems,” and radio-frequency receivers, because the Russians were using unsecured channels on the front lines.
Drofa interrupted us. It was time, he said, to make a supply run, to a state-funded home for the elderly and disabled in the Obolon district. The donated foodstuffs had already been loaded into the trunks of two cars. I rode with Drofa in his tricked-out Audi Quattro, which he would total in a head-on collision with a Renault four days later. He cranked the engine, an earring in the shape of a hacksaw dangling from his ear and a chocolate-covered cookie in his mouth.
In the passenger seat was forty-six-year-old Pavel Panych. “He is a criminal,” Drofa explained. Panych had been released from prison a few years earlier, and remained an influential figure in some sort of carceral mafia. His societal contribution in these extraordinary times was to serve as a liaison between the Red Cross and what I gathered were neighborhood councils or building cooperatives in Obolon. He was bald and slim, pale and leathery, and wore a fanny pack. His glasses had tinted lenses that made them look like goggles. He smiled and made a peace sign. “This is the life,” he said.
We sped through red lights in the rain-darkened streets of deserted Kyiv, where virtually every store was closed. Some of the street signs had been spray-painted black to disorient the invaders. Russian spies had marked lampposts, the corners of buildings, and other monuments with ultraviolet paint that could only be seen with black light—the Ukrainians had already nabbed a number of saboteurs.
The banks of the Dnipro were bare mud, and at sundown the water looked as though it were saturated with blue and purple dye. A billboard depicted politicians clutching bags of money and holding their stomachs. At every major intersection there were fighting positions surrounded by antitank obstacles known as Czech hedgehogs. We had to show our documents five or six times before we reached our destination.
The home had fortunately escaped shelling. A woman named Irena Zuy came down to meet us, wearing a puffy coat. Originally from Donetsk, she had been living here, awaiting medical imaging of tumors on her back, when the Russians invaded. “This is like a nightmare,” she said.
A sound like thunder boomed in the distance: three muffled, rolling explosions. “Pretty close,” Drofa said. “But this is our troops. When it sounds like a storm, it means this is artillery from our side pushing them out.” Panych held hands with the old folks, gave them hugs, and posed for photos. He made Zuy’s daughter laugh, a little. Before we left, he distributed copies of his self-published prison memoir, Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
By this time, it was apparent that the Russian offensive to take Kyiv had failed. The Russians’ logistical problems, ill preparation, and poor tactics, as well as the stalwart Ukrainian defense, had yielded an unexpected result. On March 29, the Russians announced a withdrawal from the northern part of the capital, though the rumble and thud of artillery on the city’s periphery continued as Ukrainian units recaptured suburbs one by one.
On April 1, they retook Zabuchchya, a small settlement on the Bucha River. The next day, I visited the area with two other reporters, two aid workers, and a young fixer. With us were two new enlistees in the reserves: Ihor, the law student who was translating for me, and Yurii, a lawyer and coffee shop owner. They had one rifle between them and no uniforms, just blue armbands on their overcoats. Our three cars were loaded with sacks of potatoes, jars of pickled preserves, loaves of bread, and bags of sugar to pass out to the people of Zabuchchya, who had been under Russian occupation for the past three weeks.
The weather was cold and wet. Wrecked cars and chunks of asphalt littered the highway, and tracked vehicles had flattened the guardrails. A gas station had been the scene of a tank battle. We passed neighborhoods that looked as if they had been hit by asteroids. Cables hung from damaged pylons. The cellular network was dead.
Leaving the main road, we stopped at a cemetery and found an abandoned SUV, stripped of its wheels, with tree branches tied to its roof for camouflage. The driver’s side was riddled with bullet holes. Dirt-battered intestines lay on the ground a short distance away, along with a large fragment of skull. Yurii turned it over with his foot, revealing buzzed, blond hair. A dog wandered up to us with its head stuck in a plastic container, but slunk off into the forest before we could help.
In Zabuchchya, people came out of their homes to meet us, looking rattled and unwashed. They showed us the damage done to their homes by artillery and rockets. The invaders had camped out in the nearby forest, they said. They had burned down the houses of policemen and threatened to shoot people. Old women wept, and old men praised the armed forces of Ukraine.
On the two-lane road leading south out of the suburb, over a quarter-mile stretch, more than a dozen tanks lay scorched, flattened, mangled, gutted by fire, and oxidized, some of them still smoking. Most had their turrets blown off, which suggested the work of Ukrainians armed with shoulder-fired antitank missiles. Misty pine forest on both sides of the road made the spot ideal for an ambush. It smelled like the remains of a campfire.
We wandered around the mechanical carnage, wary of mines. Our fixer picked up a tank periscope that must have weighed thirty pounds, and we took turns looking through the viewfinder. I spotted a blackened grenade on the ground. That’s when I noticed the man hanging in the burnt turret next to me.
He wore a padded tanker’s helmet emblazoned with the number 517. One of his arms hung out of the tank, tangled up in wires, and the sleeve of his striped jacket was shredded. A heavy metal bar, some sort of gaffe, had fallen across the hatch of the tank and prevented his comrades from pulling his body out. The top half of his face had been burned black.
A patrol of Ukrainian soldiers stopped alongside us in a convoy of mud-washed Nissan pickups and took photos of the dead man. One of them scrambled up the cannon to get a close-up of his blistered, bloodied face. The other soldiers prowled around the dislocated turret in balaclavas and kneepads, recording videos on their phones. In another burnt-out vehicle, a gutted armored personnel carrier, they found the carbonized husk of a headless Russian’s torso.
One of the Ukrainian soldiers—a sniper, to judge by his rifle—had on a newsboy cap and a nice watch. Another had long hair and plug earrings. It was the closest I had been to regular Ukrainian army infantrymen, and though I was weary of pestering everyone about Americans, it was finally my chance to ask real frontline fighters about the International Legion.
The soldier in the newsboy hat didn’t seem to understand me. His long-haired comrade remembered Zelensky’s announcement, but the only foreigners he had seen in the army were Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. “I hear about it,” he said in English, “but I never meet it in real life.” They ran off to catch up with their departing convoy, and I watched them drive north toward Bucha, where the first confirmed reports of mass graves had just emerged. The next day, the government would declare the whole region liberated. The battle for Kyiv was over, and so was my hunt for traces of the International Legion. I was convinced that it was more myth than reality, and that the role of foreign volunteers in the defense of the capital had been virtually nil. Eager as Westerners were to fight in Ukraine, it was plain that they were not needed.
Time Schedule for Video Segments:
2:04: What Seth learned from being in Ukraine that you won’t learn from western media 12:32: Was the ouster of Ukraine’s president in 2014 a revolution or a coup?
19:45: Could the White House have averted the invasion – and could it end the war now?
37:46: The degree of on-the-ground American involvement in Ukraine and Syria
49:32: Why Seth warns of frozen conflict when others predict Ukrainian victory
59:14: The extent of pro-Russian sentiment in eastern Ukraine
1:02:33: Seth: War always means atrocity, so we should avoid wars
1:15:47: Is wartime reporting less objective now than usual?
Note: This is a Youtube Video of an interview. There is no transcript nor any text version available.
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