‘The Romantics Are Gone’: A Year Later, Many Foreign Fighters Have Left Ukraine

Not long after Russian bombs first started dropping on Kyiv in February 2022, one of the iconic stories capturing the imagination of the West was the waves of foreign fighters rushing into Ukraine on foot, by car, or train. Among them were hundreds of U.S. vets looking for a “just war”, some so-called “war tourists”, a photogenic Kennedy, and even an MSNBC talking head.

But a year later, the flow of foreigners joining the Ukrainian military or the International Legion—the brainchild of President Volodyymyr Zelenskyy’s administration calling on foreign citizens to join an official wing of their military—has measurably slowed down. 

“To be honest, we don't have a big line of those foreigners who want to join [Ukrainian Armed Forces] right now,” said a source in the Ukrainian security services who could not be named for safety reasons. “The romantics [who] were present in February [and] March are gone.”

At the moment, the overall number of foreign fighters on behalf of Kyiv is thought to be around 2000 in-uniform, many of whom are skilled and committed soldiers to the cause. There’s an entire Belarussian regiment (the largest contingent of foreign fighters), some are dissident Russians, several are serving in the Ukrainian special forces branch, while others have taken on vital roles instructing new recruits, or being almost legendary and evasive troops. 

• Are you a foreign fighter who joined the Ukrainian war effort or know of someone who is? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Ben Makuch on email at ben.makuch@vice.com or on the Wire app @benmakuch.

Even so, the numbers of foreigners have undeniably dropped from the roughly 20,000 volunteer applications the Ukrainian government quoted that it had in April 2022. Of late, the Ukrainian government hasn’t released up-to-date figures to the media on the International Legion. (A request for comment to both the Ukrainian military and Ministry of Foreign Affairs went unanswered.) 

What is known is that there is a diverse flavor to the Legion, which pools from at least 55 countries including Canada, Finland, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Georgia, Poland, Sweden, Nigeria, South Korea, Norway, Spain, and Israel to name a handful. The many soldiers from abroad who are fighting remain committed, even if it is only for a few months at a time,  and there is still, certainly to some degree, a steady if small flow of volunteers joining up. 

Carl Larson, an Iraq War veteran who heeded Zelenskyy’s calls to join the International Legion and left for Ukraine from Seattle last March, said the decline in fresh foreign recruits into the conflict isn’t a new development but has more to do with weeding out the bad ones.

“The war tourists and thrill seekers have decreased in number,” said Larson, who served in the Legion for nearly five months. At one point, he helped Ukrainian recruiters on the ground identifying the good international volunteers versus the “misfits” and says the current numbers of active foreign fighters (on the side of Ukraine) seems accurate.

“I think 1000 to 3000 [volunteers] is probably a good bet if you're counting uniformed combatants and not including trainers and civilian volunteers of whom, there's probably many more thousands over there.”

Larson returned home from combat to a job in the tech sector and started the nonprofit organization Ukraine Defense Support, which coordinates aid for the Ukrainian military and the International Legion (former legionnaires are among its organizers). To his mind, legionnaires and foreign volunteers in other Ukrainian military units have mostly served for a few months at a time then either returned home, or in some rarer occasions, went home within weeks.

“Maybe twenty-percent of guys bail the first time they're under artillery fire and then the rest kind of slowly trickle away,” he said. “Almost all of them are gone after three to six months.”

There’s no denying the critical role volunteer soldiers have made to the Kyiv government’s fight against the Kremlin’s invasion. Besides corralling global interest in the conflict, media has even likened the influx of volunteers to Ukraine with the exploits of the Spanish Civil War, an often romanticized conflict with international brigades on both sides. Yet the number of dead from the war is rising sharply and foreign fighters haven’t been spared from the casualties list. 

According to the same Ukrainian security source, about 100 foreign fighters have been killed, including several Americans, Brits, and Canadians. Others have been captured, reportedly enduring torture at a Russian “black site.” In the early months of the invasion many volunteer soldiers, who once seemed eager on social media to get into the fighting, quickly returned home complaining of becoming “cannon fodder” and being ill equipped. 

Many of those who either stayed in the International Legion or signed on into other Ukrainian units, including decorated combat veterans of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, encountered fighting they never expected to see. 

“Some of the fighters continue, some quit, some are disappointed,” the security source said. “But right now everyone understands that this [war] will last for a long time, not all people are ready for long fighting.” 

Contracts for foreigners in the International Legion and in other branches of the military are entirely volunteer; foreign soldiers can leave whenever they want and stand down from certain missions if they choose, but still receive roughly the same monthly wage (with healthcare benefits) as their Ukrainian colleagues.

Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of the Georgian Legion (a unit within the Ukrainian military structure that has taken on hundreds of international soldiers in the past), agreed that the number of new Western volunteers in recent months has slowed, mostly because of the harshness of the conflict. 

“Foreign volunteers generally did a great job,” he told VICE News, but “they are not used to these conditions.”

Mamulashvili gave one simple example to illustrate his point.

“For Westerners it's common to take a shower once a week,” he said. “Here you can't do that.”

(But several foreign fighters in the past have said the situation sometimes goes far beyond poor living conditions, telling VICE News and other media outlets that the on-the-ground conditions can also include suicide missions and violent abuse.) 

Mamulashvili estimated most “Western soldiers don't stay more than three months” with the majority of the foreign fighters having previous combat experience in NATO militaries. He says that when they do leave, he fills their positions with more Georgians.

The Kremlin throughout this conflict has seen foreigners and the International Legion as both a symbolic and legitimate military target. Within weeks of the full-scale invasion, Russian bombers intentionally struck a base in western Ukraine, far from fighting at the time, housing 1000 foreign recruits, in what was up until then one of the worst single air strikes of the conflict, killing 35 people and injuring 134. 

President Vladimir Putin’s government has repeatedly and falsely labeled foreign volunteers as “mercenaries” to discredit their efforts as a propaganda trope in Russian media. Unlike the thousands of Wagner mercenaries recruited into Russian forces (many of whom are convicted criminals recruited from prison and then promised clemency following their service), foreign fighters in the war are required to officially sign a contract into the Ukrainian military as enlisted, active-duty soldiers that make them (by the standards of the Geneva Convention) no different in status from their native colleagues. 

Kacper Rękawek, a leading researcher on foreign fighters in Ukraine at the University of Oslo’s Center for Research on Extremism (who recently published a book on the subject), said part of the decrease in their numbers on the front line towards the end of last year was the holiday season and the need for a break.

“Towards the end of the year and the beginning of the New Year, there's Christmas, people are going home for rest and relaxation,” he said.

According to Rękawek’s research and sources on the ground, the biggest influx of fighters came in March 2022, as the heavy bombing offensives in Kyiv shocked the world, then once more in the summer when a major counter offensive took place.

“The best people were coming in March and then late summer when there was the Kharkiv offensive,” he said, among them elite vets from NATO countries, some of whom had special operations backgrounds. Rękawek also said that some battle-hardened vets (especially from the U.S. and Europe) who have fought in Ukraine and then went home—are returning to units.

“At the same time, some people who left home throughout the summer and early autumn last year are coming back,” he said.

For Larson, the back and forth of volunteers, who have the option of jumping in and out of combat months apart, is something he’s hearing, too.

“A lot of them are going back, actually, and they've been there before, so they know the deal,” he said about a fresh round of soldiers poised to return to the Legion or other units. “I know a lot of guys who are like: ‘Yeah, I'll go back in the spring.’”

But the legitimate enlistment process still hasn’t stopped the Kremlin, which doesn’t even fully recognize the Zelenskyy government, from deeming international fighters as illegitimate combatants or CIA plants. For example, in June, two British men, Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, and Moroccan national Brahim Saadoun, were all sentenced to death as “mercenaries” after being captured during the siege of Mariupol. All three were eventually traded in a prisoner exchange, but were tortured daily.  

The future of foreign volunteers in Ukraine likely lies in how long the conflict will last. Just as Western arms have been critical in beating back the Russian invasion, Ukraine has always largely relied on its own people to fight. But for this war the Kremlin can draw on a country of over 140 million people, versus Ukraine’s 43 million. 

Questions about Ukrainian manpower are already arising and another round of foreigners may one day be needed.

“Maybe there'll be a fresh one,” said Larson of the possibility of a new wave of foreign volunteers ready to fight. “Who knows?”

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Correction: A photo caption previously said Carl Larson plans to return to the Ukraine conflict. That is not the case.