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Ukraine war volunteers are coming home, reckoning with difficult fight
Americans and other foreign fighters who’ve taken up arms against Russia describe glaring disparities in what they expected and what they experienced
To Dakota’s surprise, it wasn’t the shelling that terrified him most.
A Marine Corps veteran who volunteered to fight in Ukraine, he has taken cover behind walls as Russian gunfire punched through and felt the throttle of artillery so many times that his catchphrase, “It’s normal,” became a joke within the unit.
What wasn’t normal, he said, was the feeling of dread while he hid and listened as Russian attack helicopters strafed the position his team of tank hunters had just fled. That moment, he said, “was quite honestly the most unsettled I had been the entire time.” Dakota, who is home in Ohio now after seven weeks of fighting abroad, is among the legion of Western volunteers who have taken up arms against Russia.
Dakota’s cohort of foreign volunteers was attached to a Ukrainian military unit and brought by yellow school bus to Kyiv, from which they were sent northwest into an embattled town outside the capital. It was early March. They were issued antitank weapons and Javelin missiles but no batteries for the launch unit, he said. Without a power source, the equipment was inoperable.
By the end of the second night, eight of the 20 volunteers in Dakota’s unit had abandoned their posts, he said, including a fellow Marine veteran who appeared to break his machine gun with a rock in the hope of passing it off as battle damage. Another feigned an injury, he said.
In interviews with The Washington Post, foreign fighters from the United States and elsewhere described glaring disparities between what they expected the war to be like and what they experienced. They recalled going into battle underequipped and outgunned, the occasional thrill of blowing up Russian vehicles, and feeling torn over whether to go back to Ukraine. Some intend to do so. Others saw friends die and decided enough is enough.
For several, an inflection point came in late April when 22-year-old Willy Joseph Cancel, another Marine Corps veteran, was killed in combat northwest of Mykolaiv, a region that has seen ferocious violence as Russian commanders have sought to widen territorial gains. The full circumstances surrounding Cancel’s death remain a mystery, and his body has not been recovered. Attempts to speak with Cancel’s family were unsuccessful.
And while the exact number of Americans volunteering is unknown, an estimated 4,000 expressed interest after the invasion in late February. Many entered the fight after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally appealed to foreign volunteers to journey there and fight.
Military veterans, in particular, have been drawn to the war, emboldened by their combat training and an eagerness to apply their skills in a conflict that, for many, feels like a struggle of good versus evil.
But the conflict also has drawn Western military veterans who either have never deployed into combat previously or have experienced only asymmetrical insurgencies — not this type of war, with contested airspace, unrelenting Russian rocket bombardment, and swarms of killer drones with sophisticated thermal targeting technology.
Pascal, a veteran of the German army, was on a team with Cancel, the American killed in combat in late April. Problems arose during their first mission, he said.
The team suspected their two-way radios were being monitored by Russian forces, and they lacked extra batteries, forcing them to rely on unsecured cellphones and WhatsApp to communicate. Soon after they exchanged plans, their position was attacked by Russian artillery, he said.
The volunteers felt underinformed during many of their missions, not knowing where they were — and, vitally, where the Russians were, Pascal said. The day Cancel was killed, he said, they took fire from a position they believed to be Ukrainian but didn’t have radio communication to confirm. Two members of the team ventured out to investigate. Gunfire sounded, and they never returned, he said.
“From the beginning, we had no chance,” Pascal said in an interview. “I was asking myself why I survived and the others did not.”
Americans and other foreign fighters who’ve taken up arms against Russia describe glaring disparities in what they expected and what they experienced
To Dakota’s surprise, it wasn’t the shelling that terrified him most.
A Marine Corps veteran who volunteered to fight in Ukraine, he has taken cover behind walls as Russian gunfire punched through and felt the throttle of artillery so many times that his catchphrase, “It’s normal,” became a joke within the unit.
What wasn’t normal, he said, was the feeling of dread while he hid and listened as Russian attack helicopters strafed the position his team of tank hunters had just fled. That moment, he said, “was quite honestly the most unsettled I had been the entire time.” Dakota, who is home in Ohio now after seven weeks of fighting abroad, is among the legion of Western volunteers who have taken up arms against Russia.
Dakota’s cohort of foreign volunteers was attached to a Ukrainian military unit and brought by yellow school bus to Kyiv, from which they were sent northwest into an embattled town outside the capital. It was early March. They were issued antitank weapons and Javelin missiles but no batteries for the launch unit, he said. Without a power source, the equipment was inoperable.
By the end of the second night, eight of the 20 volunteers in Dakota’s unit had abandoned their posts, he said, including a fellow Marine veteran who appeared to break his machine gun with a rock in the hope of passing it off as battle damage. Another feigned an injury, he said.
In interviews with The Washington Post, foreign fighters from the United States and elsewhere described glaring disparities between what they expected the war to be like and what they experienced. They recalled going into battle underequipped and outgunned, the occasional thrill of blowing up Russian vehicles, and feeling torn over whether to go back to Ukraine. Some intend to do so. Others saw friends die and decided enough is enough.
For several, an inflection point came in late April when 22-year-old Willy Joseph Cancel, another Marine Corps veteran, was killed in combat northwest of Mykolaiv, a region that has seen ferocious violence as Russian commanders have sought to widen territorial gains. The full circumstances surrounding Cancel’s death remain a mystery, and his body has not been recovered. Attempts to speak with Cancel’s family were unsuccessful.
And while the exact number of Americans volunteering is unknown, an estimated 4,000 expressed interest after the invasion in late February. Many entered the fight after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally appealed to foreign volunteers to journey there and fight.
Military veterans, in particular, have been drawn to the war, emboldened by their combat training and an eagerness to apply their skills in a conflict that, for many, feels like a struggle of good versus evil.
But the conflict also has drawn Western military veterans who either have never deployed into combat previously or have experienced only asymmetrical insurgencies — not this type of war, with contested airspace, unrelenting Russian rocket bombardment, and swarms of killer drones with sophisticated thermal targeting technology.
Pascal, a veteran of the German army, was on a team with Cancel, the American killed in combat in late April. Problems arose during their first mission, he said.
The team suspected their two-way radios were being monitored by Russian forces, and they lacked extra batteries, forcing them to rely on unsecured cellphones and WhatsApp to communicate. Soon after they exchanged plans, their position was attacked by Russian artillery, he said.
The volunteers felt underinformed during many of their missions, not knowing where they were — and, vitally, where the Russians were, Pascal said. The day Cancel was killed, he said, they took fire from a position they believed to be Ukrainian but didn’t have radio communication to confirm. Two members of the team ventured out to investigate. Gunfire sounded, and they never returned, he said.
“From the beginning, we had no chance,” Pascal said in an interview. “I was asking myself why I survived and the others did not.”
