Inside Ukraine’s Foreign Legion | Colin Freeman
We speak with journalist Colin Freeman about covering wars from Iraq and Somalia to Ukraine, including his own kidnapping by Somali pirates and the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. We also dig into his book The Mad and the Brave, the foreign volunteers who joined Ukraine’s International Legion, and the chaos, courage, and darker realities they faced on the front lines.
Colin's book: https://a.co/d/0j8oksfv
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00:00 — Start
01:26 — Colin Freeman’s Path Into Journalism
05:28 — Going Freelance to Cover Iraq
08:09 — The Reality of Freelance War Reporting
11:26 — Kidnapped by Pirates in Somalia
17:46 — Covering the Opening Days of the Ukraine War
21:21 — Taking the Train Into Besieged Kyiv
24:14 — Meeting Ukraine’s Foreign Volunteers
32:04 — Fantasists, Screamers, and the Yavoriv Missile Strike
36:36 — Douglas Carter and the Chaos of the Front Line
42:04 — Hugh Lee and the Shock of Ukraine’s Battlefield
49:08 — Pez and the Hunt for a Front Line
55:19 — Pez’s Near Capture on a Dnipro Island
59:30 — Foreign Volunteers Captured by Russia
01:05:22 — Torture in a Russian Black Site
01:14:05 — Mariupol, Azovstal, and John Harding
01:25:45 — The Bizarre POW Release and Roman Abramovich
01:31:40 — Ryan O’Leary, Chosen Company, and Jack Knight
01:37:15 — The Dark Side of the Legion
01:48:47 — Did Ukraine’s Foreign Legion Actually Matter?
01:52:50 — Could the West Have Built a Better Legion?
01:58:40 — The Mad and the Brave and Closing Thoughts
#ukrainewar #ukraineforeignlegion
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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy
here with tonight's guest journalist Colin Freeman. He is the
author of The Mad and the Brave, which is a
book about the Ukrainian foreign legion, that is, the foreigners
from I mean, he'll tell us, but fifty some odd
countries that came to Ukraine to help defend the country
from Putin's invasion, the Russian invasion, mostly you know, starting
on the twenty two, twenty twenty two full scale invasion
that began going forward is kind of the context of
the book. Collins also had an interesting career in his
own right as a journalist covering various combat zones. So
thank you Colin for joining us, and thanks for reaching.
Speaker 2: Out, thanks for having me on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just read the book, the PDF that you
sent me on. I'm gonna I need to order a
hard copy for my library. I want to have it
in my collection. I just finished reading it before we
started this interview, and it was very, very good. Like
I was telling you before the show, I wish I
had written it because it was that good. So, Golan,
let's start off a little bit with your kind of
origin story. How did you grow up, Where did you
grow up and how did that sort of take you
towards journalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I grew up.
Speaker 3: In Edinburgh and Scotland, and I think when I was young,
I didn't have any interest in anything particular. I didn't
want to be a banker, didn't want to be a lawyer,
that kind of thing. I couldn't really work out what
I wanted to do, and I realized that journalism was
quite a good profession for people who aren't interested in
anything in particular, because every day is essentially different. Certainly
that's the case if you're working on a general current
affairs newspaper. So after I left school and went to university,
I think by the end of Uni I decided I
did that I would I would try and become a journalist.
I didn't do much at university in terms of journalism.
I then got a job on a local paper in Grimsby,
which is a town in the north of England, doing
very kind of typical local paper stories, court stories, stories
about animals, stuck up trees, village, village shows, all that
sort of stuff, you know, the kind of but it's
a sort of microcosm of the world around us. And
while it sometimes feels boring at the time, you do
get to sort of see every side of human life,
from the you know, life in the courts and the
kind of darker underbelly of of of of a place,
to the way the government works at local level, who
the movers and shakers are, and of course all the
human interest stories in between.
Speaker 2: It's more that the some of.
Speaker 3: The stories rather than the the individual stories themselves. It's
a great chance really to just sort of sea life
up front in all its different shades. Then I moved
down to London to cut a long story short, and
worked on a tabloid news agency chasing celebrities around. I've
been I've been told to get lost by all manner
of famous British celebrities, and some B list ones as well,
like the Oasis, the Spice Girls, all these people. I
think at one point or another I said, no comment,
please go away to me. Probably did some American ones
as well, but I didn't get very far. And then
that that was the kind of stepping stone that tabloid
stuff to Fleet Street or you know, which is which
is where our national newspapers the shorthand for our national
newspapers and it toughens you up a bit, gets you
used to you know, gives you a bit of a
thick skin. Then I worked on the London Evening Standard,
which is kind of like the equivalent of the New
York Post. I suppose it's London's main, you know, newspaper,
but it sort of sees itself as a national paper.
I was there for about four years, but I only
got so far up the chain. Really, I wasn't one
of them, you know, their brightest rising stars. And if
that's the case in a competitive newsroom environment, you tend
to realize that, you know, you're never going to do
that well. And when the really big stories happened, such
as the Iraq War, when it was looming, you realize
you're not going to be part of the team that's
going to get sent. And I think it was the
Iraq War started in March of two thousand and three,
if I remember correctly, and many as many of your
listeners will remember that there was quite a kind of
big roll up to the run up to the war
where it was pretty clear it was going to happen.
You know, you have troop deployments to the golf and
so on. Months in advance under I think at Christmas
of two thousand and two, about three months before the
war started, I was on another celebrity doorstep and sitting
outside some celebrities house waiting for them to comment on
some story, not even sure if they were there or not.
I was winging the photographer I was with about how
the team for the to cover the Iraq War for
the Standard had already been picked and I wasn't gonna
be on it, not to any my great surprise, and
he said, well, look, you know, rather than just sort
of sitting there bitching, why don't you do and cover
the war as a freelancer.
Speaker 2: And I still thought, can you do that?
Speaker 3: And it seemed a crazy idea, but it's sort of a
little light bulb in my head and I thought, well,
you know, I'll go and try and do it, and
if nothing else, it will be like a kind of
a gap year or a backpacking adventure with with with
a bit of a difference, maybe with a bit more purpose.
So off I went to Iraq. It seemed like a
great idea to me. Some of the other people that
I ran it past thought, no, that's that's absolute bloody madness.
You know, you don't speak Arabic, you don't have any
contacts out in Iraq, you don't have any hostile environment
training and combat experience like that. You've got no work
lined up, and actually you don't even know where Iraq is,
which was true. I had to look where it was
on the map. But anyway, I went out there. I
pitched up actually on the day the war formal combat
hostilities actually ended on I think May the first of
two thousand and three, I the very last day of
the active war, which is not a great spur to
have in your cap that they have in your cap
as a war correspondent, But it turned out to be
a good time because as we know that, you know,
the actual invasion atop or Saddam Hussaying went like clockwork.
It was the it was the occupation afterwards. That was
the bit that you know, proved that did not go
to a plan, and that was where the news was really.
So I was out there for a couple of years
and that was kind of where I sort of learned
my trade as a foreign correspondent. From then I became
got a job on the Daily Telegraph back in London
on their foreign desk. She foreign correspondent and spent about
the next ten twelve years covering different big stories around
the world, principally the Arab Spring, the Somali piracy crisis,
and of course the rest of the war in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: So that was kind of me.
Speaker 3: I then went freelance in twenty sixteen, still doing the
same sort of stuff really essentially, and then when the
war in Ukraine started, the Telegraph asked me back as
an extra pair of hands to go and cover that,
and so I've been covering that on off for the
last four years. I was in Kiev when the year
I was in Ukrain at the start of the war,
ended up in Kia for most of the first month,
and that's where I ended up getting the idea for
the book about the international volunteers. That's me in a nutshell,
rather large nutshell.
Speaker 1: Just to point out to the listeners kind of the
life of a freelancer order. I mean, you really are
just packing sort of like a laptop and a camera
and a change of clothes and going over there on
your own. There's no security blanket, there's no nothing, and
you have to pitch editors and hopefully sell a story.
Speaker 2: Right that that is exactly it.
Speaker 3: Yes, And certainly when I first went to Iraq, I
didn't find that many editors that keen. Initially I thought
that was just because they had their own people there.
It turned out most of them didn't. The most of
their staff correspondence had pulled out by then. But a
lot of them were just reluctant to use you because
they were worried that if something went wrong, as it
could easily do, they would be, you know, morally.
Speaker 2: If not legally, liable for you.
Speaker 3: And that's not a position that a lot of media
organizations want to find themselves in. Nobody wants to be
waking up what no executive wants to be waking up
to find some freelancer that they gave some vague kind
of commission to via email suddenly staring out from a
hostel video That has happened in the past.
Speaker 2: And so that's.
Speaker 3: The perennial problem for freelancers these days, is it is
finding you know, news organizations are that are willing to
trust them in war zones. Although you know it's it's
not surprising because it has come down to a duty
of care.
Speaker 2: Sometimes.
Speaker 1: I remember a time because I was going back and
forth to Syria and Iraq during the ISIS war, and
it was like twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen, it was
I think it was one of the big ones. It
was like Reuters or AP or someone. They would take
copy from freelancers, but not photographs. It's very weird policy
that they would not accept photojournalism. But if you went
and wrote a story and submitted it, they would, you know,
consider it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they different places have different rules. Some
places will not take.
Speaker 3: Anything from anybody, yes, because they don't want to be
seen to be encouraging people. Other places will say, well, look,
we can't commission you to go, but when you get back,
when you're back in you're sort of safe and sound
and assuming you're still alive, we can have a chat then,
which is slightly having your cake and eating it a
little bit.
Speaker 2: So you know, it's it's quite a difficult one.
Speaker 3: But we when I was working on the telegraph phone desk,
we did occasionally get people who were free lancers ringing
up saying they were often you know, about to deploy
themselves to somewhere dicey, and we would often try and
dissuade them. I've generally found the best way of dissuading
them was to sort of say do you you know,
do your parents know you're going? And they'd be like, well,
what's what's that got to do with it? And say, well,
it's your parents whose numbers will need in case you
get kidnapped. We also need things like your blood group
and you know, other information like that. And how will
they respond if they were were on the phone telling
them that you've you know, you've not been heard of
for a week, and that.
Speaker 2: Your face has just appeared at a hostage video.
Speaker 3: I don't think I've had the let on quite as
thick as that, But when you mentioned things like that,
that sometimes drives the point home to people in a
way that they perhaps haven't sort of quite thought about
it in the past. Yea, I myself was actually kidnapped
in Somalia back in two thousand and eight while working for.
Speaker 1: The Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Sure, I mean that's why I you know this, This
is a sort of a subject of particular interest to me.
I was covering the Somali piracy crisis at the time, which, again,
as many of your listeners will remember, was when Somali
pirates were sailing out in the Gulf of Aiden, hijacking
ships and taking the cruise hostage. So yeah, we the
finder said to me at the time, can you go
to Somalia to do a bit of reporting on the ground,
just to get an idea of what the you know,
what the local people think about the piracy and so
if we want.
Speaker 2: We went to a town called Bosassa, which.
Speaker 3: Is in the northern region of Somalia called punk Land,
which is where most of the piracy was taking place
because it's close to the Gulf of Aidens, So it's
it's like being the being a spot on the inter
on the state highway where you can just sail out
into the sea and you've got you know, hundreds of
passing ships every day, as most journalists do when they
go around.
Speaker 2: Indeed most business people and aid workers.
Speaker 3: We use bodyguards that were hired by our fixes, local hires,
just you know, guys with you know, guys who were
probably the fixers, cousins or relatives or cousins, friends, whatever,
with guns. Guys with guns, about seven of them. And
it's basically a kind of scarecrow. In fact, you're not
expecting these people to lay their lives down for you,
but to. You do have to hope that the fixers
hires ones who are trustworthy. In our case, they were
not trustworthy. And on the last day, as we were
driving to the airport, our bodyguards, the guys we were
paying several hundred bucks to keep us safe every day,
kidnapped us themselves and drove us off into the mountains.
I won't go into the full details about it that
there is a book about it if anyone wants to
check it out, which tells the story in exhaustive detail.
But basically we were held in a series of caves
in the mountains of northern Somalia for about six weeks.
We weren't we weren't hurt badlier and like that. We
were threatened a few times, and there was a few
other thrills and spills. A gunfight in the cave at
one point with a rival clan, which is not a
great place to have a gunfight, you know, with all
those all those stone walls. That's the bullets zigza about
ricocheting around. But eventually we were released. Our can't go
the circumstances are released too much. But money was asked for.
Whether money changed towns, I.
Speaker 2: Don't really know.
Speaker 3: That is quite frequent in that part of the world.
We were also threatened at one point that when the
negotiations were not going very well, the pirates happened to
mention that a British naval vessel had killed a couple
of pirates and a clan a few hundred miles down
the road just the week before, and they said, the
clan that the clan to which those dead pirates belong,
and there are the cross about that, and they've heard that.
We've got you, a British journalist hostage up here, and
they put an a counter offer for you, So if
your newspaper doesn't pay up, they'd be very keen to
buy you, just to sort of have a little word
about those pirates that your navy killed. And I remember thinking,
Jesus Christ, you know, it's the first time the Royal
Navy has killed anyone in about three hundred years, and
it happens to be the same bloody week that I'm
stuck with a bunch of pirates in Somalia.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it was. It was.
Speaker 3: It was not a pleasant experience, but it was it
was manageable, and it has sort of taught me, you know,
the sort of that it's fairly important to be careful
when you get deployed abroad, although realistically these days kidnapping
is a is a threat that can you know lots
of journalists I know I've had it happened to, including
quite a few in Iraq, where the consequences could be
a lot more serious. You know, we had religious kidnappings
that led to beheadings as well.
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I was gonna say, like, one of the things I've
been told about the kidnappings and Somalia is that they're
not going to hurt you. Like that's not what it's about.
It's all about a value transaction that they want to
take place.
Speaker 2: That is generally the case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they actually, I think it's almost fair to
say that they specialize in being they trying to be
fairly honest brokers in that sense, because and to honor deals,
because you know, there is a sense among a lot
of you know, a lot of Western firms, if they
get somebody kidnapped in Somari, they would sort of assume
that the people doing the kidnapping would be bad faith actors,
and that offering them roundsom money would simply be chucking
good money after bad and making a bad situation worse,
and that there'll be no reason that these people in
this lawless part of the world would honor their deal.
In actual fact, I think they do have a reputation
for once a deal is struck, it usually goes through.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: And as you say, there's not much relative to the
numbers of people who've been taken by pirates, there's not
been many cases where there as people have not come
home alive as long as money has been forthcoming, whereas
in Iraq or Syria, you know, you saw the majority
of those many of those cases would end up with
somebody being beheaded, And there was a school of thought
that says that these were not the kidnappings at all.
They were more what you watched someone was reading described
as deferred homicides. You catch somebody, you intent that killed them,
but you make out like it's going to be you
want some political concession, which you know, you know is
never going to be offered. For example, US troops being
pulled out of Iraq was a common one.
Speaker 2: During that time.
Speaker 1: And then how did you get interested or get sent
to cover the war in Ukraine? How did that first
come about?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was a jobbing freelancer for the telegraph, you know,
mainly for the foreigners, So whenever they needed an extra pair.
Speaker 2: Of hands on someone, I was there. And the Ukraine
War was obviously one of those cases.
Speaker 3: And if you catch your mind back, you remember that
the war, You know, there was quite a lot of
pre indicators that the war was going to happen. Put
In doing this enormous troops throughout the new year of
twenty twenty two, and it became fairly obvious that he
was gonna make some key decision about it. Around the
last week of the last week of February of twenty
twenty twenty twenty twenty two. We all have the telegraph
already had a couple of people in Kiev, and one
team in Kiev and one team in the east of Ukraine.
They're in anticipation that the invasion would start. And initially
they said to me, can you go to Leviv in
the west of Ukraine, just to be there as an
extra pair of hands if you know, if much.
Speaker 2: Happens or whatever.
Speaker 3: But we don't really think it will, you know, we
don't improve into that daft, so neither did I, of course,
so I flew in on what I think was the
very last flight from the Viv on February the twenty
third of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: The war, of course started on the twenty fourth.
Speaker 3: Got to the hotel, had a couple of beers, went
about thinking, and yeah, it's going to be a couple
of weeks watching covering what we call the diplomatic climb
down story in the media, where it's like, you know,
there's been a big build up, lots of saber rattling,
and then Putin decides not to do much in the
end and maybe send a few more tanks into bits
of the down Bass of the already occupied.
Speaker 2: Or something like that.
Speaker 3: Then a few hours later, I'm sort of woken up
by florries of WhatsApp messages from colleagues in key Evan
elsewhere saying the war has started.
Speaker 2: You know, all hell is breaking loose, and yeah.
Speaker 3: So that was that, And so the first week was
was you know, it was a bit frightening because I
had never I'd covered wars in Africa in the Middle
East a bit before, but you know that this.
Speaker 2: Was kind of like grown up warfare.
Speaker 3: This is, you know, that the world's second superpower, and
also it's of Vladimir Putin's It's not more than the
nice guys. And you know, nobody really had any idea
of what kind of things he was capable of. As
we now know, you know, he's barely capable of invading
the Dawn Bass, let alone, Kiev or anywhere else. But
at that time, you were, you know, you were expecting
Russian paratroopers to land in the Viva at any moment
you were.
Speaker 2: I was worried the border might be sealed.
Speaker 3: I was thinking, like, you know, if if all hell
breaks lose, can I walk from the Viv back to Poland.
Speaker 2: It's only seventy miles or something. So yeah, it was.
Speaker 3: It was quite so that that first week was was
quite scary. It was it was difficulty sleeping and so on,
and also you're very adrenalized just from having to you know,
do the job as well the daily reporting. Then on
about day five I had I was, you know, I
was tasked with replacing the team in Kiev that we
had who'd already been there for a month. They both
had COVID and you know that they weren't feeling match
fit for what could be, you know, an unending siege potentially.
So I was kind of thinking, well, after we get
into the Kiv, all the cars are driving the other way,
the higher cars shut place in the Vivas has been shot,
you know, and nobody in their right mind is driving
down that motorway. And I was kind of despairing. And
then sudden somebody said, well, why don't you take the train?
I said, what do you mean the train, thinking like
all the trains would have stopped ages ago. They pointed
out that the trains were every day there were disgorging,
you know, large numbers of refugees at the at the
border with Poland, and obviously those trains came back empty
and so you could just jump on one of them,
and it was it was one of the strangest train
journeys I've ever done.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just almost a completely.
Speaker 3: Empty train, me and one or one or two other
a few other Ukrainians and I think of for Italian,
an Italian photographer who was told by the steward not
to take to take his feet off the seat. So
there's still maintaining standards the Ukrainian train service. As we
got into Kiv and then covered the you know, the
the Siege of Kia for the next the next five
weeks or so, by which time it was already showing
signs of petering out.
Speaker 1: This is when they were trying to capture the airfield
and there were assassination at tams.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yes, the majority.
Speaker 3: I mean, there was a lot of fear of Russian
saboteurs wandering the streets in the first few days, and
the Ukrainian troops, although pretty professional most of the time,
were quite jumpy. Those sabatarres are either were rounded up
or proved to be nothing more than the rumor. After
about a week.
Speaker 2: Or yours.
Speaker 3: The Russians pushing into Urpin and Butcher in the northwest
that was the main focus of their assault. Also an
area called Brivery in the east, so that the combat
itself was limited to certain areas. But I mean Kiev
at that point certainly felt very much like you know,
a city under under siege. You had, you know, missiles
coming in quite regularly in the mornings, and also just
the streets were almost completely deserted at that time, far
far quieter than they are now, and you know, there
was just signs of the of things kind of fraying
at the edges. Lots of spots on street corners were
or streets where cars had crashed just because people were
driving in a panic. Quite a lot of mentally unstable
people out on the streets who primarily people whose medical
who are on medication of one sort or another or
otherwise unable to care for themselves, who've been left basically
to defend for themselves, and who you know, running out
of appropriate medication. Yeah, just quite a few signs that
you know, the sort of the place was buckling. But
as as time went on, it you know, things sort
of you know got back together, back back to normal again,
and you know, shops were open, cafes were open, and
we saw Ukrainians rallying around in the way that you
know he's now. You know, they're not very famous for
around the world.
Speaker 1: When was the first time you came in contact with
a foreigner that was fighting over there.
Speaker 3: Well, Zelensky announced the creation of the International Legion on
about day three of the war from his bunker in
the center of Kiev, a time when you know, all
rather rather grim for Kiev, and everybody was expecting that,
you know, if if the regually, if the Zelenski's government
didn't collapse within seventy two hours in three days, it
would be you know, within three weeks or three months
or whatever. And he framed it very much as an
appeal in the wider world. He said that anyone who,
anyone ouse out there has got military skills and wants
to come and fight for Ukraine, fight, I'm forming an
international legion. It will be for those who want to
fight for democracy, freedom, human rights, not just for Ukraine.
Speaker 2: But for Europe and for the whole of the world.
Speaker 3: It's a very you know, romantic appeal really and you know,
you know, echoing the spirit of the the International Brigade
in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the nineteen thirties,
when volunteers around the world flocked to fight to help
the Republican government that democratically elected left wing Republican government
in Spain fight off Franco's fascists. And you know, so,
you know, has since been regarded very much as you know,
a dry run for World War two. And yeah, so
that's what he said, And within I think a couple
of weeks, you know, the Ukrainian government said they've had
something like twenty thousand email twenty thousand applications to join
the new International Legion. I think majority of that by
what they meant that was the twenty thousand emailed expressions
of interest, but it was still a significant number. I
think the first ones I met, I didn't actually meet
them physically because a lot of them wanted to keep
themselves fairly low profile because they were worried about getting
tracked by the Russians, and sometimes one didn't want people
to know at home that they were there, because not
all of them had actually told them their families that
they were going.
Speaker 2: You know, I spoke to a few on the phone.
Speaker 3: A lot of them were ex British soldiers, mainly people
who were younger actually, and I think quite a lot
who had missed out on the Iraqi Afghanistan and who
saw this as a as a chance to put their
skills to the test. And in that sense, soldiering is
a pretty unique profession because you can spend your life
training in soldiering and never get your skills. You know,
the chance to put your skills to the test is
like being a surgeon who never operates, foreign correspondent who
never goes to cover the war, that sort of thing,
you know. So there was a strong that there was
a strong element of that people wanted to see with
their skills were up to it. There were also more seasoned,
you know, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who wanted
to see what it was like to fight a peer army,
you know where you know, it would be the Russians
this time, rather than coalition forces that held all the aces.
So that there was that element, and then there was
also just quite a lot of people who had never
fought before, or if they did have military experience, you know,
what was limited to you know, driving trucks in in
logistics squadrons.
Speaker 2: And things like that.
Speaker 3: Who you know who again wanted you know, wanted to
see what combat was like. And I think it would
be fair to say for most of them, if not
all of them, that was also just drawn by the cause.
Speaker 2: You know, this was a.
Speaker 3: Pretty unique war in the you know, for the first
time since World War Two, really it felt like a
just war with a clear body and a clear goody
in Zelenski and with with echoes of the land grab
that hit the Maid that started World War Two when
he invaded Poland and the Czech Republic. A lot of
people saying like, you know, I don't really want to
come and fight, particularly, but I feel it's my duty
as a soldier and someone with someone with with the
relevant military skills. I'm gonna feel shit if I stay
at home in London or New York or anywhere while
there are Ukrainians out there fighting and dying. Partly because
we know that this may, this may only, this may
be the start of a bigger operation against other parts
of Europe. And also it's if he succeeds, if he's
not opposed, it will be the end of the the
you know, the rules based order as we know it,
and as a as a military equipped individual, I feel.
Speaker 2: It's my job to go out there.
Speaker 3: So those were the kind of motivations that were involved,
although for a lot of them, you know, there were
other factors, personal factors as well. A lot of them had,
you know, civilian lives that they weren't particularly enjoying jobs
that they found on fulfilling personal lives.
Speaker 2: That's you know, marriages that were sometimes on the rocks.
Speaker 3: A few people, you know, were on the run from
the law or had been in trouble with the law
in the past and wanted to kind of wipe the
slate clean, which is something you also noticed with you know,
people who went out to fight for ISIS as jihadists.
That's the thing, you know, the sense of I've not
led a decent life. Well, I've led a bad life.
This is the chance for me to kind of try
and you know, rectify that a bit. So you have
a wide range, a very colorful range of people's science
joining up, and that was one of the reasons I
wanted to write the book.
Speaker 2: Really, it's it's.
Speaker 3: Partly an account of the combat that they faced and
their experiences on the front line.
Speaker 2: That is obviously primarily what it is.
Speaker 3: It also tries to be narrative of the first three
years of the war, so you get that as a
kind of thrown in for free, as it were if
you read the book. But it's also trying to describe
what the you know what why these people go out there,
and what it is about life in their home countries
in America or the UK that they feel is lacking,
you know, in their own you know, and that for
quite a few of them, I think that there's what
I would call the sort of fight club element to it,
as in the film The Book starring Brad Pitt, where
you have a generation of men brought up these days
in the United States and certainly in Britain, where they've
known you know, the countries have known peace really for
largely for more or less for eighty years, and they
don't really feel like there's you know, many existential challenges
left in life, that life is too too molly coddle,
too soft, and they want to know whether they can
face up to the kind of hardships their forefathers faced
in World War two or World War One. You know,
they've seen it in you know, programs like uh oh,
what's it called the.
Speaker 2: Sorry my mom is the brothers?
Speaker 3: Yet you know they you know they've they've got relatives
who you know, fought in that war in World War two,
or they might have vote. In America's case, well it
was in Vietnam, and it's not a sense of what's
it like to fight in.
Speaker 2: A real, a proper grown up war. Can I handle it?
Here's a chance.
Speaker 1: There was a very motley crew that showed up for
this international legion Especially, it sounds like early on in
the war and you have a chapter you talk about
the screamers. I think you guys call them waltz. You know,
people are presenting to be someone they're not. And then
there's this ballistic missile strike that kind of separated the
wheat from the cheft.
Speaker 3: It sounded like, yeah, uh so that when the legionnaires
first came across the border, a lot of them were
told to deploy or sorry to to go to a
base at a place called Yavarev near the Polish border.
Speaker 2: It's actually a base that was used prior to the
war by as a kind of native training base.
Speaker 3: And you know, so there's I think there's probably about
a couple of thousand of them pitched up there at
the at the beginning of the war, all sort of
sitting there waiting, you know, for orders, waiting to get
trained up. And yes, as you say, some of them
were you know, fairly competent volunteers with proven military records,
and some of them were not. You had quite a
lot of watermittees, I fantasists.
Speaker 2: You had quite a.
Speaker 3: Lot who so called screamers, I people who had no
military training at all, but who bullshited a lot that
they had you know, previous records as you know, Navy
Seals or Delta Force or sas. And then who would
go up run off screaming the moment they action started.
And yeah, I mean according to some of the volunteers
I spoke to for the book, you could kind of
see these fantasists a mile off, you know that they
all wore kind of berets and cat badges that had
you know, insignias that you know, nobody actually seen before,
and they would often talk about, you know, various missions
they'd been on, you know, inevitably with the CIA Delta
Force works a bit like I can't really talk about
it too much, but it was, you know, it was
real harsh hush stuff. But you know, and you sort
of think, well, it was that harsh shush, why why
is it not classified? You know what, why are you
even mentioning it?
Speaker 2: So that there was there was, there was.
Speaker 3: There was quite a lot of those sorts of people,
and it was a big worry for the more regular
competent legionnaires to see these people having turned up because
the Ukrainian military authorities didn't really have any means of
vetting people at that particular point. Because you know, if
you've got normally, when you go to warrior fighting alongside
other guys you've been with for years and years, you've
trained alongside, you know their strengths, you know their weaknesses.
Here you're being lined up to fight along with a
whole load of people who are tilting strangers anyway, some
of whom seem like complete wat jobs. And then yeah,
the other the other problem with a lot of these
people was that they had no sort of sense of
you know, secure secure comms at all, no, you know,
no situational awareness. They'd be posting TikTok videos of them
sort of saying yo hanging here at Yavarev or whatever,
and sending all kinds of you know, messages to you
know on the social media saying where they were, and
yeah about about on about March the fourteenth, I think
it was or something. One night at that particular base,
the rush Is hit it with a series of missiles,
hypersonic missiles, big ones, and you know, they clearly identified
this place as a as a haunt of international legionnaires.
By some miracle, I think only one legionaire if that
was killed. A large number of Ukrainians were killed in
a in a neighboring barracks. But as a result of that,
a lot of the it was something of a wake
up call. A lot of the legionnaires then decided and
actually I don't really fancy this.
Speaker 2: I feel a bit out my league. And it was widely.
Speaker 3: Presumed that the reason the Russians had managed to hit
this place was because there was so much digital traffic
on the internet that they you know, they've been able
to easily pinpoint where it was all the foreigners mobile
phones and so on. Personally, I think they could have
probably worked it out anyway, just because it was a
it was an obvious place for all the foreigners to
go to. But certainly yes, as you say that, that
kind of slightly sort of sifted the week from the chaff.
A lot of people left deciding, you know, that this
was not for them, but you know, probably unbalance more.
Speaker 2: Of them stayed. But that was certainly very much a
kind of a baptism of fire for a lot of them.
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Speaker 2: Thank you everyone.
Speaker 1: You profile a lot of these foreign fighters that came
over there. Some of them were professional soldiers, served in
the Paros. One of the one guy with a Sandhurst
graduate as I recall. But then there's also like another
guy who was like grew up on a farm in
Scotland and just wanted to get it on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that was Douglas Cartner who was Yeah, he
had no military experience at all. I think he wanted
to join the US Marine, wanted to join the Royal
Marines or the commandos when he was when he was
a kid. But he'd he'd you know, had a problem
with a shoulder or something like that during the qualification process,
so that had kind of ruined his dream of joining
the military. He became a tractor engineer instead, had a
perfectly happy life, but he always felt there was something missing.
And I think, you know, normally, if you were a
twenty something in the UK and you want, you know,
thrills and kicks, you you go off, maybe have a
gap year around the world, travel to Asia and India
and the Far East, that sort of thing. But if
you've set your heart on being a commander or a
member of the ESAs, that's not really going to be
much of a substitute. So yeah, when the war came along,
he's just sort of thought, shall I do it?
Speaker 2: You know, why not? This is my this is my
one and only chance. And off he went.
Speaker 3: Yeah, undeterred by the fact that, you know, he didn't
have any military experience, undeterred by the fact that the
Ukrainian embassy had told him no, might just just stay
at home and you know, do a bit of charity
work back in the.
Speaker 2: UK if you want.
Speaker 3: Undeterred by the fact that his parents said to him,
you know, your bloody daft, you know you'll get killed,
and you know.
Speaker 2: In finness to him, he played it fairly, fairly carefully.
Speaker 3: He started out with just a volunteer humanitarian unit, getting
getting to know that the ropes, getting to know the
ground in Ukraine a bit, then moved to a some
sort of medical unit where they had an number of
soldiers or ex soldiers who were doing sort of humanitarian
medical work a bit close to the front lines, and
then from there eventually moved to a sort of medical
unit that was a combat unit of some sort of
I remember rightly. And yeah, eventually, you know, a few
months in, found himself heading towards the front lines, you know,
ready for combat with a with with the Ukrainian legion
that took a large number of foreigners. And yeah, we're
sort of trying to describe what it's like for him
when he when he's sort of first heads into combat,
is with all this all this sort of other piles,
many of whom are likewise rookies, and there's a sort
of sense of like, you know, finally we've got the
chance to get here. We're sort of dreading it and
yet we're longing for it at the same time.
Speaker 2: Then he gets to the.
Speaker 3: To the to the base or the trenches where you
know where he's going to be based, and he's kind
of expecting to get to right, you go over there,
you point your gun there, and you know all that,
and he's just left on his own in a trench,
you know, not knowing what to do with this machine gun,
a p k M, which is like a big belt
fed thing, a bit like a general purpose machine gun
that he's been trained on, but he has no idea
where the front line is, you know which direction it is.
And then out the blue, several soldiers start walking towards him.
Because of the light at that time of day, because
he was in some in some woods, you couldn't see
whether they were Russians or Ukrainians, but they were. They
were more wondering, you know, with their guns in a
sort of in a manner that you know, didn't look
terribly relaxed, looked like they meant business. And so he
starts thinking, right, that was my guys are they're the enemy.
And as they get nearer and near, he's some things
were like I'm gonna have to do something. You know
I'm gonna have to shoot if these guys are Russian soldiers,
because the moment they see me here my trench, you
know they're going to start shooting. So they get closer
and closer. He's hoping they'll, you know, where, you'll be
able to work out who they are. Eventually he's on
the point of firing a warning burst over their heads,
which I think would almost certainly have led to them
firing back when one of them waved at him and said, ah, yeah,
how are you doing in English or something, and you know,
he's sort of like described sort of wiping the sweat
off his brow and sort of pulling his hand off
the trigger grip, which is kind of, you know, just
about shaking by that time. And it turns out to
be the guy who's going to be command, his new commander,
who basically just almost wiped out that very first but
you know, that very first.
Speaker 2: Day, simply because nobody had told him which direction the
point is gone in.
Speaker 3: I'll mention that because it's sort of symptomatic of the
kind of unexpected chaos you governed the Ukrainian flunt lines.
People imagine that it's going to be a nice straight
line it's not Neander's in and out like a river,
and it changes within the hours, and quite often people
don't really know whether they're sort of, you know, the
Russians are ahead of them, or perhaps a little bit
beside them or behind them or or whatever.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, that was I think it's something of a
baptism of fire for him. Definitely.
Speaker 1: Another interesting person you profile on the book is a
Vietnamese American military veteran. Can you tell us about him?
He had a very unique story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think his name a while since I've reread
the book, but I think his name was Hugh Lee.
And yeah, he was a Vietnamese American. His family had
come over at the end of the Vietnam War to
the US. He you know, was very much of the
opinion that America had given his family a decent life
and that you know, when when when other when other
parts of the world suffered, you know, suffered military aggression,
that you know, he had a duty to help them,
just as he'd been helped or his family had been helped.
So at the time, he was running a restaurant in Columbia,
of all places, having retired from the US Marines, and
he'd served in Afghanistan as a command center sort of
technical operator more than a frontline soldier. But you know,
he'd still done US Marines training. He was a capable
and competent operator, but you know, he wouldn't call himself
any kind of you know, rambow infantry kind of guy.
You know, didn't sort of over sell his skills. Anyway,
he decided to go out.
Speaker 2: I think he was.
Speaker 3: Similar to a lot of the American soldiers out who
volunteered for Ukraine in that he having served in Afghanistan,
he had been quite disappointed by the pullout in twenty
twenty one of US sportsters from Afghanistan, by the collapse
of the Afghan army, and that had made him feel like,
you know, we spent twenty years there, all that blood
and treasure invested, and yet you know, when it came
to the moment we pulled out, the Afghan Army collapsed,
and was what was the point of supporting these people.
I know the story is more complicated than that, as
does he, but that that was the kind of the
you know, the rough headline, and one of the things
he felt. And he saw the Ukrainians though, you know,
actually fighting tooth and nail against the Russians, and he
sort of thought, yeah, that these people are worth fighting,
these people are worth supporting because they're fighting on their
own accord, that they're not even you know, asking us
to come in officially, you know, and that they're worth
helping and there'll be a useful future ally for America
in the future.
Speaker 2: So off he went.
Speaker 3: Hugh did not have a good experience, and he was
at Yavarev when the missiles landed, but he didn't let
that deter them. However, he didn't he didn't have a
very pleasant time with the with the legionnaires when he
just met them. He's described bumping into a bunch of
guys who he uh, who he summed up a Special
Forces washouts, basically sort of very muscly, rambo rambo looking
guys who he reckoned were sort of high on steroids
or something, who were quite aggressive and dismissive of him.
And again, you know, just that feeling like I don't
want to be stuck in the trench with these guys.
I'll feel more scared of them than the Russians. And
then also on his his very first deployment, he was
said to erpen in the north, the northwest suburb of
Kiev where the Russians were pushing in. During that first
month in Kiev, his first assignment was to was to
pick up a corpse from behind enemy lines. A Georgian
fighter is a fighter from the from the volunteer from
the the ex Soviet state of Georgia who'd been killed.
And him, Hugh and several other about a dozen other
guys went through through the combats area to actually pick
this this guy's body up, the Georgian's body up. He
was a big, heavy guy, fifteen stone maybe, and they
spent the next seven hours stretching him back through the
enemy lines, through you know, mortar fire and and you know,
potential sniper areas and potential minefields, back to you know,
back back to the rear with lines, the Ukrainian lines.
And I don't think it was so much the you know,
the actual threat of you know, the the threat of
armed danger, but the actual weight of the corpse was
was made it really really hard.
Speaker 2: They only had a kind of.
Speaker 3: They had a soft stretch of one of those ones
who wait that you can like almost like a tar paul,
and with handles that used primarily for getting people out
of the buildings, which which are more flexible, which but
which make the actual task of carrying somebody far harder.
And they said, you know, every one hundred yards or so,
he was getting exhausted, and they were also kept dropping
the guy, which didn't feel very respectful. And then by
by the time he got back to the end, back
to the Ukrainian lines, he was exhausted. He felt totally
somewhat out of shape for what he was being tasked
to do, as well somewhat rattled by, you know, his
experiences with these other legionnaires early on, and he just
burst into tears and he just realized, I cannot cope
with us.
Speaker 2: And as a result of that, he then went home.
And I mentioned that case in the book.
Speaker 3: I think just partly just sort of show that not
everybody emerges a hero out of these things. Are not
a hero in a conventional sense. You know, Hugh did
still do his bit, he just decided it wasn't for him.
But also just I think to sort of show to
people that, you know, wartime experiences, as with Douglas Cartner,
you know, the guy who you know was told which
direction the fire is gone, and wartime experience is never
going to be what you expect them. You know, he
was expecting to be there in a trench fire and
a gun and in steadies humph, and of guy's body
for seven miles, you know, staring at a dead man
in you know, staring in at a dead man's eyes
the whole time, be very very closely confronted with with
the consequences of war and yet not actually participating in it,
not getting the kind of adrenaline that you normally would.
She's quite an unusual perhaps introduction to you know, a
conflict zone, and you know, it just sort of struck me.
That again also underlined how different the war in Ukraine
was to the one in Afghanistan where he had been before.
If soldiers were killed, then there were helicopter lifted out. Usually,
you know, their bodies might have had to drag them,
you know for you know, stretch them for a short
time or something like that, but it would it would
be relatively usual for anyone to have had the kind
of experience that he had in Ukraine, Whereas in Ukraine,
you know, the world who helicopters flying around anywhere, There
wasn't that sort of Kazavak system and so situations like
he had were actually very common and often.
Speaker 2: Very very difficult.
Speaker 3: You know, most of the people I spoke to who
did stretchering jobs said it was, you know, the most
exhausting thing they've ever done, you know, on the battlefield.
Speaker 1: There's another guy, you profile who had a bad experience,
as I recall, and he got to a certain point
was kind of like, screw this, I'm going to go
guard this diamond mind in the Congo and make some
real money and then maybe come back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That was Christopher Perriman, known as pez who who
was you know, a highly qualified soldier.
Speaker 3: He fought in Iraq in you know, in the Second
Gulf War. He was a trained sniper, and yeah, he
went to Ukraine thinking, you know, very much like this,
this is my job as a soldier. I you know,
I've I've got the skills, I will i will be
able to help train Ukrainians and save some other guy
from losing his life because of his his lack of
you know, his his lack of aptitude for the task.
So yeah, Unfortunately, he, like like a lot of people,
when he got there, found that the Ukrainian military system
wasn't really capable of you know, processing all the volunteers
that were coming in, including the experienced people like him.
Speaker 2: Zelenski had not told his.
Speaker 3: Generals before creating beforehand that he was creating the legions,
so he was blindsiding them, and they didn't really have
the organizational capacity to, you know, to put all these
people in barracks just as the war was starting to
train them up and to send them off in different
you know, big battalions and foreigners or whatever to the
front lines. So a lot of the soldiers, like pairs
found themselves was sitting around in the bases at places
like Javarev, where they're getting missiled. They're doing nothing. They're
just getting bored and paranoid and wondering how much longer
it's gonna take before they get sent to the front
lives keeping. They keep getting promised that, you know, they
don't get sent soon, and nothing happens. And he, like
a lot of soldiers that ended up just kind of
taking matters into his own hands.
Speaker 2: He teamed up with a.
Speaker 3: Bunch of other guys, but maybe a dozen of them,
all for them had sort of got to know each
other during all this periods sitting around waiting in the
barracks sort of worked out, Yeah, this guy doesn't look
too look sensible, that guy doesn't look too much like
a water emittee, so on and so forth, and yeah,
they they they would form these little units and then
they would try and bypass the leaching bureaucracy essentially just
go off and you know, tout their services around the
front lines, like like you know, laborers looking for work
really And usually what they'd do is that there'd be
one person who maybe spoke a bit of Russian or
Ukrainian who could do the introductions to certain commanders or
some guy who maybe knew a Ukrainian command or who
knew a man who knew a man, and they would
they would chase down those leads sometimes and hope in
the hope that one or two of those Ukrainian commanders
would say, yeah, I can use some guys.
Speaker 2: You know, you can try us. We'll try you out
for a couple of weeks.
Speaker 3: But it was very much on probation, and unfortunately, the
because there had been a few waltamities and bad apples already,
you know, sort of earning the leagion a bad reputation.
A lot of the Ukrainian commanders are actually quite unwilling
to take them, and they would find themselves just being
told thanks, but no thanks or whatever, and quite a
sort of unusual experience if you go to a war,
respecting the fight and then everybody's just saying, don't need you.
Speaker 1: You know, we're good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, normally, you.
Speaker 3: Know, you hear a lot of stories in Militarist about
soldiers dreading the front line and trying to get out
of it. Here here it was the opposite, and people
sort of you know, hunting for the front lines, like
a kind of military Eldorado and has found himself in
that situation. I think they eventually got down at some
place in mick Alive in the South where they got
a little bit of action but nothing very much, just
sort of you know, and eventually he decided, look, I
can't keep you know, I can't stay here forever. I've
been here three months of running low on money and
payment wasn't very regular in the legion then it is now.
And so he went back to the UK and I think, yeah,
pursued a job guarding a diamond mine in Congod. I'm
not sure whether he ever got it or not, but
he did resurface again in October of that same year
of twenty twenty two and joined a unit that was
you know, offered much more scope for action, and they
were they were out in some islands down on the
in in southern Ukraine, on the on the Delta area
of the Dnipro River, Ukraine's main river, where there's lots
of islands at the mouth of the river as it
leads into the Black Sea, and on those islands, Russians
and the Ukrainians would often occupy one half, you know,
sort of rival halves of the islands, and it was
Pez's job and that of his team to sort of
try and keep you know, keep it retained their section
of the island. And pretty scary stuff because there's nowhere
to run to if you if you get stuck, you know,
there's there's not going to be a boat that's going
to let you off the island if you if if
the Russians start to do is start to really pile
the pressure on. And so yeah, he was there for
a few months. There was a few gunfights, and I
think he had one or two disagreements with his with
his colleagues occasionally when things went wrong. There's an account
of that when a gunfight goes wrong and Pears gets
blamed for not having his weapon there at the time.
There were reasons why that happened, But again I use
that example to sort of explain why, you know what,
he nearly let the fistfights afterwards, and again it's it's
what anybody else would have is just as a bad
day at the office with these guys is a you know,
a bad day at work where.
Speaker 2: A few mistakes are made out of the side.
Speaker 3: It leads to people potentially getting killed and feelings running very,
very high, especially when once again these people don't know
each other it.
Speaker 1: Pears continued, but can you can you finish the story
about how he narrowly avoided capture because I remember he
like had to jump off a balcony or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, yeah, I can. I can plunge it in
a bit more detail.
Speaker 3: They were They were basically in a house doing you know,
an op and observation point in a house on this
island one night, and a whole lot of Russians suddenly
surrounded them. It's not clear whether they actually surrounded them
knowing that they were there were legionnaires there, or that
there were Ukrainians there or whether they actually thought again,
this is the element of confusion on the battlefield, that
they these Russians actually thought it was a Russian occupied
op because apparently some Russian went knocked on the door
of the house, I think, expecting to be let in.
One of the other legionnaires inside challenged him with a password.
The Russian was unable to produce the password. At that
point they both realized that, you know, each other were
enemy forces, and I think one of the legionnaires fired
a burst down the down the stairway to keep the
Russians at bay. After that, all hell broke loose, as
you would imagine, and they were having there were there
was machine gun fire coming in through the windows, there
were smoke good aides coming through the windows. The Russians
were surrounding them, shouting them in English as well, shouting
come out, come out your bitches, and so on. So
it was clear that I think they'd identified them as
foreigners at that point and that they would obviously be
potentially quite a big prize.
Speaker 2: A gun battle ensued for quite a long time. I
quite can't quite remember how long.
Speaker 3: I don't think it was perhaps more than about half
an hour, but I think it probably seemed like forever
at the time. And eventually, as the as the upstairs
we were filled with tear gas and smoke grenade gas
that the Russians had chucked in pairs, sort of decided
that you know, it was you know, he couldn't see
his colleagues and his comrades anymore, and leapt out of
one of the windows, the upstairs window about twenty feet
nearly broke his ankle, smashed into aside, you know, the.
Speaker 2: Wall of the building.
Speaker 3: He just jumped out of, smashed his head up, and
then kind of basically ran off through the back gardens
of the house that he was in and somehow managed
to get to safety, and by some miracle when when
they were at the wrong they agreed Rendezvy point that
they would go to in eventualities like this, met up
with his comrades who who had also survived. Again, I
think they were also all like, was convinced that, you know,
everybody else was dead, and as it turned out, nobody
actually got killed in that particular incident. But I've watched
sort of video grabs something, I mean, you know, it's
absolutely terrifying, and of course the consequences of being caught
in that situation would have been you know, would have
been die. If you weren't killed, you'd have been taken
Russian prisoner of warning. I mean that is something that
happened to some of the other legionaires, which we can
perhaps talk about as well.
Speaker 2: But yeah, Peirs continued there.
Speaker 3: He parked the company with that particular unit and there
went joined another unit. And then in October twenty twenty three,
which I think was sort of later that same year,
after that gunfight on the island, he was on another
operation near Snake Island in the Black Sea and he
was killed by mortifier.
Speaker 2: I believe. I don't know any more details than that.
Speaker 3: Nothing ever else was ever released, but as you know,
the Ukrainians are often quite secretive about the details of
military operations when casualties have been sustained.
Speaker 2: But yeah, he was.
Speaker 3: He was one of one of a number of people
who are in the book who you know, who are
not you know, southly not around to have seen it
seen it published.
Speaker 1: I do want to ask you about the guys who
were taken as prisoners of war. Those are some of
the crazier stories in this book. There were a couple
of differ for guys you profile I believe who were captured.
Can you tell us about them a bit?
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, I mean the I think there's three who
were profiled in the book. A British guy named Andrew Harding. Sorry, yes,
and Andrew Harding, Yes, so I may have to check
his name. Andrew will call him here from from now,
and it's been a while since I've read the book.
And then a two Americans, Alex Druki and Andy Queen,
who may be familiar to some of your listeners. They
were the first Americans to be taken captive in June
of twenty twenty two. And yeah, so Alex was a
was a was a classic legionnaire in many ways. He
had served in a rock as a top gunner in
about two thousand in Baghdad, which as anyone who's spent
time in Baghdad during those years, we'll know, it was
a very dangerous job. You're driving around in a humvey.
He scored in convoys and vps and generals, so you're
big target. And Alex's job was to be in the
lead humbie with a fifty cow, you know, so he
if anybody, if any snipers or car bombers or insurgent
gangs were waiting to try and take out the convoy.
Alex would probably be the first to know. So after
he came back from Iraq, he had quite bad PTSD
and he tried to get other civilian jobs. He tried
to become a police officer, for example, and found that,
you know, I think partly because of his PTSD, he
couldn't really deal with it, and also the rules of
engagement as a civilian police officer are very different from
those as a you know, a lead gunner in Iraq,
and he began to feel like it was a bit
of a failure in life. And also being an ex
military man, you know, a career military man, you know,
he sort of felt that his life had lost purpose.
Speaker 2: When the Iraq War.
Speaker 3: Started, he decided to go despite having a one hundred
percent veterans pension with PTSD. Many would have queried that decision,
you know, saying you're you know, you're only likely to
make your demons far far worse.
Speaker 2: Surely, his view was, you know.
Speaker 3: These are demons that haunt me while I'm in civilian life.
But you know, it's a case of conditioned reflexes, and
if I'm back in a combat zone that there will
be they will serve a useful purpose, and so hopefully
will I. By serving in the legion. I think there's
I've listened to enough military podcasts to know that there
are people who might dispute Alex's diagnosis of that sort
of thing. But that was that was Alex's version of events,
and he said it worked. So for the first few
months when he was there, he was training Ukrainian sort
of military volunteers, and he was an ex staff sergeant
US Army staff sergeant, so he was used to dealing
with sort of groups of twenty or thirty men under
I think he felt it was, you know, he's making
a lot of difference effectively as a force multiplier, more
useful really in some ways than what he could achieve
individually as a you know, as a combatant.
Speaker 2: But that that training work.
Speaker 3: Stopped after a while, I think fell foul of Ukrainian
military bureaucracy, as the things often do. And I think,
like many people, he was keen just to sort of
see what the combat was like. So he joined a
volunteer up in Kharkiv. They were sent to do a
drone Wreki one day on his very first mission and
about they were up in some forests outside of Kharkiv
and they were ran into a much larger Russian unit
that effectively ambushed them. The unit he was with scattered.
There was about and they all scattered in different directions.
Alex and his companion had been told to look for
another guy who had gone missing. They felt reluctant to
leave the area while this other guy was unaccounted for,
mainly out of a sense of duty. That meant that
they were still there when the Russians started infiltrating through
what they were they saw through the woods in the
enormous tracked vehicle going along like a you know, like
some kind of prehistoric dinosaur. That was the sort of
first glimpse of the Russians, with a whole other Russian
soldiers wandering by them.
Speaker 2: They then tried to escape out there.
Speaker 3: I think they walked for about eight seven or eight
hours through the Ukrainian forest trying and head back roughly
in the direction of Kharkiv.
Speaker 2: No idea who they might be running into.
Speaker 3: Got chased by a wild boar at one point, and
eventually I think just at the point when they were
hoping they might have got back to sort of what
looked like a familiar village, they realized that the soldiers
ahead of them were in fact a big, a large
gang of Russians. By the time the two groups laid
eyes on each other, it was too late to run
and they had to surrender basically. And then Alex uh,
he was he was roffed up a bit at the time,
not too badly, I think, he said. The Russian soldiers
that caught them were that sort of yeah, you know,
you're another soldier. Yeah you're a foreigner, but you know,
we're all soldiers here together. So just the usual kind
of customary kicking and then a few conversations about you know,
what's you know, what's Joe Biden like, what's you know,
what are American women like? You know, they heart all
this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: Here, have a cigarette, mate, have a drink and water.
That then abruptly.
Speaker 3: Changed when they were handed over to the Russian intelligence services,
and Alex spent about five weeks in a Russian black
site prison we'll call that. He doesn't really know what
it was, but it certainly wasn't an official prison anywhere
somewhere probably in the the Nets People's Republic, the Separatist held,
but of Ukraine, where he was tortured pretty much non
stop by Russian secret police who thought he was a
spy of some sort and were perhaps not surprisingly reluctant
to think that any American would be crazy enough to
join the International Legion.
Speaker 2: You know, he was sort of saying, yeah, he was
a volunteer, and they're saying, no, you wouldn't.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't do that, you know, you wouldn't be mad enough,
which was which was a hard one that dissuade them of.
And he was electrocuted quite a few times, you know,
fairly badly, which he said was far worse than the
other treatment that he tortured that he suffered. They also
did noise you know, noise torture on them, putting them
in a cell, and you know, playing really very loud
music at them, although rather amusingly they played band heavy
lots of heavy metal bands like Ramstein and other people,
you know, sort of death metal and speed metal American stuff,
which I think they thought would be the epitome of
torture and.
Speaker 2: Might well have worked quite well.
Speaker 3: Again, you know, on Gan tanam Obey INMTES. But for Alex,
it was exactly the sort of music that suburban teenagers
of Alex's generation grew up with in America.
Speaker 2: Says, oh, you know, here's Ramstein.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a bit loud, and it's you know, it's
the third time I've heard this one to day. But
it was manageable and it kind of reminded him from home.
And I think they played played this this thing on
a kind of loop of eighty tracks a day, and
it allowed Alex to keep time in a way that
he couldn't otherwise because the lights were switched all the
whole time, and that they had this sort of slightly
surreal experience when his captors told him that they were
actually going to try and negotiate for his release via
a prison swap or something like that. And he assumed,
I think, as we all, would you know somebody, you know,
the Russian secret police, secret services would have some sort
of hotline to the b I or the CIA that
they could do for you organizing these sorts of things.
Speaker 2: They didn't.
Speaker 3: They presented Alex with a downloaded list of phone numbers
for various US departments U S government departments that they
printed off the Internet and said, right, you start ringing
around these And so he was ringing around, you know,
the Department of Homeland Security switchboard and various other places.
Speaker 2: And you know, most of the time never getting through
to anybody.
Speaker 3: And on the and on the ed occasion where you know,
he did get through to some switchboard operator, you know,
when when your spiel as hello, my name is Alex Druki.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm a prisoner of war in Russia. I'm
being held by the you know, the Russian Secret Police.
The answer is yes, I'm sure you are, Thank you, sir.
We do not take the nuisance callers here, you know,
slams the phoner and eventually I think the Russian is
Russian captors discovered a number for the veterans, the US
Veterans Crisis Line, which is a real life, you know,
help number on.
Speaker 3: Which Alex himself had rung several times when you know,
in his bad days back in the in the US,
when he was suffering badly from PTSD and overdoing it
on the booze. So Alex said, now that this is
not the right number to ring. This is a twenty
four hour Veterans crisis line, to which his captor apparently said, well,
you know this is a crisis though, and you are
a veteran.
Speaker 2: Wring the line, Alex kind of went, you know what,
I've had enough of this.
Speaker 3: You know you might be right, so he rang it up,
and of course, being a veterans crisis line, you know,
designed for people who were suicidal, there was actually a
human being at the end of the phone who did listen,
and who did sort of then say yeah, okay, I'll
try and find a number for somebody who can help you,
and short, you know, very shortly afterwards put him through
to a state Department official who clearly knew who Alex
was and who knew about the case, who was in
a position to start the process for negotiations for Alex's release.
And I won't give away too much in the book,
but basically Alex spent about the next four months. He
was transferred to a civilian prison with a number of
other volunteers, about a dozen of them from various different
parts of the world, include a few other Americans and
some Brits, and they were held there and eventually released
as part of a prisoner swap. But the conditions in
that civilian prison, although they were not getting tortured on
a regular basis anymore, were still pretty grim. Alex sort
of as tells a story about it, was there was
a trustee in the prison, another inmate, a Ukrainian inmate.
Speaker 2: Who was a.
Speaker 3: He was employed that sweet the cells and change the
light bulbs on the cc TV in the cell. When
that went wrong, and uh, the prison guards sort of
took great delight in mentioning to Alex so that that guy, yeah,
he was a cannibal. He's a convicted cannibal. He's serving
several licenses for eating people. And one day they they
sort of the prison guards asked this, this cannibal, you know, uh,
which of the three prisoners in here would you would
you prefer to eat? Because they had Alex and then
they had Andy who was Asian, and they also had
an African American in the cell as well as which
ethnicity would you prefer to dine off? Which I think
was an example of kind of a sense sort of
dark Russian humor. And as Alex, you know, Alex later
reflected her that this this, this this cannibal, I think
his name was Ego, was actually you know, one of
the few friendly faces in the prison, and he would
occasionally give him his you know, his he's used cigarettes
cast offs, which they would then Alex and his friends
would then sort of dissect and make roll ups from
from using bits of bits of paper, pets of newspaper,
and you know, but he didn't sort of say, you know,
when your idea of a good day is getting you know,
cast off cigarettes were convicted, Cannibal does sort of suggest that,
you know, he perhaps a bit of a low point.
Speaker 1: Another thing that I thought that I thought was very
interesting was he mentions how the interrogators, I guess they
were at the other place, at the at the black site,
presumably FSB guys. They were very good at torturing the
hell out of people, but they were very naive about
how America works, like just oblivious.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think they they thought that Alex had been
their official. Their suspicion was that Alex had been sent
in bar by some US sort of secret service to
equip the Ukrainians with the means to manufacture weapons of
mass destruction. That the basis for this being that Alex
had done a course while he was a US Army
staff sergeant on WND disposal, which I think was a
fairly standard course that a lot of US military soldiers
did prior to the.
Speaker 2: Two thousand and three deployment in Iraq. What that meant was,
you knew how to recognize.
Speaker 3: Potentially hazards materials, and the purposes, you know, the sort
of procedures for potentially disposing of.
Speaker 2: Them or making them safe.
Speaker 3: They Yeah, they seem to have no real concept of
who he was or anything like that, and no way
of disbelieving him.
Speaker 2: In any way. And yeah, more generally, I think they're there.
Speaker 3: They're sort of a lot of their sort of experts,
dictations or preconceptions about Americans seemed to be drawn from
you know, reading US spy novels and so on. You know,
it was it was quite commic. You would have thought
perhaps it was a you know, just a play of
a ploy of some sort to hide the fact that
they actually knew what they were doing, But often it
didn't seem like that.
Speaker 1: I and then tell us about the guys in Mauropaul.
Speaker 3: In Mariopol, Yeah, yeah, so Mario Paul, as most of
your listeners will remember, was the city that the Russians
really laid siege to at the beginning of the war.
It's down down on the ass of I thinks on
the on the ass of the coast of the ass
Of seeing southeast on Ukraine's sort of southeastern border. And yeah,
it was just basically raised to the ground by shelling
and there was a big sort of the Ukrainian forces
there mounted a last stand at as Of Steel Works,
which is this sort of vast complex steel complex, one
of the biggest in the world that runs for several miles.
It's just an enormous steel refinery. So there's a million
and one place is to hide there if you are
a soldier. You know, there's gantries, there's pipes, there's underground bunkers,
there's there's miles and miles of service tunnels. And also
because there's a Soviet built facility, there are lots of
purpose built military bunkers there as well that were built
in the anticipation that Marion Paul and the rest of
the Soviet Union would one day be attacked by the
US or by the West. So you know, it's both
a factory and the citadel. And so the Ukrainians mounted
a last stand there, and among them was a British
fighter by the name of John Harding, and you know
he he'd actually joined the Ukrainian military several years before
as a volunteer, having previously fought for the Kurdish as
a volunteer with the Kurdish anti Isis forces in Iraq,
and he was an ex parachute regiment soldier. He also
for the Falkland's conflict in nineteen eighty two, which he
was getting on by the time the war in Ukraine
loomed and I think in fact, he was due to retire.
It was his sixtieth birthday was coming up around in
twenty twenty two sometime, and I think a month before
the war started in January twenty twenty two, he'd said
to his commander, I mean, I'm good at it's time
I retired. My legs are not what they were, and
you know, I don't want to be a liability. And
the commander said, well fine, yeah, but do you know
that the paperwork will be easier if you if you
just wait waited out a month, I said, might.
Speaker 2: He stay on to the end of February? And John
said yeah, sure.
Speaker 3: And at that time none of them thought the Ukrainian
invasion was going to actually happen, that they just thought
this troop build up was just another you know, not
a saber rattling exercised by Putin.
Speaker 2: So he stayed on and then on the twenty third of.
Speaker 3: February, the night before the invasion, he literally had his
bags packed to head back to the UK and then
he got the message the next morning from his comrade saying, oh, yeah,
the Russians coming in across the border, and John said,
how many of them? And the reply came, all of them.
And so it was that John found himself among the
soldiers manning with the Azo Brigade who were manning the
the sort of last stand in this steel factory and
pall the as of steel factory, and he gives a
pretty graphic account of that. It's you know that they
held out for a long time and basically managed to
slow the Russian advance across the rest of Ukraine quite significantly.
So the operation was a success from that point of view.
But as as the siege went on, I think it
lasted until early May, so you know, nearly three months
they ran low on supplies and ammunition, and also on
medicines and anesthetics. And then John gives a very vivid
account at one point of having two you know soldiers,
you know, suffering gangrene in their wounds and having to
perform amputations without anesthetic, and you know, they would have
a surgeon with a bone saw. They would do the
job as quickly as he could on a leg or something.
She used to take a couple of minutes, and then
they would have about six other soldiers just there to
hold the patient down to to try and keep them
still when you know, on the operating table. And I
said that, John, and what was yours sort of you know,
what way did it was the only way to prepare
people for this? And he said, no, not really. You
know what he would say is this this is really
gonna fucking hurt. And if you want, I can stick
a piece of wood in your mouth that you can bite.
But yeah, that's that sort of thing, you know, absolutely
extremes of experience. And eventually, yeah, they were ordered to surrender.
Put in sealed the place off. He actually realized that
he couldn't actually get the soldiers get the ass off.
He didn't want to send his own soldiers in because
he realized they just still get.
Speaker 2: Keep getting killed.
Speaker 3: You sealed it off, and then the as of soldiers
were agreed to surrender and internationally broken surrender on the
condition that they would not actually be that they would
be taken into Russian custody but not harmed, and of
course they were all tortured to within an inch of
their life. John was you got a really severe kicking
during his spell, his five week spell in the Black Site,
to which he tried to make it worse by saying
to them, you know you hit like my sister, you
or hit like girls, I think, basically actually trying to
get them, daring them to kill him, you know, rather
than sort of subjecting to really prolonged, serious, more you know,
more considered torture. It didn't, but it did break his Sternham.
And then later when he was released from captivity, I
think he was taking the Hosport system a few months later,
having suffered a suspected heart attack, and the doctor said, actually,
the signs that you suffered at earlier heart attack, which
is probably while you were in captivity, it's you.
Speaker 2: Know, it's a miracle you're still alive.
Speaker 3: So yeah, John is one of you know what, one
of thousands of ours off soldiers who sort of went
through that experience, but one of relatively few Westerners who's
you know, who's been around to tell the tale. And
I think that's one of the valuable parts of the
book is that you've got American and British soldiers giving
first hand accounts of what that brutality, what the what
the brutality is like in the Russian system. Because with
the best will in the world, to some audiences around
the world, when they hear Ukrainians talking about what they
often don't perhaps believe, you know, I don't believe the
one percent because they feel these are people who've got
skin in the game, whereas that's less likely when when
it's Westerns who are giving those accounts.
Speaker 1: I mean, as you say that, it reminds me of
an American World War Two veteran named Jerry Sage who
was captured and he was held in that that that
prison is like Stalog three. It was the Great Escape
where they tried to dig out. He got transferred. He
wasn't part of that. But anyway, his memoir what you're
saying that reminds me of it is in his memoir
he talks about the end of the war and he
his position where he is gets taken over by the Russians,
and so the Russians, you know, capture him, liberate him,
and they're going to be the ones that repatriate him
back to the United States. And he saw how they
treated the Poles and other Slavic people in Eastern Europe.
It was just disgusted by it. I think he actually
got released through Odessa. I think from Odessa he sailed
on a ship to Egypt and then the American military
picked them back up. But history repeats itself.
Speaker 2: It does, indeed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's I mean one of the other soldiers,
Andrew Hill, who the guy previously described as Andrew Harding,
the British guy. Apologies Andrew, if you're listening. He when
when he got back.
Speaker 2: To the UK.
Speaker 3: You know, he there's there's no real support for legionnaires
who've who've been through trauma or injury because the British government,
like the American government, does not sanction them going out
there to Ukraine. It doesn't it doesn't stop, but it
doesn't sanction them either. That doesn't doesn't endorse them going
and so you don't get you know, you can't go
to the US military hospital or UK military hospital and
get medical or you know, mental health trauma help, and
he ended up going to some local men's health group
you know, near his house, are perfectly good, well run
mental health charity that had been recommended to him by
a friend. But you know, it was one of those
things where you you know, you turn up and you're
the new guy in the group, and it's like, you know,
please share your experience, and he sort of said, like,
you know, Andrew Hill, which military volunteer in Ukraine, I
was taking prisoner of war by the Russians and I
was tortured for five weeks and then held in a
pow camp where I nearly staffed to death.
Speaker 2: And you can sort of see, he said, you could
see some jaws dropping by a mile in this room.
And you know the majority of.
Speaker 3: The other guys in there are people just with every
everyday complaints about you know, drink problems, drug problems, arguments
with the wife, depression, you know, very much sort of
civilian first world issues. And I think he talked for
about an hour and a half in that first session.
It's supposed to be everybody had ten minutes each, but
the rest of them all just like, really what happened?
Speaker 2: And I think it was an interesting evening for his
fellow you know, he's felt the people also in the
session and no doubt put their problems from the perspective,
but it really wasn't suitable for him and I don't
think he went back. He needed, you know, to be
in with with other military But at.
Speaker 3: The same time, I mean that there wouldn't have been
any other military people who would have had an experience
comparable to that. There were you know, I don't know
there's anybody in the British military living or dead in
you know, in the last century who would have had
experience of being tortured by the FSB. You might have
had a few who'd been experiences of uh, you know,
mistreatment in captivity and but yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe Andy McNabb in the in the Gulf War.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that would be the only sort of
comparable experience and you know that that was a long
time ago, and yeah, it's the experiences would not have
been entirely comparable anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know was special Forces Andrew Andrew Hill was
not although he'd done you know, he'd done.
Speaker 2: Conduct under capture training.
Speaker 3: He was a training for try going I think actually,
given what he's been through seemed to manage to.
Speaker 2: Cook quite well.
Speaker 3: Although I make a point I'm not talking specifically about
Andrew's case here, but I never make any judgments about
sort of you know, what kind of mental health state
any of the people I interview are in when I
interviewed them, because they may not, they may not well
disclosed a lot about, you know, what they're feeling inside,
even if often you know that they appear to be
pretty pretty stable the outside.
Speaker 1: And the story about how these POW's got released is
like one of the most bizarre stories that anyone's likely
to read in quite a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I think when they were there for about
four months and they were all just they several of
them have been sentenced, you know, appeared in court in
Russian run courts where they'd been told that they were
going to get the death sentence, and if if that
wasn't gonna happen, they thought they'd get at least twenty
five years in the jail they were in, which given
the conditions there, would have meant the death sentence by
the means, so very few I think expected to last
more than about a year. Alex Druki, who we spoke
about earlier, had a nail hidden in his mattress, some
nail that he pulled out of the the metal struck
for the mattress, which I think you said, you know,
if I will use this to slip my throat, if
this lasts to be on the point where I can
stand it, you know, maybe in another year. They're pretty
much given up vote. And then there was suddenly told, right.
Speaker 2: You're all moving from this jail.
Speaker 3: They weren't told why, and initially I think they thought
this was possibly the month where they're going to be
taken and said a firing squad. They were then loaded
into a lorry in extremely uncomfortable stress positions, all kind
of bound up together and driven from about twelve hours
to an unknown destination, all blindfolded, almost willing death by
the time they got there, after being twelve hours of
being trust up in stress positions, and then they found
themselves at an airport in I think Rostov on Don,
which is one of the Russian cities actually is a
forward base for the for Russian operations in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: And so this is we're out in the you know,
we're out of Ukraine. Something's clearly happening. And then they uh,
they were then put on a plane with a whole
load of Arabs on the plane, Arab men in expensive dress,
you know, expensive suits, and they're thinking what is going
on here? They're still not told what's going on really.
Speaker 3: And thinking maybe you know these Syrians and we're being
transferred to present the sad tender mercies was a mate
of prudence at the time. Or it's just the plane
going to get got up in the sky and you
know what we're gonna We're going to be told that
we're on a prison swap and then it's just going
to get shot down or developed mysterious mechanical failure and
that would be the end of that. But anyway, they
duly landed in Saudi Arabia and at that point they
met the US diplomats and were told like, yeah, you've
you've been. There's been a prison swap. You're free to
you know, head home. And some of them have added
ink this was happening on the plane on the way over,
and the main reason for that was that they had
there was this sort of wealthy looking businessman who wandered
up and down the plane at one at one point,
and he had a striking resemblance to a man called
Roman and Vramovich. I don't know how well he is.
He well known in the US. Well, he's he's a
Russian oli guard and he's he's famous in the UK
because he owns, or he used to own, Chelsea Football Club,
famous football club in the UK. There's a billionaire, and
he'd been sanctioned subsequent to the start of the Ukraine
what he'd been sanctioned for his alleged links to President Putin.
But he's familiar to a lot of these legionaires who
are keen footballers because of the fact that he had
owned Chelsea Football Club. And one of them said to
said to this chat as he wandered past this man
in the in the you know, in the World Cup
suit said you don't matter what, mate, you look just
like that guy roaming a Braanvitch, the guy who owns Chelsea,
who heard of him. And this man turned to him
and sort of said, yes, that is because I am
Roman Abradovich.
Speaker 2: And it turned out that Roman Abravitch had.
Speaker 3: Organized this this prisoner swap, broken a deal between well,
I suppose essentially Britain, America and the Russians whereby the
foreign volunteers and about two hundred and fifty other Ukrainian
prisoners of war were freed in return for a number
of Russian prisoners of war. And a Bravich had done this,
I think apparently partly to sort of, I think, to
you know, sort of mend his reputation with the West
and presumably hope long term that he, you know, he
would be able to regain ownership of his assets in
the UK, including Chelsea Football Club. There's also no coincidence
that the plane landed in Saudi Arabia. Who's Who's president
President Leader mohammadan Salman, the Crown Prince was, you know,
was also in the diplomatic doghouse at the time over
the the killing of a Saudi journalist, Jamal Kashohji, which
he was accused of giving the red light the green
light too, so both of them had a bit of
reputational laundering to do. But that led to the freeing
of about you know, twelve or thirteen legionnaires and many
Ukrainian soldiers who were otherwise have probably still been there.
And that's how Alex Druki, for example, came to fly
home at the tail end of twenty twenty two and
was then Julie Grill for another three weeks or for
several hours by him some FBI guys, which he didn't
really want, but he gave lengthy descriptions of the people
who tortured him and hopes to this day, I think
to maybe one day see them across the dock of
a war crime squad.
Speaker 1: But yeah, another person mentioned in your book who has
been a guest on this show before is Ryan O'Leary.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yes, yeah, I mean Ryan I never met.
I think we did try to interview once, but just.
Speaker 1: The times never we have like a three and a
half hour episode with him.
Speaker 3: He had a lot Yeah, you know, yes, you'll know
most of Ryan's history then. But I interviewed one of
the soldiers in the book, Jack Knight, worked for Ryan,
worked under Ryan and as part of Chosen Company, and
fought a number of battles with them. They were a
volunteer unit made up mainly of legionnaires, and the interesting
thing about Chosen Company, apart from the battles that they
they fought in, was that they were essentially essentially an
effort to sort of improve the professionalism of the Legion.
I think it had gone a bad reputation because of
the Walter Mitty characters within the Legion and the sort
of fantasists and so on. Other legionnaires Legion units had
a bit of a reputation for the only fighting one
week in three and spending a lot of time in
bars and brothels and brawling and other stuff. And then
there were a few other Legionaire units that you know,
we were okay, but didn't really do much, didn't really
see much action, and Chosen was sort of formed, i
think as a sort of a more serious elite legion
within the Legion, as it were, and the selection criteria
was pretty rigorous. You had to have had i think
prior combat experience was certainly prior military experience. And also
you know, the idea was that you would be you
would be on prolonged deployments, no sort of spending one
week in the don Bass and the next week in
a bar in Kiev. And also that you would be
they were they were going to be frontline combat specialists,
doing trench charges and so on, and that you should
expect to be injured or killed. No no windin or
winding if that happened. So the pretty serious unit and
Jack Knight, you know, signed up to serve with them,
having had I think a slightly frustrating tour to start
off with where he'd you know, he'd done his best
to get stuck in in the action down south in
hous On in twenty twenty two, but then the Russians
rather unsportingly then pulled out of hers on, so the
big bat off of house on which I think he
was hoping to take part in, didn't happen, and he
sort of the count in the book him sort of
wandering about liberated her soon and being about the only
person who isn't, sort of cheering and waving, sort of
thinking like, you know, it's it's it's nice to be
here to see everybody free. But I would have liked
to have played more of a role in it. And
Jack joined the Chosen Company, I think partly to sort
of hope to get some proper action. And he had
partly in his in his sort of military in his
family history, his great great great grandfather had won the
Victoria Cross in World War One, and he was keen
to try and following his great great grandfather's footsteps because
he was from a military family and that kind of
thing runs quite thick in the blood if you've got
a distinguished ancestor. And yeah, during one of the battles
in the Don Bass, where they were trying to take
some trenches, things did not go according to plan. There
was a large number of soldiers of Chosen Company were
injured early on in the battle, and Jack, who was
staying at the back at the time because he was
there as a sapper ready to go in and clear
minds later on, realized that the he wasn't going to
be doing much mind clearance if everybody got killed and
didn't come back alive, so he volunteered to go into
the combat zone and try and stretcher a few people out,
and did so, I think, at one point, having to
rescue a bunch of Ukrainian guys who'd strayed into a landmine.
Speaker 2: A minefield, and.
Speaker 3: The way he told it's just decided to he had
no choice but just to walk randomly into the minefield
himself to get them and hope that he wouldn't get
blown up himself, basically ignoring everything he'd spent years training
to do during his Royal Ordnance and Supper Awareness course,
you know, which is always about probing the ground carefully
in front of you, if you're in a minefield with
a product thing and taking each sort of step, you know,
like an in time. He said, there's no time for that,
and you know, there were drones ahead, this machine gun fire.
I've just got to go for it and try and
get these guys out and hope for the best.
Speaker 2: And that's what he did, and he ended up.
Speaker 3: Getting himself a medal, and I think he felt that,
you know, he'd you know, to some extent at least
followed in his ancestors footsteps. So again, somebody who was
who was there very much looking for purpose, who didn't
really feel terribly happy in civilian life, and I think
certainly found it in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Doing things like that despite the sort of very high
risks that you were running.
Speaker 1: And then kind of on like the darker side of things,
you talk about two international volunteers who were we think
murdered by their own people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've got to be a little bit careful about
what I say on these ones, because I've written about
these cases extensively, both in the book and the you
know and and in the Telegraph, the newspaper I worked for,
and they both live cases as in there are you know,
nobody has been arrested in either case, yet there is
a particular suspect in one case. What one case involves
a guy called Daniel Burker, military volunteer that I interviewed
for the book several times and who I spent time
without in Ukraine. He had fought, like many of them have,
for the with the Kurdish antony Isis forces in in
in in Syria, and so when he came to Ukraine,
he brought a certain amount of experience as somebody who
was used to fighting, you know, the people's wars. He
he knew it would be disorganized, He knew you would
probably have to sort of get quite a lot of
things done for yourself. You couldn't expect to bure opposite
to do.
Speaker 2: It for you. And it was a sort of mascot
in some ways for the for the volunteer, for the volunteers.
Speaker 3: Early on he ran a unit called the Dark Angels
that did some earlier operations, that who posted details of
themselveshooting up a Russian tank on social.
Speaker 2: Media that got huge numbers of followings.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's kind of very much summarized the
kind of thing that a lot of volunteers wanted to
be doing I think, you know. But anyway, in late
twenty twenty September twenty twenty three or so, he'd actually
diversified into running a humanitarian mission instead, a sort of
frontline rescue and support mission, and he went missing for
several weeks.
Speaker 2: Nobody knew what had happened to him.
Speaker 3: It was the first maybe just been on a you know,
sort of a bit of a boozebender or something for
a few days. And if you know the legion are
as well, you'll know that it's not unusual for someone to,
you know, if they've been on a boozebender.
Speaker 2: Don't expect that he had. Don't expect them to declare
the missing for at least about a week. But anyway,
he had indeed disappeared.
Speaker 3: A police investigation was launched out of actually and his
body was recovered from under a sewer or a culvert
near a firing range in the countryside outside of Zaparista
in eastern Ukraine. And I think initially people thought, well,
maybe you know, of Russian has done this or something
like that, but it later became clear that a fellow
volunteer had carried out well, it appeared to have carried this,
this this killing out. This volunteer later claimed that he'd
shot Daniel by mistake, having sort of pretended to what
was it he said, He said, I think I think
the term is fragging, where you point a weapon at
somebody when you shouldn't do and you know it's violating
basic military procedure. Apparently Daniel had said to him, you're
fagging me while they're out of this range, just having
a practice shoot or something.
Speaker 1: Flagging, flagging, flagging or fragging flagging. So flagging is when
you're going over with your muzzle over friendly guys that
you don't want to shoot. Fragging is when you actually
kill one of your own guys intentionally.
Speaker 2: Flagging.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, basically when you're pointing your weapon at somebody.
Sorry for anyone listening, I'm not I'm not an ex soldier,
So worries when you point a weapon at somebody you
know who's a friendly force. You know something that you
know every boy whatever given a gun or an air
gun from you know, the death from the age of five,
which is the first rule of weapons craft you ever told.
Never point a gun at anyone, whether it's loaded or not.
Apparently this this suspect in his shooting had he later
told police that he had pointed the gun Daniel Daniels,
don't do that, mate, that's stupid, remonstrated from UH, at
which point the suspect and then apparently so they said,
don't worry, the gun is not loaded, and then fired,
you know, pulled the trigger on the gun at Daniel,
and sure enough the gun was loaded. He emptied a
burst into him and killed him, then panicked and hid
him in his body in this sewer. This was the
account that he allegedly later gave to police who arrested him.
It's not verified, so I should put that whole warning
on it. But as you can imagine, it raises more
questions than it answers why I would experienced soldier ever
point a gun at anybody in the first place, let
alone then pulled the trigger on somebody, Because if you
imagine that happening in real life, even if that gun
was not loaded, the next thing that Daniel would likely
have done, having already been annoyed, would probably give him
a punch him in the face. They said, don't you
ever fucking do that again? I would have done I
think so the explanation sort of doesn't seem to sort
of bear much truth, unfortunately, for reasons that I've never
been made clear.
Speaker 2: The Ukrainian police then let this individual go.
Speaker 3: He was released on bail to a hotel, and then
he then made himself scarce, perhaps not surprisingly.
Speaker 1: And he's on the lamp. So he's on the lamp still, yeah.
Speaker 3: And as well, perhaps this dayre unknown, but he is
wanted by the Ukrainian police in connection with Daniel's death.
I cover that one in the book quite a bit,
partly because I knew Daniel, and partly I wanted to
sort of try and give a deepailed account of what happened,
because there was a lot of a great deal.
Speaker 2: Of claim and counterclaiming it, and.
Speaker 3: Partly because it's sort of when he disappeared, it was
very very soon. The finger of suspicion pointed a fellow Legionnaires.
Even though nobody knew what had happened at that point.
It was just this sort of sense that there are
a lot of dodgy Legionnaires out there, and it seems
likely that Daniels as unfortunately, had some sort of running
with one of them, and you know, it just pointed
to the sort of the sense that there were a
lot of unsavory characters out there, and that the Legion's
vetting was not very good. It did not point a
very good picture of the Legion at that point. And
that was similar in the other case that I write
about the book where a Legionnaire called them. Jordan Chadick,
a British guy who was an ex member of the
Well Scots Guards who was found in a reservoir in
eastern Ukraine some way from the front lines in the
summer of twenty twenty three, was lying in the dead
in the reservoir and his hands tied behind his back.
As I say, the reservoir was some way from the
front line, so it was he did not appear to
have been killed by Russian soldiers. There were no known
Russian separatist crews operating in that area or indeed anywhere
else in you know, Ukrainian territory, so it couldn't didn't
seem like it was them either. And again suspicion quickly
focused on his fellow Legionnaires and apparently had an argument
the night before with a bunch of his fellow legionaires
while drinking, and some sort of fight had broken out,
and the next thing that anybody knew was that he
you know, his body had shown up in this in
this lake.
Speaker 2: There's a there's there's.
Speaker 3: A limit of what I can say on that one
again because it's, uh, it's quite a complicated story. There's
a lot of he said, they said, I probably couldn't
do justice to on a podcast even if I even
if I tried to.
Speaker 1: But the story is given about how he ended up
in that reservoir just don't make sense.
Speaker 3: No, yeah, uh, you know, at one point it was
said that he was being taken to a local police
station where you know, he was going to be held
because he was drunk, but instead he ended up in
this in this reservoir instead. And you have to ask
yourself if somebody is supposed to be getting taken to
a police station because they're drunk and have you know,
they're they've needed to be restrained by handcuffs for their
own safety because they've been involved in the punch up,
how does that end up with them then.
Speaker 2: Dead in a reservoir.
Speaker 3: You know, somebody somewhere who would have been you know,
in charge of him as a you know, you know,
in custody has some questions to answer, clearly, because even
if somebody has been violent, even if somebody has been
restrained as a prisoner, you know, at that point most
soldiers would know, especially if they've ever taken prisoner as
a war or anything, that there are certain proceedures you
follow to you know, if only to prevent a prisoner
harming themselves or or anything else. And clearly that wasn't
that didn't happen. And the the tragedy of that case,
and one of the tragedies is that, uh, quite apart
from Jordan's death, is that you know, nobody has been
brought to book for it, and there's a very little
sign of any proper judicial process happening, and very little
sign of the British government really doing anything to try
and question the other British soldiers who were with him
at the time. I've spoken several of them. I've asked them,
you know, did you know, have you had any anybody
from the Foreign Office or the British Police asking to
speak to you about this? None of them have, you know,
And that would not be that would not be difficult
if I can find out who they are. The you know,
the Ukrainian police know who they are, They interviewed them
all afterwards. They just think what wise are wise are
proceding not on the way so that Jordan's mother, among
other people, can get some proper answers about what happened,
even if it turns out it was some sort of misadventure.
But that that that is life in the legion. You know,
you're often not fighting with with with people who you're
often fighting with kind of rough diamonds of different sorts,
and some who are not diamonds at all. But you know,
it's what also DAWs draws them to it.
Speaker 2: And it was one of them.
Speaker 3: I was speaking to him who fought in that same
unit with Jordan. Uh, you know, in often very tough combat.
That's why they're all pistols. Pistols, you know, is drunk,
very drunk. So using the English leave was that was
why they were all very drunk when this fight broke out.
They were drinking off for stress and a very very
tough few months of deployment to back Mud. And yeah,
I said to this guy, what, you know, what was
it like fighting out there? This other guy was in
the unit, and he said, yeah, it was, you know,
really really hard going, really tough, you know, And I said,
you know, did you find it difficult?
Speaker 2: He said, yeah, but I fucking loved it. And I
think that.
Speaker 3: Sums up the Legion experience in its classic sense for
a lot of the movie.
Speaker 1: And I mean, taking it from there, I want to
kind of ask you about any concluding thoughts you have about,
you know, your work studying and interviewing the foreigners that
served in Ukraine and sort of their impact in the war.
I think at the end of the book you have
an interesting segment where you talk about how, you know,
every single person on the battlefield makes a difference in
their own small way, but the foreigners and big picture
were probably not strategically relevant to the overall scheme of
the war.
Speaker 2: Not enough of them. Ye oh that's right, you yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3: So as just said, I don't think the numbers ever
reached money much more than sort of twenty or thirty thousand,
maybe a few more over the years. But that's so
rough bull puck figure. She's about to say much she
has fought in the Spanish Civil War and coincidentally is
about the same numbers that volunteered to fight for ISIS
as in fighting as jahadists in Iraq and Syria from
around the world, which puts it into sort of some
sort of weird perspective. So with those sort of numbers
in a war with you know, maybe about half a
million competents on either side are possibly more thirty five
thousand or so, Even if it was that many, it's
not going to make that much of a difference. Where
I think the legion did make a difference, there was
just in morale Ukrainians, ordinary Ukrainians in the street would
see these guys wandering around in you know, in Ukrainian uniforms,
but with these little sort of shoulder badges denoting the
fact that they were from the UK or the US
or wherever.
Speaker 2: And it was a huge.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a sign to a lot of
Ukrainians that look, you know, the world is with you here,
we believe in your cause. And yeah, sure, foreign governments,
Western governments might not be sending troops. They may not
they may not be putting boots on the ground, their
own private citizens are and they're here not just to
handout aid and deliver you know, first aid packages and
medical stuff. They're actually here to fight and die alongside you.
That's a big morale booster, I think as well as
the you know, the the the individual tactical contributions that
they made, whether it was experienced US marines, for example,
teaching Ukrainians certain tactical stuff, or whether it was individual
groups of volunteers showing metal and initiative. Initiative on the battlefield,
which might often just be like, you know, taking a
Russian machine gun position there, or making a good judgment
call somewhere else, saying now, maybe that that's going to
be too tough, stay away from that, that's going to
be too difficult, you know, just sound tactical advice. I
think a lot of that percolated through to the Ukrainians
over time. But yeah, one of the I think that
because you had a lot of bad apples, and because
they didn't have any huge struty victories were an individual
battalion of Legionnaires kind of took a town or village,
there weren't many good headlines that the Legions generated. Really unfortunately.
A lot of the headlines were about Legionaires killed, legionnaires captured,
legionnaires murdered by the Legionnaires, et cetera, and that perhaps
did not encourage a you know, many others to sort
of join up or certainly that.
Speaker 2: Perhaps not as many as might have done. And also the.
Speaker 3: The logistics around the Legion were pretty poor in terms
of people coming in, you know and not sort of
you know, the recruitment system was poor, the system to
actually get them channeled out to the front was lousy,
and so on. And I do make the point in
the book that if they'd had a better recruitment system
and sort of watermastering system and everything else it's just
been better organized, you might have had far more Legionaires
coming in.
Speaker 2: This is something I've interested in your opinion, or.
Speaker 3: Actually because I know you've discussed people like outfits like
Dying Core and Blackwater a lot on the podcasts in
the past. My sort of theory, or one of the
theories I advanced to the book is that, you know,
if the West had been able to provide some sort
of logistical support for the Legion along the lines of
a Dying Core or a Blackwater training, that could have
trained the legionnaires in the same way as they trained
up the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police or the
Afghan army, and that that could have been done, you know,
in ukrainive needs to be I think, or if need
be elsewhere, and it could have been done on a
private basis, that might have made a lot of difference because.
Speaker 2: Bruising experiences.
Speaker 1: You know, Putin got to have his little green Man.
Why can't we have ours?
Speaker 2: Exactly? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean do you think I mean that there
is a political difficulty with it in the British and
American governments for example, might feel that it was a
step too far, that it was it was one step
off training troops. But I mean, you know, they were
sending in heavy weaponry, they were sending in you know,
they were training Ukrainians in their own countries.
Speaker 2: We have Ukrainian training facilities here in the UK.
Speaker 3: They were doing everything short of that, and in some
ways things quite beyond that, with the heavy missiles and everything.
Speaker 2: Do you think that.
Speaker 3: Somewhere like Dying Core or Blackwater would have taken on
something like that or do you think it would have
been hard to get you know, PMCs to take on
such a thing.
Speaker 1: I think yeah, you could. Probably. The thing with private
military companies in the United States is that they don't
really engage in offensive combat operations. We don't really have
that much. We have intelligence contractors, we have logistical contractors,
security contractors that do mobile and static security for diplomats
and so on, but we don't have like executive outcomes
that you know, the South Africans that fought in Angola
and Sierra Leone and they really took the fight to
the enemy and didn't take any ship at all. We
don't really have an equivalent of that. And I guess
the question is should we have something like that, and
maybe maybe Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't even think you need the equivalent of that though,
because what this would be for would be for the training, and.
Speaker 1: It would be it would be a Ukrainian unit with.
Speaker 3: Military to the Ukrainian military units, right, so you wouldn't
necessarily need the organizers at the you know, at the
shop and a bit like what you You would have
pretty much the same model as you'd have in a
Rock and Afghanistan, a large scale sort of public sect
to the large scale security set to training.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that in the United States at least and
to a lesser extent Western Europe. I think we're we
were and we are a victim of you know, seventy
seventy five years of analysis of the Soviet Union in Russia.
That turned out to be wrong in a lot of ways.
And we had all these theories about escalation ladders and
we're going to do this and then they'll do that.
I mean, I think in retrospect, we probably should have
just thrown up a no fly zone over Ukraine the
day of the invasion and they're like no, like, no,
this is unacceptable, and it called putin call him out.
I mean, as we know, the Russians only respond when
you punch them in the nose and tell them no,
like that's not acceptable.
Speaker 3: Well, that's certainly there was a lot of Ukrainian is
asking about that at the beginning of the war. Yeah,
I mean I would have said that even that was
that would.
Speaker 2: Have been riskier than yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, what I'm sort of what I've sort of
exploring the in the last chapter of the book. And
also would I mean, it would have been valuable for
the you know, the Britains, for the Western forces because
you'd have had loads of people going out there and
gaining first hand experience of what it was actually like
to fight against the Russians, which would be, you know,
which would be extremely useful. And I think it would
have probably attracted a far you know, potentially far more
soldiers you know, into the Ukrainian military fold, because there'd
be a lot of people who probably like.
Speaker 2: Us, including serving US military soldiers.
Speaker 3: They might have had, you know, take a sabbatical of
some sort, who would say that, you know, a few
three months fighting in Ukraine on the front lines is
worth several years of training back home. I mean, it
strikes me as a little bit of a failure of imagination.
I can think of all sorts of good reasons why
it wouldn't happen. But that's always the case when you
get a war. There's always people who are going to
say we can't do this for reasons they be and c.
And often it's it's when people kind of find a
reason around that that.
Speaker 2: You get a breakthrough.
Speaker 3: I'd be interested to see, you know, I've not sort
of found anybody who's who's really sort of been able
to sort of argue the ins and outs of this
will I'll be interested to see if any of your
listeners have a reason to say, na, sorry, part of
that wouldn't work, you know, which they may well be,
but it seems a bit like a missed opportunity to me,
I must say, and I do remember there's a guy
in the book who I quote who sort of says
it was a former US Army soldier I think he
was unfortunately was actually killed out in Ukraine. And he says,
you know, it surprises me. They're not fucked tons of
guys from West point out here just learning the ropes,
you know, like you.
Speaker 2: Know, he was amazed that the legion was as small
as it was. And I think it's a telling point.
Speaker 1: So the book, for people who want to read it,
I highly recommend it is The Mad and the Brave.
It's a story of Ukraine's foreign legion. Available now. You
can find it in bookshops or on Amazon wherever you
want to go. Colin, What's what's the next book? What
are you working on now?
Speaker 2: Oh? No idea I've done. I think I've done three
year before.
Speaker 3: I've done one about my time in the one about
being kidnapped in Somalia, otherwise about some other people being kidnapped.
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
Speaker 3: Books do not grow on trees where I know, either
where I'm from. Sadly, I often think I would like
to do another one on the Ukrainian Legion because every
time I meet a Legionaire, even if it's just for
a five minute conversation, they always tell me something that
happened to them on the battle that makes you think
Jesus Christ, I could have got a chapter in the
book out of that.
Speaker 2: I wish I'd met you before. You know, that's on
the basis of a five minute conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you should.
Speaker 3: Millions, million and ones stories still to be to be
written about the Legion and my one basically was kind
of written to deadline to make sure it came out early,
so you know you, I would not necessarily claim the
stories I've done are necessarily the most thrilling stories that
the Legionnaires have out there, but maybe the history books
will give them.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'll do another we'll see that'd be great.
Speaker 1: And where can people find you online? Do you have
a website or social media or anything.
Speaker 3: The easiest way to reached me is on my Twitter feed,
which I'm also on the Blue Sky b or whatever
it's called.
Speaker 2: The one.
Speaker 3: It's Colin Freeman nine to nine at so as upon
Me at Colin Freeman ninety nine is my Twitter feed
and also, to be honest, if you google me, you'll
see me see the book and my Telegraph home pace
on fairly easy to find you and I can also
be found at Colin dot Freeman at Telegraph dot com UK,
which is my generic Telegraph email.
Speaker 2: I do check my email and my Twitter feed pretty
rankyly on my on my call it spams.
Speaker 3: So yeah, if anybody ever wants to get in touch,
feel free to you. And thank you to anyone out
there who's who's listening. And I hope I haven't made
too many sort of faux pas or bloopers in terms
of my military knowledge.
Speaker 1: No, no, it was great, and we'll have links down
the description for all of that stuff that where you
can go and find Colin in his book. Thank you
for joining us tonight, Colin, I really appreciate you taking
the time.
Speaker 2: I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and everyone else out there, we'll see you guys
next time.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Good. Hey, guys, I want to take a moment to
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Speaker 2: The link will be down the description