When the first reports came in, nobody knew much of anything. Four volunteers, maybe five—it was all sketchy—had apparently been caught in an ambush and killed, somewhere in the east, out in the shifting turmoil of the chaos zone. Within hours, among some of the huddled groups of foreign fighters training and waiting in and around Kyiv, the scant details of a deadly attack were all anybody was talking about.
Michael Young, a lean 36-year-old American with a shaved head, sat in the booth of a dim bar near Maidan Square and sipped at his Heineken. Outside, the city streets were slick and cold with the April drizzle. Young had come to Ukraine a few weeks earlier, arriving from Portland, Oregon, to join thousands of eager volunteers flooding into the war zone, anxious for the chance to help fend off Vladimir Putin’s troops. The war was then only two months old and the ranks of the country’s International Legion seemed to be quickly swelling. From what he could piece together, the group that was said to have been killed was due to link up with his own outfit. “They were supposed to be joining our unit here in Kyiv in the next few days,” he said. The sense of proximity heightened Young’s feeling of danger. “This makes it all real,” he told me.
As he spoke, Young hungrily forked at a rib-eye steak. He had spent the long, wet day training with Ukrainian reservists. He was eager to get to the front. In truth, as he’d explained to me over Signal, an encrypted messaging app, in the preceding weeks, Young had been seeking a combat mission ever since he’d flamed out of the U.S. Marines 15 years ago, before he’d had a chance to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Right after his country was invaded, in February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had urged foreign volunteers to join the fight. “This is the beginning of a war against Europe,” Zelensky had said, “against democracy… and peaceful coexistence.” He announced the creation of the International Legion to train and dispatch the volunteers. Young heard the call. But his path to the fight wasn’t proving easy.
After first considering joining the International Legion, Young had instead joined up in March with the Georgia National Legion—a battalion of over 1,100 men and women founded by the Georgian commander Mamuka Mamulashvili in 2014, when fighting commenced against Russian forces in Donbas. The group included a smattering of foreign volunteers, mostly Americans and Brits, but it was, of course, primarily composed of volunteers from Georgia, which had also been invaded by Russia, in 2008.
But Young soon left the Georgia Legion and, alongside a pair of Americans he had met, joined up with an independent unit promising a speedier deployment. He’d yet to see the kind of fighting he’d come all this way to partake in, but his duties felt like they were inching him closer to the action. Just that morning he’d returned from Bakhmut, about 350 miles southeast and just a few miles from the Russian positions in Donbas, where he’d delivered flak jackets, helmets, and cigarettes to troops. He had only a vague understanding of where he’d go next, but he told me that his commanders had deemed him “combat ready,” and he was expecting to be sent east more permanently in a matter of weeks, or maybe days.
Sitting with Young in the booth were the two Americans with whom he’d quit the Georgia National Legion; the men had become inseparable during the past month and were staying together in a hotel nearby. Mark Watson, a former U.S. Marine turned software developer from Pomona, California, was a slight, taciturn man of 27 with sleepy eyes and a shock of brown hair. Born in Ukraine, he had moved with his parents to the United States when he was about six. His military career had taken him to the Philippines with an infantry unit and to Israel with one of the Marines’ Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team (FAST) units. Watson, who spoke some Ukrainian, still had family living around Kyiv and relatives fighting in the war. He showed me a photo on his phone of a relative in camouflage, taken, he told me, “somewhere near the front lines.”
The other member of the threesome was Dallas Casey, a husky, bearded 28-year-old with curly brown hair and a warm, garrulous manner. He had served as a medic in the U.S. Army and then worked in Israel for Triple Canopy, the security group, guarding government officials. Now employed by an I.T. firm in Salt Lake City, he was contemplating medical school but had felt compelled to head to Ukraine the moment the Russians invaded. “I told my husband that I was going to go,” Casey recounted. “He said, ‘All right,’ and a week later I flew to Slovakia.”
The trio was hardly alone in the bar, which had become a kind of hangout for foreign fighters hitching up with a variety of militia units. Watson scanned the room, glancing at other men arched over their beers. He recognized a few; others were new faces. “Some of these outfits you can join are sketchy, like Right Sector,” Watson said, referring to an ultra-nationalist umbrella group of paramilitary units that had sprung up in late 2013 during the protests against the country’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych. Right Sector street fighters had fought battles against riot police in this neighborhood, around Maidan Square, helping to drive Yanukovych from power.
The diversity of fighting forces underscored the spectrum of motivations and personalities converging—the makeshift armies were variously composed of danger junkies and sinister right-wing nationalists, shameless opportunists and good people seeking a good war. There were men like Watson with roots in Ukraine, and others, like Casey, driven by a deep humanitarian impulse. Then there were those like Michael Young, moved by a tangle of motives that he had struggled to understand: moral outrage, a thirst for adventure, a yearning for redemption. Young’s lifelong restlessness and search for fulfillment had taken him, step by step, to the edge of a catastrophic conflict in a land far from home, and would, over the next weeks, draw him in even deeper.
A thin man with stringy blond hair and a blond beard sat disconsolately in a corner booth, with several empty beer bottles in front of him; Young identified him as the commander of the group that was apparently ambushed on the eastern front. He caught Young’s eye and shuffled over to the table. He was shutting down his unit of the International Legion and heading back to the States, he said. After the unconfirmed report that his men had perished in combat, he was too shaken up to continue. Take care of yourselves, he told Young and his comrades. “Have a good life.” Then he returned to his booth and resumed drinking his beer, alone.
Three days after Russian troops crashed into his country, Zelensky—who was just beginning to capture global admiration for the grit and physical bravery with which he was personally responding to the invasion—challenged the world to help. The Ukrainian army had 196,000 active members, a sizable force but a far cry from Russia’s 900,000-strong active personnel, and Zelensky seemed to think that to have any chance of staving off their adversaries, he would need more troops on the ground. “Anyone who wants to join the defense,” Zelensky said, “can come and fight side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals.” The call to arms echoed the invitation made at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when Republican forces fought off a coup attempt led by General Francisco Franco by enlisting the help of some 35,000 volunteers from 65 countries—including around 2,800 Americans who rushed to Spain to fight alongside Republican soldiers.
Not since that conflict has a war in Europe elicited such a groundswell of support from foreign recruits. It remains unclear exactly how many made it into the country—and how many went home after only a few days—but a week after the Legion was announced, the Ukrainian government claimed that 20,000 volunteers from 52 countries had applied to join its ranks.
Despite that wave of fighters, the international community’s formal response to Zelensky’s plea has been inconsistent. The governments of several countries, including some vulnerable former Soviet republics such as Latvia and Lithuania, gave volunteers their blessing. In Australia, then prime minister Scott Morrison urged citizens not to travel to Ukraine, and warned that fighting in the conflict was possibly illegal. The United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said that British citizens would “absolutely” have her support if they volunteered in Ukraine—only to be contradicted by Prime Minister Boris Johnson the next day. British soldiers who went to Ukraine would face a court martial, he said the following week. The U.K. government has also warned that civilians may risk prosecution upon return. The U.S. State Department warned American citizens not to travel to Ukraine, citing the extreme danger, though the government has made no firm statement on the legality of volunteering.
There was not only the danger of what might happen to these foreign fighters in battle, but what would happen to those who were captured. As the first surge of applicants declared their intentions to volunteer, a spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Defense declared that all foreign fighters would be treated as mercenaries, rather than as combatants; thus they would not be protected by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the torture and execution of prisoners of war. “At best,” the spokesperson said, “they can expect to be prosecuted as criminals.”
Other deterrents have popped up to thwart would-be volunteers. Several Ukrainian embassy websites experienced cyberattacks the day after the International Legion was announced, and Norwegian police alleged that Russians hacked the Ukrainian Embassy in Oslo. But the efforts appear to have done little to stop those eager to join the fight—a collection of enlistees who’ve been helped along by the new technologies and novel approaches in army building. The encrypted messaging apps Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp have allowed volunteers to reach out directly to intermediaries in Ukraine and in neighboring Poland, where recruiters set up shop and began processing incoming fighters. An informal network sprung up to share logistical details and helpful tips for those looking to join the war. Rendezvous points, supply checklists, current conditions inside the conflict zone. All the details necessary to join a war half-a-world away were suddenly right at a prospective fighter’s fingertips—as were the grim reminders of the conflict’s brutality, in the form of photos and footage.
Of course, wars always attract tourists. What’s new is just how easy it has become to venture into the chaos—and share a vision of what you might discover there. In March, Henry Hoeft, a 28-year-old who reportedly had once been a member of the Boogaloo Bois, the American anti-government extremist group, traveled to Ukraine where he claimed he volunteered for the Georgia National Legion. After several days, Hoeft left the Georgia Legion and made a video that was posted to the internet and went viral in which he claimed that foreigners were being sent to Kyiv “with no fucking weapons, no kit, no fucking plates,” and when they refused to go, commanders threatened to “shoot us in the back.”
A volunteer who was working alongside the Georgia Legion called the assertions “completely false,” claiming in videos provided to a journalist that Hoeft did not pass the legion’s vetting process and was responding to being rejected. Mamulashvili, the founder of the Georgia National Legion, a 44-year-old mixed martial arts fighter and veteran of the Georgia-Abkhazia and First Chechen wars, told me that Hoeft had been expelled after a Georgia Legion interviewer intuited possible ties to an extremist movement. Hoeft’s allegations evaporated—but not before he rattled the nerves of many potential volunteers.
Other indiscreet internet activity might have been even more harmful. In March, Russian cruise missiles struck the International Peacekeeping and Security Center in Yavoriv. The base had become a training center for new legionnaires, and as many as 1,000 were there at the time of the strike. While the Russian Defense Ministry would claim the attack killed up to 180 “foreign mercenaries,” Ukrainian officials asserted that 35 people were killed, none of whom were foreigners. Among the volunteer soldiers, speculation spread that social media posts had helped the Russians hit their target.
One volunteer, a man named Scotty, who asked me not to share his last name, told me he thought that the volunteers’ own online activity had compromised security at Yavoriv and one other base. A 37-year-old resident of Glasgow, Scotty had, before the invasion, been working for an airport-security company in the United Kingdom as an IED expert. But when air travel collapsed during the pandemic, the firm laid him off. “I found myself out of a job, I felt useless,” he said. “I saw these TV reports about civilians getting killed, and
I decided to put this skill set to use in Ukraine.” He joined up with the International Legion, which directed him to the Yavoriv base. He arrived four hours after the Russian missile strike. Shaken by the violence, Scotty was soon dispatched to a new base in Kyiv. But that post, too, he said, was apparently compromised by recruits who had inadvertently revealed their location on TikTok and other social media platforms.
“The alarms went off, we were getting ready to leave, and mortars started coming down,” he said. “We had to leave our medical equipment, body-armor plates, helmets, and other gear behind. It was too dangerous to go back in.” Scotty said nobody was injured in the attack, but he quit the International Legion after that near-calamity and signed with the Georgia Legion, which volunteers told me enforced stricter security, confiscating phones from new recruits and holding them for three days. The Georgia Legion also requires volunteers to keep their location services turned off during their training period—and kicks out anyone caught violating the rule.
For all their potential to do harm, social media and texting tools have also been an invaluable resource in the combat zone.
I was granted access to an enormous Signal group started by a British combat veteran that was being used as a kind of primer for foreigners wading into the conflict. On the chat, volunteers from the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and Sweden swapped information on border crossings and other logistics. Polish Good Samaritans offered to serve as couriers between Warsaw, Kraków, and Lviv, and weighed in with up-to-the-minute bus schedules, train schedules, and road conditions. Volunteers traded info about salaries: One American seemed pleasantly surprised when he learned that his pay with an international outfit would be “3,500” a month. A month later he discovered that the sum was paid in Ukrainian hryvnia—about $118.
The chat group also served as a guide to the outfits that accept foreign fighters in Ukraine. These notably include the Mozart Group, set up by a retired U.S. special operations commander named Andy Milburn as a counterpart to the Wagner Group, a rabidly pro-Putin mercenary outfit, and Task Force Yankee, a unit largely composed of volunteers from the U.S., Canada, and Europe cofounded by U.S. Army veteran Harrison Josefowicz. There are also the extreme-right factions. The most prominent, the Azov Battalion, originated as a paramilitary unit during the war in Donbas in 2014 and became incorporated into the Ukrainian military, despite its associations with neo-Nazi ideology. Though still shadowed by its past, the battalion has cleaned up its image in recent months and this spring earned distinction and global attention for its part in holding off the Russians for weeks from inside the abandoned Azovstal Iron and Steel Works—the huge industrial complex filled with subterranean chambers and tunnels—in the destroyed city of Mariupol.
If anywhere near the initial 20,000 applicants are with the International Legion, it would be the largest foreign group fighting in Ukraine. But the legion had a reputation for uneven quality, at least at first, as Matthew Robinson, a 40-year-old Brit told me. Robinson, who had worked during the Iraq War as a contractor for Kellogg, Brown & Root, came out of early retirement in Spain to join the fight in early March. “I was looking for redemption to make up for my time in an unjust war in Iraq,” he told me.
He flew to Poland and signed up with the International Legion at a recruitment booth at Kraków Airport. But before he’d even made it into Ukraine, he got a sense for the wildly uneven quality of volunteers in the International Legion. On the bus into the country, he says, an intoxicated volunteer pulled a knife out of his backpack in a deranged effort to attack the driver and take command of the vehicle. “We disarmed the gentleman, and when we stopped at a hotel I decided that I would no longer be a part of the International Legion,” Robinson said. “I realized that the caliber of candidates was not going to be sufficient.” He quit and joined the Georgia Legion, where his assertive personality and wartime experience earned him a promotion to commander of the foreign contingent, the group that included Michael Young and his two American comrades.
Robinson wasn’t the only foreign volunteer who shared his disillusionment with the caliber of the international force. Hieu Le, 30, a Vietnamese American veteran who had served in Afghanistan, wrote on Facebook that the International Legion was filled with “unhinged” characters, some of whom claimed to be former Special Forces troops yet spent their time starting fights and getting “high on amphetamines, testosterone, steroids and who knows what other drugs they’ve smuggled into the war zone.”
“There’s no screening,” Robinson told me of the International Legion at the time he volunteered. “It’s ‘Yes, we want to fight,’ and they’re moving people with no experience quickly into battle.”
Yet other volunteers offered a gripe of an opposite nature. Some foreigners arrived in Ukraine expecting to be immediately dispatched to fight Russian tanks—only to face what they saw as a shortage of munitions and a seemingly interminable wait to get to the front. “We’re not being used. We have no weapons, no armor, and no one apparently can change these things,” a Canadian comedian who traveled to Ukraine to join the conflict wrote on Twitter in March. “We’re willing to lay down our lives in defense of this country—because it’s worth it—but instead we’re sitting here getting jerked around by everyone we meet.”
A spokesperson for the International Legion, Corporal Damien Magrou, a Norwegian attorney in Kyiv, didn’t respond to requests for comment from GQ but has publicly acknowledged the challenges the force has faced in the past. “It’s a bit like a start-up,” he told The Washington Post in April. “There’s a few lessons you learn along the way.”
Mamulashvili, the Georgia Legion founder, told me that his organization imposed a three-week waiting time on fresh volunteers to allow commanders to assess their battle readiness. “They want weapons in two days and to go to the front lines, even those without experience,” he said. “They are saying, ‘We came here to fight, not to sit on a base.’ I say, ‘It’s war, people are dying there. You’d better be prepared.’ ”
Michael Young, the erstwhile Marine from Washington State, had, in a sense, been waiting longer than just about anybody to get to the front—to get into the fight. He had joined the American military back in 2004, inspired by the 9/11 attacks that occurred in his sophomore year of high school. His Marine experience included teaching riflery, service in a FAST company, and a three-month stint at Guantanamo, where he guarded the perimeter of the base. But then a darkness rolled over him. In 2006 he suffered a series of what he describes only as “mental health problems.” After he sought treatment at a psychiatric hospital, Young got little sympathy from his commanders. “Their attitude was like, ‘Are you going to kill yourself?’ ‘Well, I don’t want to.’ ‘Well, then, you’re not depressed.’ It was like Catch 22.”
The setback derailed him but didn’t defeat him. In 2007 he received a general discharge under honorable conditions, but it disqualified him from receiving tuition assistance under the G.I. Bill. He struggled to put himself through college but finally graduated from Washington State University with a degree in psychology. He began an itinerant life, driving a tour bus in Boston, toiling in wineries in Oregon and New Zealand, and working as a utility arborist in Oregon and eastern Washington—shinnying up towering Douglas firs and Ponderosa pines and trimming branches away from power lines with a chainsaw. At the beginning of 2022, he caught COVID, quit the arborist job, and spent the early months of the year doing the same work in the Idaho Panhandle, sawing branches through the cold, dark winter. He was there when Putin sent his troops over the border.
The Russian invasion had a profound effect on Young, in part because of his own boyhood experience in another corner of the former Soviet Union. When Young was 12 years old, his father—a Navy vet who’d become a Pentecostal missionary—moved the family from Washington to Latvia. Homeschooled but largely left to his own devices, Young played soccer and ran around Riga, the rough-edged Latvian capital, with a handful of other children of American missionaries.
The best thing his parents did there, he said, was to put him on a two-week-long bus trip from Riga to Denmark and back with a team of teenage Latvian soccer players who spoke minimal English. Young, who spoke only minimal Latvian or Russian, was ignored at first but managed to find acceptance. “After that bus trip I had no fear,” he said. “I don’t think that Ukraine would be on my radar if I hadn’t gone.”
Young’s time in the Baltics helped him understand the long-simmering fear of Russian authoritarianism that exists in the former Soviet states—in places like Ukraine, where the threat of invasion always felt real. Which prompted Young to make a commitment to himself. “I promised myself that if such a thing were to happen in Eastern Europe and I were in a position to help, I would do so.”
After Putin’s attack, Young made plans to enlist in the International Legion, but he changed course once he began to read about the group on Signal. Talk of poor leadership and supply shortages discouraged him, as did the Russian missile strike at Yavoriv. Casting around for options, Young sent a blind message to a WhatsApp number he’d obtained for the Georgia National Legion. “I told them what my training was, how long it was, when I got out. I gave them a lot of little caveats,” he told me. “And they were like, ‘Yes, come.’ ”
In the days that followed, Young pondered his motivations and limitations. “There is a part of me that is drawn toward danger and adventure,” he wrote to me on Signal. “And there is a part of me that wants redemption for how my military career ended.” He was working through the meaning of his desire to volunteer and he feared being ridiculed by other veterans as one of those wannabe warriors who were “going there to get experience they feel they missed in the U.S. military.” Young’s biggest concern was being told by his commanding officers that he wasn’t qualified to fight. “I’m just worried,” he confessed, “that wherever I go, it’s going to be ‘Get out of here, we don’t like you, we don’t want you.’ ”
Young and I met in the lobby of his hotel, in the center of Kraków, hours before he climbed aboard the bus bound for Ukraine. With him that March day was Mark Watson; they’d struck up an online friendship through the international volunteers’ Signal group and had arranged to link up to travel to war together. At 2 a.m., the three of us settled aboard the chilly bus as it rumbled east, into the dark.
As the Polish hinterland flickered by, most of the 20 or so passengers dozed off, but Young and Watson made easy conversation and resolved to hang together when they reached Ukraine.
“I’m flattered because you strike me as thoroughly sane, and it made me feel good that you searched me out on Signal,” Young told Watson. He drew a contrast between the low-key ex-Marine and certain swaggering veterans, he said, “who make comments like, ‘We’re going to do Inglourious Basterds shit,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want to be in that movie.’ ”
Watson had seen that behavior while serving in the Marine Corps. “You don’t have to telegraph it,” he said. “You’re living it.” The talk turned to the war. “I made a will before I came,” Young said. “The fee was $550, but when I told him I was going to Ukraine, the lawyer said he’d do it pro bono. That was cool.”
Watson sounded a bleak note about what they might find. “You could be there for five minutes and be killed or be there for months and nothing could happen.”
The sun peeked above the horizon at 6 a.m., streaking the sky orange and crimson. Mist clung to the countryside in the half-light of dawn. At the border checkpoint, Polish immigration officials boarded and processed passports, and then the bus advanced to the Ukrainian side. A young official with no English stood beside Young, silently tapping out questions on Google Translate.
“What is the purpose of your visit to Ukraine?”
Young began tapping out his response. The true answer to this question was perhaps a hard thing to articulate. Humanitarian work, he wrote.
“For how long will you stay?”
As long as they need me. “You?” the official asked Watson. Same.
The bus rolled down the two-lane highway toward Lviv. Golden-domed churches rose over clusters of cement-block houses. We passed sandbagged checkpoints marked by tattered Ukrainian flags, roadside crates of Molotov cocktails, and banners declaring “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” Soon the bus was crawling through traffic in central Lviv, and Young began trading WhatsApp messages with his handler at the Georgia Legion. In front of the city’s main train station, an ornate Austro-Hungarian colossus, the bus doors opened for the two ex-Marines, and they followed a Google Map pin drop to a rendezvous point.
Minutes later, their intermediary materialized: Bohdan Solonko, a bearded, balding man in jeans and a checked sweater. The two had arrived in Ukraine at a difficult moment, he told them. Air raid sirens were going off daily in Lviv, sending everyone in town scurrying to find cover and forcing them to wait hours for the all-clear signal. “The longest alarm came on the day that the training camp was attacked—from two to seven in the morning,” he said. Solonko emphasized to the new arrivals the importance of patience. He’d heard rumors that many of the people who’d sought refuge in the bomb shelters eventually grew impatient and came out, and that most of the ones who came out got killed. A close family friend, Solonko said, had lost a leg in the attack.
Hours later another air raid alert shattered the afternoon calm. From my third-floor hotel room, I heard two explosions. Black plumes of smoke drifted toward central Lviv from a fuel depot nearly three miles away.
As it turned out, those blasts would set the tone for Young’s and Watson’s first, difficult weeks in Ukraine—a period characterized by the omnipresent threat of air strikes and the prevailing tedium of war. They were sitting on a military base outside Lviv, sharing the space with members of the Territorial Defense Force, the military reserve component of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and about 20 foreign trainees—including Brits and Americans, along with a few Poles, Romanians, Frenchmen, and a Norwegian. They had been drilling without weapons and taking cover in a basement when the sirens went off. “Four air raids in one day,” Young texted to his friends and family at one point. “First was at 3 a.m., was trying to get a guy with bronchitis to the hospital and now he’s sitting in the shelter with us. Fuck Putin. I’m not an angry person. And I haven’t really seen much by comparison to many here. But the situation has me simmering.”
The messages that followed revealed his growing frustration. At first he’d been impressed by the Georgia Legion’s cautious approach, he said, but now he had begun to wonder whether he’d ever get close to the fight. There seemed to be no military supplies, no clear objectives, and Young was feeling useless. “I honestly can’t figure out why they asked us to come,” he wrote to me in mid-April.
A week later, Mamuka Mamulashvili and the Georgia Legion high command halted recruitment and recommended that foreign volunteers without the appropriate combat experience refrain from joining the fight on the front lines. There weren’t enough weapons to go around, the commander told me, and the leadership reckoned that the foreign combatants could be best employed teaching basic military skills to members of the Territorial Defense Force. For Young, Watson, and Casey, who were all impatient to confront the Russians, this was not what they had signed up for.
Days later, Young announced to me that the three men had left the legion and joined up with a small unaffiliated band of foreign volunteers who eventually planned to transport supplies to the front and evacuate the injured. It wasn’t direct combat; if anything, these forays to the fringes of battle were something like chores. But it felt like progress: They would be in the line of fire, where they wanted to be. Young insisted that he was leaving the Georgia Legion on good terms. “I’m still in touch with them and we’ll assist each other when we can,” he wrote to me. They were leaving soon for Kyiv, one step closer to the action.
Matthew Robinson, Young’s Lviv-based former commander in the Georgia National Legion, was moving east to Kyiv, too. With the Russian army now concentrating its attacks on Donbas and the south, Lviv had come to feel too distant from the action. In late April, Robinson and some of his men took over an abandoned office building in the capital and turned it into a Georgia Legion barracks and an urban training ground for Ukrainian reservists in the Territorial Defense Force. When I saw him in Kyiv and asked if I could visit the base, he regarded me with suspicion. “We just met. I don’t know who you are,” said Robinson, a slim man with unruly blond hair and flecks of gray in his beard. But after I sent Robinson a lengthy email to be forwarded to Mamulashvili, the unit’s founder, and pledged to reveal no details about the center’s whereabouts, he agreed to take me there and introduce me to his squad.
Twenty-four hours later Robinson led me to the rear entrance of a modern office building, opened a gate, and took me to the second floor. We were joined by Michael Kelley, an American ex-soldier and commercial fisherman from Maine. Although we were hundreds of miles from the front lines , Kelley was decked out in full combat regalia, with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a combat knife strapped to his flak jacket. He wore a Georgia National Legion red-eyed wolf patch on one shoulder of his khaki uniform and a skull and crossbones on the other.
Robinson ordered me to surrender my iPhone to Kelley, who shut down the location services and disabled every other function that might compromise our position. Then he stuck the phone in his pocket. Kelley’s and Robinson’s no-nonsense manner initially struck me as overdramatic: two would-be soldiers playing war games far from the front lines. But I remembered Scotty’s concerns about social media compromising positions and figured they probably had good reason for their caution. All the building’s corporate tenants had evacuated the place hours after the Russians invaded; computer monitors left on desks and documents strewn about the floor attested to their panic. A former bank’s offices and cubicles had become a training area where the Territorial Defense Force practiced room clearances. The men had converted other abandoned offices into bedrooms, with sandbagged windows, army cots, piles of helmets, and a Marilyn Monroe pinup.
Robinson’s Kyiv-based crew had varying degrees of experience in the armed forces, but in several weeks of training they had each morphed into ad hoc military instructors. Kyle Stark, a 23-year-old from the U.K. pursuing a master’s degree in global security, had rushed to Ukraine the first week of the war; he was now serving as a tutor in first aid and a quartermaster in charge of procuring combat supplies. Giorgi Kurashvili, 37, a Georgian actor who left Tbilisi for London in 2010, had taken a break from voice-overs and commercials to join the fight. “I grew up amid wars,” he told me. “Russia waged them against us all the time. When this started my heart sank. I would have felt guilty if I hadn’t come.” Franck-Olivier Jutier, a 52-year-old Parisian high school teacher, said he had been inspired by stories of the French Resistance. “I am a true liberal,” he told me. At a shooting range in Ukraine, Jutier had fired an assault rifle for the first time since serving as a volunteer for the Israeli Defense Forces on the Lebanon border in the early 1990s. Now he was screening prospective foreign volunteers, trying to identify right-wing sympathies and serving as a Georgia National Legion spokesman for the francophone press.
Then there was Matt Roe, who, he said, had given up a landscaping business in Adelaide, Australia, and created a family rift when he set off for Ukraine in March. He said that his ex-wife, the daughter of Ukrainians, wasn’t speaking with him, he’d been unable to contact their young children, and his uncle had turned over his name to the Australian government. “I’ve got the embassy in Poland breathing down my back, trying to get me to leave,” he said. “I’ll probably be here forever.” Indeed, Kelley confirmed that Roe might be in Ukraine for the long haul. As the American quietly put it to me, “We will be helping him get citizenship in this country.”
When they reached Kyiv, Young, Watson, and Casey—eager for action—fell in with the unaffiliated squad of foreign volunteers. Suddenly their days adopted a new gloss of hazard.
After languishing in the backfield for weeks, the trio was now embarking on increasingly dangerous assignments. They weren’t exactly fighting, but things did feel risky. Whether that was an improvement was difficult to determine. “They’re asking us to do a lot of extractions of wounded soldiers now,” Casey told me, when I met the three men in Kyiv. “But it’s difficult. We still don’t have weapons, and it could be a death mission. There have been a couple of guys with drivers and vehicles going out toward the front lines and getting fucking destroyed.”
In the days after I caught up with the trio in Kyiv, the peril to the foreign fighters seemed to be escalating. Two British fighters, Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, and a Moroccan, Brahim Saadoun, were captured while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. Authorities for the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk announced that the three men were being charged as mercenaries, thus denying them the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war. In the weeks that followed, their captors hauled the men into a show trial and sentenced them to death—a ruling that the British government has been attempting to forestall. Northern Ireland’s secretary of state, Brandon Lewis, said he had sympathy for the captured Britons but added that they had been fighting in Ukraine “illegally.”
In April, two American volunteers, Paul K. Gray of Texas and Manus McCaffery of Ohio, were injured when an artillery shell hit their fighting position as they waited to ambush a Russian tank. Then, on April 28, came a report of the death of 22-year-old Willy Joseph Cancel, a correctional officer in Tennessee who had fought in March alongside Ukrainian forces. He was the first American to be confirmed dead in combat in Ukraine.
As for the rumor that had rattled Young—the story about the reputed deaths of four or five volunteer fighters that he had shared that evening in the pub in Kyiv—no clarifying details ever materialized. Nothing official was ever confirmed. Certain volunteers I spoke with had heard that the supposed casualties were Americans; others asserted that the group was composed of fighters from various countries and that Cancel had been among them. Perhaps, in the fog of war, incidents had been conflated or misunderstood. The U.S. State Department, for its part, has confirmed the deaths of only two Americans fighting in Ukraine. When reached by GQ, a State Department spokesperson was unable to comment on the particulars of this rumored ambush, noting that “our ability to verify reports of deaths of U.S. citizens in Ukraine is limited.”
Next on their agenda was to construct a field hospital based out of Dnipro, a vital transit point for troops and military supplies bound for the eastern front; Russian missiles had destroyed the airport there in April. “Once [the hospital is] up and running we’ll be doing extractions,” Young told me. To his friends and his family he struck a brave posture, though his anxiety was palpable. “I may be going dark here for up to two weeks, maybe more,” he informed them. “If you don’t hear from me, don’t panic.”
After weeks spent running relays back and forth to the front—ferrying munitions in, pulling the wounded out—Young, Watson, and Casey settled on a new mission. They were living in a shared hotel room in Kramatorsk, just southwest of the war’s front lines. The base they were working at was so close to the fighting that they could watch attack helicopters and bomber jets pass overhead and they could hear the sound of Russian air strikes on Ukrainian positions. But they still felt sidelined, unable to see a path to the fighting for themselves.
They had harbored a faint notion of somehow opening their own hospital unit, but jettisoned that idea, Casey says, after the main hospital in the area told them, frankly, that this sort of help wasn’t needed. Instead, they decided that they would devote themselves to evacuating sick and wounded civilians from dangerous areas at the edge of Russian-controlled territory. They linked up with an aid organization called Road to Relief, and obtained a donated Polish ambulance, a beat-up van, and a small SUV. By the end of May they were receiving assignments and driving almost daily to contested Luhansk towns such as Pryvillia and Severodonetsk, then held by Ukrainian forces but infiltrated by mobile teams of Russian troops. They were operating in what was a wild, desperate no man’s land, largely depopulated, scarred by artillery strikes, peppered with pro-Ukrainian civilians too infirm to leave on their own and pro-Russian separatists who regarded the foreign do-gooders with hostility.
If they weren’t experiencing the glory of combat, their work was at least high-profile. In June, Volodymyr Zelensky called Severodonetsk the epicenter of the war in Donbas and later posted a photo to his Instagram account of Watson helping an elderly woman in one of the besieged city’s bomb shelters.
The missions they went on were risky, occasioned by—and even interrupted with—Russian artillery strikes. But the situations they found themselves in often surprised them. If what the men had sought was the black-and-white clarity of firing bullets at invaders, well, their current tasks offered something different. Often after dodging rockets and evading Russian troops, the men confronted people designated by aid groups or concerned relatives for evacuation who cursed and told them to get lost. “They say, ‘Hey, we’re not leaving—we’re waiting for the Russians to liberate us. We don’t trust you guys. When the Russians get here our life is going to get better,’ ” Young said. The war, at close range, had a way of defying expectations.
One Sunday morning, Young set out for Severodonetsk, behind the wheel of the Polish ambulance, in a three-vehicle convoy. After he crossed the bridge that led into the city, he found the place eerily empty. The streets were a wreck of impact craters, downed live power lines, and unexploded Russian rockets embedded in the asphalt. Young could feel the vibrations of artillery landing a few hundred meters away.
Young drew the ambulance to a slow stop, parked, and then was led into a bunker. He moved down the steps and into a dark tunnel, where he pushed through a metal bomb-shelter door, and recoiled from the stench of sweat and decay. Illuminated by a few weak lamps, dozens of people lay on mattresses and strips of cardboard in two humid, airless rooms. The sounds of coughing and wheezing, especially among the children, filled the space. Then the shelter director pointed out an elderly woman who lay on a mattress, barely conscious, taking shallow breaths. The director told them that if they did not get her out now, she wouldn’t live through the night.
Days later, when Young checked in with the woman’s physician at the hospital in Kramatorsk, where they had driven her, he was relieved to learn that she was doing well, that she’d survived. It had been a relatively straightforward mission, but it left him with a sense of accomplishment during what had been a challenging period of doubt. The long days of mundaneness punctuated by these rare hours of consequence and drama—it was a cycle that had eroded some of the uncertainty he’d possessed when he’d first stepped off the bus in Ukraine. “You don’t know what’s going to happen day to day here,” he said. “The boring days can be worse than the busy ones, because after sitting around for two hours I start thinking, Am I qualified to do this?”
After nearly three months in Ukraine, Young was still occasionally tormented by questions of confidence. But the war had changed him. He had found reserves of strength. His Marine training had helped keep his stress level down, and he had emerged as the leader of his small group of volunteers. “I’ve become the father figure,” he told me. “Keeping everybody sane and focused, that’s the role I organically fell into.”
The day after Young told me all this, advancing Russian troops blasted apart the Severodonetsk bridge that he had traveled across on his evacuation missions. Wreaths of smoke could be seen over the city from a checkpoint 35 miles away; the Ukrainians were beating a retreat. As Young messaged me, he, Watson, and Casey were “standing down and reassessing.” Meanwhile, the war’s dangers were enveloping other foreign volunteers as the battle for Donbas intensified. In early June, two American veterans from Alabama, Alex Drueke and Andy Huynh, were captured and reportedly held by Russia-backed separatists in a skirmish outside Kharkiv. That same week that their capture was announced,the U.S. State Department reported that a third American volunteer, Grady Kurpasi, may have been missing since April.
Though their work was, for now, seemingly confined to humanitarian efforts, Young, Casey, and Watson found for themselves the sort of danger that lurks everywhere in the tumultuous environs in the conflict zone. In one instance, Casey and Watson, while driving through Kramatorsk in June, were forced to swerve to avoid a military truck carrying a howitzer in its tow hitch and their vehicle smashed into a utility pole. Casey badly fractured his arm and Watson suffered a concussion. Both had been treated in Dnipro. The injuries—of an ironically non-combative nature—clearly weren’t the sort they’d expected they might suffer at war. But then, so little had gone as they’d imagined it might.
In May, when Young took to Facebook to post his first public message about being close to the fighting, he had already been there for months. He didn’t mention how his plans had gone a little sideways. He was upbeat. “I don’t have a timeline for when I will return home,” he told family and friends. “But I can assure you that I am healthy and happy despite the stressful environment.”
In the weeks that followed, he grew only more resolute—more committed to the people of Ukraine. By the summer, Young was contemplating staying for the long haul and had already reached out to commanders about making a three-year commitment to serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Where once he had wanted simply a war to fight in, now Young had found instead something like a cause to believe in. As he had written in his post: “There is nothing that I’d rather be doing.”
Joshua Hammer is a frequent contributor to gq who last wrote about a Swiss Alpine rescue team for the February 2022 issue.
A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2022 issue with the title “The Last-Chance Brigade”