In “The Mad and the Brave: The Untold Story of Ukraine’s Foreign Legion,” Colin Freeman offers a powerful series of snapshots from the tactical perspective of men who volunteered to fight on behalf of Ukraine as foreign fighters. Freeman, an accomplished war correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, offers an engaging account for irregular warfare specialists and general readers alike. An overarching takeaway from the book as described in Freeman’s sketches, is how Ukraine’s failure to anticipate the need for a foreign legion, and a plan to vet and evaluate, train, and deploy these foreign volunteers in cohesive units has ensured that they have never had greater than a tactical and localized impact on the battlefield. This foundational flaw also led to missed opportunities for achieving strategic impact. A larger, well-organized legion (a regiment, series of regiments, or even a division) could have boosted Ukrainian morale while ensuring European and American skin in the game, potentially rallying stronger public support from those populations. For example, the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War helped shift many in the United States to focus on the fascist threat in Europe. Strategists considering the potential use of auxiliary fighters in Taiwan, the Baltics, or elsewhere should take these lessons to heart if they want to capitalize on the manpower opportunities provided by volunteers to an honorable cause.
Profiles of the Foreign Volunteers
Freeman’s book consists of a series of vignettes based on interviews and arranged chronologically for the first three years of the war. Over this timeframe, Freeman’s interviewees —primarily British and Americans (and often veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq)—express concern with the difficulty of the modern battlefield and sometimes disappear from the book as they are captured, injured, killed, or punt off to parts unknown. Their experiences range from those who quickly lost their appetite for combat, others who fought for a while before heading home (with some returning again), and several who have been engaged throughout. The skill levels, military background, and motivations for fighting the Russian invaders range widely. Some joined because they felt out of place in the civilian world; others sought to fight in what they saw as a morally righteous crusade; some had unaddressed questions they needed to resolve, such as feeling they had failed to live up to their self-imposed expectations in earlier combat or wanting to test themselves battling an advanced enemy in the conventional fight they had previously trained for, rather than the counter-insurgencies many had found themselves in. Quite a few mystically believed somehow that the trenches and the black soil of Ukraine could help them self-medicate their PTSD.
Missteps and Structural Failures
Freeman’s book illustrates that many of the flaws in the Foreign Legion were baked in from the start, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for volunteers three days after the February 2022 Russian invasion. Perhaps because many military and foreign policy experts doubted that the government in Kyiv would last more than two weeks, little thought went towards vetting, training, and deploying the foreign volunteers who streamed into Ukraine. Many were, in Freeman’s description, “screamers,” war tourists, wannabes, never-weres, steroid-addled mercenaries, ex-cons or those on the lam, who were combined with a fair number of quality troops – former NCOs and officers from legitimate light infantry and special operations units including the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Special Forces, British Paras, and other legendary British Regiments. This absence of planning quickly had visible impact in the first weeks of the war: on March 13, 2022, the Kremlin launched an airstrike and hammered the Yavoriv training site where International Legion volunteers had congregated in a holding pattern as the Ukrainian military tried to fit them into the expanding force structure.
As the war continued past the initial shock of the invasion, it became evident that the lack of preparation for how to screen, train, and employ both foreign volunteers and Ukrainian forces had additional negative ramifications. The failure to properly triage new recruits at the outset led to men in the ranks who had no business being in a warzone as they endangered themselves and others through incompetence; this left many Ukrainian units and citizens skeptical of Western volunteers.
Misallocated resources led to a waste of talent and human capital. Poor performance by some volunteers created a lack of trust between foreign fighters and several Ukrainian units; likewise, Soviet-style leadership methods and a lack of modern tactics undermined the faith of some of the volunteers Freeman interviewed, who questioned decisions made by their Ukrainian commanders. While accounts differ, it appears that more than 200 foreigners have been wounded or killed fighting for Ukraine since 2022. Trauma has caused many to return home – including those who were poorly suited from the start, as well as talented volunteers who felt the inadequate operational security and lack of defensive preparations (such as bunkers), motivated them to exit the battlefield, rather than remaining and being needlessly endangered.
Historical Parallels and Strategic Implications
The term “foreign fighters” in modern parlance often conjures images of jihadists who jump at the opportunity to join a holy war, whether by enlisting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Chechen zealots, or the militant Islamists who fought throughout Afghanistan and Central Asia. The volunteers of Ukraine’s foreign legion harkened back to an earlier and more idealistic cohort, particularly those (like George Orwell) who flocked to the International Brigades who fought for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. The foreign cadre who joined the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to fight ISIS in Syria was a ready model for Ukraine in its search for manpower. In fact, many of the first volunteers had also previously fought with the YPG. These included British participants who left for Ukraine despite the UK government’s prior detention and prosecution of those who had fought in Syria.
Understanding how to leverage the motivations for joining a just cause could provide valuable insight for governments in Taiwan, the Baltics, or other beleaguered states facing threats from larger adversaries. A savvy social media appeal for volunteers to counter a ruthless adversary worked well from the outset for Ukraine and similarly could again in other circumstances leveraging the social connections established by veterans of the YPG, Ukraine, or recent military service. A comparable dynamic was visible in Israel following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, when any Israeli reservists who had refused to report for service or protested the Netanyahu government over proposed changes to the judicial system quickly returned from abroad or ended their protests to respond to public appeals for support; including some who had aged-out of the requirement for duty.
Broader Lessons
Over time, most volunteers have joined piecemeal small units of Westerners who fight together or work in concert with larger Ukrainian units. These pick-up teams typically operate at the squad or platoon level in size. Freeman suggests that, had Kyiv helped stand-up freestanding international battalions or brigades, there may have been better unit cohesion as well as greater impact on the FLOT where these larger units could be deployed. While small, ad hoc groups of foreign volunteers (often modeled after YPG fighters) proved effective against irregular forces such as ISIS (particularly when backed by coalition aircraft, advisors, special operators, indirect fires, and Iraqi military, police, and Iranian-supported Shi’a militias), this approach has been far less successful against Russian troops, who have benefited from Chinese support, Iranian Shahed drones, and North Korean troops, missiles, and artillery.
As always, the language barrier was consequential with too few legionnaires speaking Ukrainian and too few translators to help fill in the gap. Problems with pay, supplies, kit, and equipment are also frequently described – though, Ukrainian troops often deal with the same issues, which are exacerbated by drone-warfare and Russian attacks on supply-lines. Freeman suggests that the number of volunteers are at best an estimate and probably undercounted given how support for the war in Ukraine has become politized in the US, and even some in the UK. Many thus have kept their service a secret from all but their families and refrained from sharing their experience with the larger community. An additional cause for reduced publicity is the active cohort of pro-Russian trolls who regularly attack and harass the families of foreign fighters online.
Most volunteers interviewed for the book lacked any familiarity with Ukrainian history, culture, or language and thus bumbled headlong into sizable cultural obstacles; thus, their stories reflect a sense of what the war is like on the ground from their particular western viewpoint. Freeman has not written the definitive account of the Foreign Legion; that dispassionate historical account will likely have to wait for the war to end and will require a review of Russian and Ukrainian primary source documents. Instead, he offers a visceral and immediate book that provides some sense of the larger shape of the war through the foxhole-level viewpoint of those who shared their stories with him. It is always propulsive and given his eye for detail combined with a conversational writing style that captures the personalities of the individual volunteers, keeps the reader engaged.
In capturing foreign fighters’ perspectives and weaving them together, Freeman has succeeded in creating one of the first impressionistic tapestries of the Western volunteers’ perspective. From their stories, readers can take away broader lessons in the successes and possibly larger failures in the establishment of a foreign legion for Ukraine. As a result, his book is recommended reading for professionals, scholars, and casual readers alike.
Christopher D. Booth is co-director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s Maritime Program. He has more than two decades of experience in national security and international relations, first serving on active duty as an Army armor and cavalry officer. He is a Distinguished Graduate of Command and Staff College–Marine Corps University and graduated from Vanderbilt University Law School and the College of William and Mary.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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