Seth Harp on the foreigners, in Harper’s:

‘They made the journey at the explicit invitation of the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Just days after Russian tanks rolled across the border from Belarus and Crimea, Zelensky declared the formation of a new military unit that would consist entirely of foreign volunteers: the International Legion for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine. “Every friend of Ukraine . . . please come over,” Zelensky said. “We will give you weapons.” The Ukrainians created a recruiting website and put out a slick video describing 4 simple steps to join heroic army. Veterans with combat experience were strongly preferred, but anyone was welcome. A week after Zelensky’s announcement, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, told reporters that they had recruited twenty thousand troops from fifty-two countries—a figure roughly equivalent to one tenth of Ukraine’s active-duty army.
I had previously reported on the foreign volunteers fighting the Islamic State in Syria, a mix of black-bloc leftists and apolitical war enthusiasts from Europe and the United States who, at their peak in 2017, numbered less than two hundred. Few as they were, they had struggled to cohere as a group. A handful of bad apples had caused problems for the Kurds. An inability to speak Kurmanji or Arabic had limited their efficacy in battle. At least thirty were killed.
The wave of volunteers headed to Ukraine was supposed to be orders of magnitude larger. To muster a cohesive battalion out of such a polyglot rabble, and do so before what most analysts predicted would be a swift Russian victory, seemed all but impossible. Yet the Ukrainians purported to have already deployed foreign fighters. On March 7, the defense ministry released a photo of ten men from the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Lithuania, Mexico, and India, grinning in a sandbagged trench, armed and uniformed like soldiers of the Territorial Defense Forces, Ukraine’s rapidly expanding reserve militia. A statement from the defense ministry declared that the first volunteers were “already in position on the outskirts of Kyiv.”’

(…)

‘The creation of the International Legion set off a massive wave of positive press. Within a few days, hundreds of articles appeared in English-language publications, some offering how-to guides for those interested in enlisting. Practically every major U.S. periodical, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, published glowing profiles of the Americans who were “playing a growing role as the fighting spreads.” Moscow took notice. As I made my way to Warsaw in the early-morning hours of March 13, a volley of Russian cruise missiles struck a training base in Yavoriv, a dozen miles from the Polish border, where foreign fighters had been congregating. None of the recruits, no matter how intense their experience had been in Iraq or Afghanistan, would have ever seen such an onslaught of precision-guided munitions. Footage of the aftermath showed buildings burning around a crater that looked to be forty feet deep. The Ukrainians confirmed that thirty-five people had been killed, but denied that any had been foreigners. Meanwhile, the Russian defense ministry claimed to have killed up to one hundred and eighty. “The destruction of foreign mercenaries who arrived on the territory of Ukraine will continue,” the statement promised.’

(…)

‘I wasn’t sure what to make of these accounts, or of the tales I heard about the Ukrainians confiscating passports, requiring recruits to sign onerous contracts, and stealing gear. All the volunteers I met in Poland were under the impression that the legionnaires were getting slaughtered in ill-planned suicide missions. And yet the war had been going on for over three weeks, at an intensity comparable to World War II, and not one Westerner had been confirmed among those killed in action. Several weeks after the strike, the U.S. State Department told me they were unaware of any Americans who had died at Yavoriv. It wasn’t until April 29 that the Ukrainian defense ministry disclosed the first Western casualties: Scott Sibley, thirty-six, a British veteran of Afghanistan; an unnamed Dane, twenty-five, who reportedly served in the Jutland Dragoon Regiment in Holstebro; and Willy Cancel Jr., twenty-two, a former prison guard from Kentucky who had been discharged from the Marine Corps for bad conduct.’

(…)

‘At Saint Volodymyr’s Cathedral, reputed to be the tomb of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners, armorers, and artillerymen, I met with Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of the Georgian National Legion, a militia of foreign fighters—mostly from the Caucasus—that has been in Ukraine since 2014. Mamulashvili, a burly, hirsute Orthodox Christian who has fought against Russia in four different wars (in Georgia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, and Ukraine), sometimes came here to pray.
I had heard that the Georgian unit tolerated foreign fighters of all stripes—including white supremacists from the United States—but Mamulashvili was quick to deny it. “We do not accept those radical organizations,” he said. “We tried to never accept them, neo-Nazis, or racists, or whatever. It’s totally unacceptable. We just kick them out.” Mamulashvili told me that of his seven hundred fighters, about one hundred and fifty were from somewhere other than Eastern Europe, and put the number of Americans at fifty. His men operate in small teams, he said, attacking Russian supply lines. During reconnaissance, they move on foot and avoid using radios or cell phones. They might spend a week in the forest, observing roads and tracking Russian vehicles before launching an ambush. They had just killed sixty Russians, he said, and captured three tanks in the village of Rudnytske. He showed me footage of the operation on his phone, and complained that Ukrainian security officials were always censoring his TikTok videos.’

(…)

‘During my reporting in Syria, I had been able to tour the training base for foreign fighters, interview their commanders, and visit groups of them at the front, where they played a small but appreciable role in the liberation of Raqqa. Here in Ukraine, I had come to understand, I would find nothing so concrete. The main significance of the International Legion for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine, it seemed, was the win it represented for Ukraine in the information war. It had been so successful, in fact, that Russia had found it necessary to found its own international unit. Two weeks after invading Ukraine, Putin approved a proposal to deploy sixteen thousand foreign troops from the Middle East to fight alongside separatists in the Donbas, an unlikely plan that Moscow backed up by flying in a few hundred mercenaries from Syria.
The savvier Ukrainians put on a far more convincing show. The first volunteers to arrive had been interviewed, screened, offered proper contracts, and given housing. Some had been allowed to wear the Ukrainian flag and the patch of the Territorial Defense Forces. Perhaps a dozen or so had made their way to the front lines, attached themselves to Ukrainian units, and taken part in patrols. But the Ukrainians, busy with more urgent matters and deterred by the strike on Yavoriv, had done little to honor Zelensky’s promise to arm, train, and equip all the friends of Ukraine who had showed up at his invitation.
Zelensky’s move had been a brilliant exercise in wartime propaganda. The errant Westerners I had met knocking around Warsaw, the border, Lviv, and Kyiv in search of the International Legion were merely the unfortunate fallout. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for them. Few of them had college degrees or steady jobs. They had drained their bank accounts to buy winter gear, ballistic vests, medical kits, and plane tickets. A few may have been motivated by bloodthirst or white supremacy, but most I met expressed views that were centrist, liberal, or garden-variety conservative. By and large, they had simply been sucked into the spectacle. Those who were veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, a cohort now entering or well into middle age, might have felt the possibility of renewed relevance and the old thrill of being at the center of world events. Many of them are still in Ukraine, looking for something—anything—to do.’

(…)

‘I turned to Will, the American. He wouldn’t say where in the United States he was from, or give his surname. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He was in his mid-twenties and had an air of optimism about him, dressed in a beanie, base-layer shirt, and cargo pants. He had a speech impediment, and one of his eyes was slightly crossed. Though he had never been in the army, he said, “I have more experience with guns than most of the military guys coming here.”’

(…)

‘One of the Ukrainian soldiers—a sniper, to judge by his rifle—had on a newsboy cap and a nice watch. Another had long hair and plug earrings. It was the closest I had been to regular Ukrainian army infantrymen, and though I was weary of pestering everyone about Americans, it was finally my chance to ask real frontline fighters about the International Legion.
The soldier in the newsboy hat didn’t seem to understand me. His long-haired comrade remembered Zelensky’s announcement, but the only foreigners he had seen in the army were Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. “I hear about it,” he said in English, “but I never meet it in real life.” They ran off to catch up with their departing convoy, and I watched them drive north toward Bucha, where the first confirmed reports of mass graves had just emerged. The next day, the government would declare the whole region liberated. The battle for Kyiv was over, and so was my hunt for traces of the International Legion. I was convinced that it was more myth than reality, and that the role of foreign volunteers in the defense of the capital had been virtually nil. Eager as Westerners were to fight in Ukraine, it was plain that they were not needed.’

Read the article here.

Ah well, the adventurers looking for something to do, sucked into the spectacle.

They came to fight, not to die, the first foreign fighters.

Money might not be the best incentive to die for another country, but the lust for adventure is not the basis of the most reliable soldier either.