At a bar that was selling pints of ale despite the temporary ban, I met with a senior Ukrainian defense official who asked to remain anonymous. He was wearing a Stechkin automatic pistol under his zip-up jacket, and showed me photos on his phone of alleged Russian atrocities: a dead baby crushed under rubble; a confused civilian wandering through the wreckage; and the bodies of charred Ukrainian soldiers, the victims of what he claimed was a white phosphorus attack.
I asked him about the International Legion, and he said the government had not been prepared to receive so many volunteers. About a third of them had been turned back for lack of combat experience. “It would not be a good thing,” he said, “for them to be killed and us to have this reputation.” Another third left “after they saw real war,” by which he meant the strike on Yavoriv. The remainder had not been organized into a freestanding unit, he admitted. The volunteers were being housed at various locations around Lviv and Kyiv, and few had weapons, body armor, or helmets. There were a few highly experienced veterans at the front, he said, but that was it.
His account tracked with what I had heard from Matthew VanDyke, the freelance military trainer I’d seen at the airport. “The international legion doesn’t exist,” he texted me. “It was all propaganda to elicit international support, media coverage, and reinforce the idea that it’s the world vs Russia.” In Kyiv, he had met with a group of about sixteen legionnaires at a hotel on Peremohy Square. “Saddest group you’ll ever see,” he told me, “a clown car of misfits.” “The entire thing was an ill-conceived ploy to internationalize the conflict in the press,” he added. “They want people to apply through the Embassy because they aren’t really going to bring them here. The ones that came on their own, they’re not sure how to handle. It’s a mess.”
