He was working odd jobs and getting a degree in automotive technology at a local community college in the San Fernando Valley.
He believed that both Ukraine and Israel were “being attacked unprovoked” and that both nations needed more military help to fight their enemies. As a Jew with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, he said he saw similarities between the Russian assault on Ukraine and Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. 24 invasion, Adam said, he couldn’t stop watching the news. His first choice, he said, is to be a medic because he took a first aid class in the United States, he said. If they get killed, it could bring more pressure on the United States to retaliate.Īdam just wants to get on the battlefield as soon as possible. If Americans get captured by Russian forces, they could become fodder for the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, held up as evidence that Ukraine’s resistance is really an American and Western plot. “The political might be more important in the long term than the actual military contribution.”īut there is concern that some of these American and other Western volunteers could become liabilities on the battlefield. “This is a way of tying in populations from other countries to the Ukrainian war and the outcome of the war,” said Ilmari Kaihko, an associate professor of war studies at the Swedish Defense University who has researched Ukraine’s conflict. If nothing else, the foreigners may be useful for public relations purposes, demonstrating the global support for Ukraine. Others are landing in the capital without contacts or speaking the language, hoping that someone will get them trained and shipped to the front.
Some would-be fighters are processed in their home nations. It remains unclear what added utility the arriving foreign recruits can bring as soldiers, medical aides or logistics personnel on the battlefields.Īnd the government’s volunteer program, at times, appears to be disorganized, according to interviews with five volunteers and an ethnic Georgian commander who has enlisted Americans and other foreigners into his own paramilitary force in Ukraine. They’ve seen the images of civilians being killed by Russian bombardments, and like those who went to Spain, they believe they are on the right side of history. They say they do share a sense of righteous conviction. While some experienced American veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are said to be among the volunteers, many of these would-be fighters, such as Adam, are novices at best. In Ukraine’s brutal modern war, though, the romance of adventure and political convictions can quickly vanish as volunteers get pounded by airstrikes, Grad rockets and artillery shells, or engage in urban warfare on the streets of cities. That conflict became a losing battle against nationalists led by General Francisco Franco, with the support of Nazi Germany and the fascist Italian government of Benito Mussolini. They have been compared to the 32,000 foreigners, mostly Americans and Europeans, many of them equally unprepared, who joined the republican forces in Spain’s 1936-39 civil war. Now, as the conflict enters its fourth week, a growing number of foreign volunteers are flowing into the capital, signing contracts and receiving weapons and combat training before getting deployed to one of the numerous front lines of the war. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands of Americans and other foreign nationals have signed up to fight for Ukraine, answering a call to action by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And Ukraine is the underdog, so they need help.” “Democracy and freedom are very important to the whole world,” said Adam, seated in the lobby of a Kyiv hotel, along with other foreigners dressed in their new military camouflage who have joined his unit.
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