'I have the fitness, the youth, and the training—it would be selfish of me not to use it,' says one volunteer. Meet the foreign fighters risking their lives to defend Ukraine—and Europe
that he had been inspired to register at the Ukrainian embassy in Paris by Zelensky’s call for foreign fighters. “I don’t really have any animosity against the Russians,” he said. “I’m going there to defend human beings, and because I have an 8-year-old child.” Luis Castaño, a 46-year-old repairman who enlisted at the Ukrainian consulate in Barcelona toldhe was going because “You have to take your heart in your hand and help people who need it.
The Ukrainian embassy in Norway estimates that 300 Norwegians have already volunteered to fight, while Torndal’s Facebook group counts, he says, around 650 members. Those who go, he says, are motivated primarily by a sense of injustice. “The aggression, the murder of innocent people—nobody feels that the Ukrainians have done anything that justifies the invasion.”
Vitalijus holds his passport with numerous stamps of his visits to Ukraine to deliver support to the front lines since 2014, in Kaunas, Lithuania. on March 4Health care professionals are also responding in droves. When the Lithuanian Ministry of Health put out a call for volunteers to go, 360 people applied within a couple of days; the ministry is now preparing to send 24 doctors and nurses who will be assigned to hospitals close to the Polish border.
According to attaché Verkhovod, about 200 Lithuanians have registered to fight at the embassy. Helping at least some of them figure out how to get there is the organization Luksu Vyrai. Based in Kaunas, it was— until about two weeks ago—a men’s group that hosted camps for fathers and sons. But with the Russian invasion, it suddenly shifted focus.
On Friday morning, Mauricas’ apartment outside Kaunas, which has become Luksu Vyrei’s staging area, was a hive of activity. Outside, a steady stream of donations—plastic jugs of petrol, cases of ready-to-eat meals, baby food to be handed out to refugees with infants—were loaded into a jeep that had also been donated. Inside, some of the 20 men the group will be sending to Ukraine ate poppyseed cake and tried on their bulletproof vests.