The Team House - Inside Ukraine’s Foreign Legion | Colin Freeman

Episode Date: July 4, 2026

We speak with journalist Colin Freeman about covering wars from Iraq and Somalia to Ukraine, including his own kidnapping by Somali pirates and the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. We also dig into his book The Mad and the Brave, the foreign volunteers who joined Ukraine’s International Legion, and the chaos, courage, and darker realities they faced on the front lines.Colin's book: https://a.co/d/0j8oksfvToday's Sponsors:GhostBed ⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! Mars Men⬇️For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://mengotomars.com/Quince⬇️go to: https://www.quince.com/housefor free shipping and 365 day returns For ad free video and audio and access to live streams...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________GRAB JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featuredJack Murphy's book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 — Start01:26 — Colin Freeman’s Path Into Journalism05:28 — Going Freelance to Cover Iraq08:09 — The Reality of Freelance War Reporting11:26 — Kidnapped by Pirates in Somalia17:46 — Covering the Opening Days of the Ukraine War21:21 — Taking the Train Into Besieged Kyiv24:14 — Meeting Ukraine’s Foreign Volunteers32:04 — Fantasists, Screamers, and the Yavoriv Missile Strike36:36 — Douglas Carter and the Chaos of the Front Line42:04 — Hugh Lee and the Shock of Ukraine’s Battlefield49:08 — Pez and the Hunt for a Front Line55:19 — Pez’s Near Capture on a Dnipro Island59:30 — Foreign Volunteers Captured by Russia01:05:22 — Torture in a Russian Black Site01:14:05 — Mariupol, Azovstal, and John Harding01:25:45 — The Bizarre POW Release and Roman Abramovich01:31:40 — Ryan O’Leary, Chosen Company, and Jack Knight01:37:15 — The Dark Side of the Legion01:48:47 — Did Ukraine’s Foreign Legion Actually Matter?01:52:50 — Could the West Have Built a Better Legion?01:58:40 — The Mad and the Brave and Closing Thoughts#ukrainewar #ukraineforeignlegionBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest, journalist Colin Freeman. He is the author of The Mad and the Brave, which is a book about the Ukrainian Foreign Legion. That is the foreigners from, I mean, he'll tell us, but 50 some odd countries that came to Ukraine to help defend the country from Putin's invasion, the Russian invasion, mostly, you know, starting on the 22, 2022 full scale invasion that began going forward is kind of the context of the book. Collins also had an interesting career in his own right as a journalist covering various combat zones. So thank you, Colin, for joining us and thanks for reaching out. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Yeah, I just read the book, the PDF that you sent me. I'm going to, I need to order a hard copy for my library. I want to have it in my collection. I just finished reading it before we started this. interview and it was very, very good. Like I was telling you before the show, I wish I had written it because it was that good.

So, Colin, let's start off a little bit with your kind of origin story. How did you grow up? Where did you grow up? And how did that sort of take you towards journalism? Yeah, I grew up in Edinburgh and Scotland. And I think when I was young, I didn't have any interest in anything particular. I didn't want to be a banker. I didn't want to be a lawyer, that kind of thing. Couldn't really work up what I wanted to do. And I realised that journalism was quite a good profession for people who aren't interested in anything in particular because every day is essentially different. Certainly that's the case if you're working on a general, you know, current affairs, newspaper.

So after I left school and went to university, I think by the end of uni, I decided. that I would try and become a journalist. I didn't do much at university in terms of journalism. I then got a job on a local paper in Grimsby, which is a town in the north of England, doing very kind of typical local paper stories, court stories, stories about animals stuck up trees, village shows, all that sort of stuff.

You know, the kind of... But it's a sort of microcosm of the world around, And while it sometimes feels boring at the time, you do get to sort of see every side of human life from the, you know, life in the courts and the kind of darker underbelly of a place to the way the government works at local level, who the movers and shakers are, and, of course, all the human interest stories in between. It's more the sum of the stories rather than the individual stories themselves. It's a great chance, really, to just sort of see life up front in all its different shades. Then I moved down to London, to cut a long story short, worked on a tabloid news agency, chasing celebrities around. I've been told to get lost by all manner of famous British celebrities and some B-list ones as well, like the Oasis, the Spice Girls, all these people, I think at one point or another said, no comment, please go away.

to me. Probably did some American ones as well, but I didn't get very far. And then that was a kind of stepping stone, that tabloid stuff to Fleet Street, which is where our national newspapers, the short hand for our national newspapers. And it toughens you up a bit, gets you used to, you know, gives you a bit of a thick skin.

Then I worked on the London Evening Standard, which is kind of like the equivalent of the New York Post, I suppose. It's London's main, you know, newspaper, but it sort of sees itself as a national paper. I was there for about four years, but I only got so far up the chain, really. I wasn't one of their, you know, their brightest rising stars. And if that's the case, in a competitive newsroom environment, you tend to realize that, you know, you're never going to, you know, do that well. And when the really big stories happen, such as the Iraq War when it was looming, you realize you're not going to be part of the team that's going to get sent.

And I think it was the Iraq War started in March of 2003, if I remember correctly. And as many of your listeners will remember, there was quite a kind of big roll up to the war, run up to the war. It was pretty clear it was going to happen. You know, you had troop deployments to the Gulf and so on months in advance. And I think at Christmas of 2002, about three months before the war started, I was on and on another celebrity doorstep and sitting outside some celebrities house waiting for them at a comment on some story, not even sure if they were there or not. I was winging the photographer I was with about how the team to cover the Iraq war for the standard had already been picked and I wasn't

going to be on it, not to any my great surprise. And he said, well, look, rather than just sort of sitting there bitching, why don't you go and cover the war as a freelancer? And I also think, can you do that. And it seemed a crazy idea, but it sort of lit a light bulb in my head. And I thought, well, I'll go and try and do it. And if nothing else, it will be like a kind of gap year or a backpacking adventure with a bit of a difference, maybe with a bit more purpose. So off I went to Iraq. It seemed like a great idea to me. Some of the other people that I ran it past thought, no, that's absolute bloody madness. You know, you don't speak Arabic. You don't have any contacts out in Iraq.

You don't have any hostile environment training, no combat experience, or anything like that. You've got no work lined up. And actually, you don't even know where Iraq is, which was true. I had to look where it was on the map. But anyway, I went out there. I pitched up actually on the day the war,

formal combat hostilities actually ended on, I think May the 1st of 2003, i.e. the very last day of the active war, which is not a great spur to have, in your cap, fair that they have in your cap as a war correspondent. But it turned out to be a good time because, as we know, the, you know, the actual invasion to topple Saddam Hussein went like clockwork. It was the, it was the occupation afterwards that was the bit that, you know, proved, that did not go to plan. And that was where the news was, really. So I was out there for a couple of

years and that was kind of where I sort of learned my trade as a foreign correspondent. From then, I became got a job on the Daily Telegraph back in London on their foreign desk as chief foreign correspondent and spent about the next 10, 12 years covering, you know, different different big stories around the world, principally the Arab Spring, the Somali piracy crisis and of course the rest of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. So that was kind of me. I then went freelance in 2016. still doing the same sort of stuff, really, essentially. And then when the war in Ukraine started, the telegraph asked me back as an extra pair of hands to go and cover that. And so I've been covering that on off for the last four years. I was in Kiev when the, I was in Ukraine at the start of the war, ended up in Kiev for most of the first month.

And that's where I ended up getting the idea for the book about the international volunteers. That's me in a nutshell. A rather large nutshell. Just to point out to the listeners, kind of the life of a freelance reporter, I mean, you really are just packing sort of like a laptop and a camera and a change of clothes and going over there on your own. There's no security blanket, there's no nothing, and you have to pitch editors and hopefully sell a story, right?

That is exactly it, yes. And certainly when I first went to Iraq, I didn't find that many editors that keen. Initially, I thought that was just because they had their own people there. It turned out most of them didn't. Most of their staff correspondents had pulled out by then. But a lot of them were just reluctant to use you because they were worried that if something went wrong, as it could easily do, they would be, you know, morally, if not legally, liable for you. And that's not a position that a lot of media organisations want to find themselves.

And nobody wants to be waking up, no executive wants to be waking up to find some freelancer that they, you know, gave some vague kind of commission to via email, suddenly staring out from a hostage video. That has happened in the past. Yes. So that's the perennial problem for freelancers these days is finding, you know, news organizations that are willing to trust them in war zones. although it's not surprising because it does come down to a duty of care sometimes. I remember a time because I was going back and forth to Syria and Iraq during the ISIS war. And it was like 2014 or 2015. I think it was one of the big ones.

It was like Reuters or AP or someone. They would take copy from freelancers, but not photographs. It was a very weird policy that they would not accept photojournalism. But if you went and wrote a story and submitted it, they would, you know, consider it. Yeah, I mean, they different places have different rules. Some places will not take anything from anybody. Yes.

Because they don't want to be seen to be encouraging people. Other places will say, well, look, we can't commission you to go. But when you get back, when you're back in, you're sort of safe and sound. And assuming you're still alive, we can have a chat then, which is slightly having your cake and eating it a little bit. it. So, you know, it's quite a difficult one. But when I was working on the Telegraph Foreign Desk, we did occasionally get people who were freelancers ringing up, saying they were off to, you know, about to deploy themselves to some way of dicey. And we would often try and

dissuade them. I've generally found the best way of dissuading them was to sort of say, do you, you know, do your parents know, you're going? And they'd be like, well, hang on, what's, what's that got to do with that. And so, well, it's your parents whose numbers will need in case you get kidnapped. We also need things like your blood group and, you know, other information like that. And how will they respond if they were on the phone telling them that you've, you know, you've not been heard of for a week and that your face has just appeared in a hostage video. I don't think I've had to lay it on quite as thick as that.

But when you mention things like that, that sometimes drives the point home to people in a way that they perhaps haven't sort of quite thought about it in the past. I myself was actually kidnapped in Somalia back in 2008 while working for the... Can you tell us about that? Yeah, sure. I mean, that's why I, you know, this is a sort of a subject of particular interest to me. I was covering the Somali piracy crisis at the time, which again, as many of your listeners will remember, was when Somali pirates.

were sailing out into the Gulf of Aden, hijacking ships and taking the crews hostage. So, yeah, the foreign editor said to me at the time, can you go to Somalia to do a bit of reporting on the ground just to get an idea of what the local people think about the piracy. And so what if we want, we went to a town called Basasa, which is in the northern region of Somalia called Puntland, which is where most of the piracy, taking place because it's close to the Gulf of Aden so it's like being the being a

spot on the inter on the state highway where you can just sail out into the sea and you've got hundreds of passing ships every day as most journalists do when they go there and indeed most business people and aid workers we we use bodyguards that were hired by our fixes local hires just, you know, guys with, you know, guys who were probably the fixers, cousins or relatives, or relatives, cousins, friends, whatever, with guns, guys with guns, about seven of them. And it's basically a kind of scarecrow effect. You're not expecting these people to lay their lives down for you, but you do have to hope that the fix is hires ones who are trustworthy.

In our case, they were not trustworthy. And on the last day, as we were driving to the airport, our bodyguards, guys we were paying several hundred bucks to keep us safe every day kidnapped us themselves and drove us off into the mountains I won't go into the full details about it. There is a book I wrote about it if anyone wants to check it out which tells the story in exhaustive detail but basically we were held in a series of caves in the mountains of Northern Somalia for about six weeks. We weren't hurt badly and like that. We were threatened a few times and there was a few other thrills and spills.

A gunfight in the cave at one point with a rival clan, which is not a great place to have a gunfight. You know, with all those stone walls, lots of bullets, zigzag, about ricocheting around. But eventually we were released. I can't go into the circumstances. I'll release too much, but money was asked for whether money changed towns. I don't really know.

That is quite frequent in that part of the world. We were also threatened at one point that when the negotiations were not going very well, the pirates happened to mention that a British naval vessel had killed a couple of pirates and a clan a few hundred miles down the road just the week before. and they said those the clan the clan to which those dead pirates belong

they're rather cross about that and they've heard that we've got you a British journalist hostage up here and they put an accounter offer for you so if your newspaper doesn't pay up they'd be very keen to buy you just to sort of have a little word about

those pirates that your Navy killed and I remember thinking Jesus Christ you know it's the first time the Royal Navy has killed anyone in about 300 years and it happens to be the same bloody week that I'm stuck with a bunch of pirates in Somalia. So yeah, it was it was it was a not a pleasant experience but it was it was manageable and it has sort of taught me you know that it's fairly important to be careful when you get deployed abroad although realistically these days kidnapping is a is a threat that

And, you know, lots of journalists I know have had it happen to them, including quite a few in Iraq, where the consequences could be a lot more serious, you know, where you had religious kidnappings that led to beheadings and so on. One thing I love about summer is how easy everything feels. The days are a little more relaxed, and I find myself reaching for the same comfortable, go-anywhere pieces again and again. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on well-made essentials that naturally become those everyday staples you actually

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is that they're not going to hurt you. Like, that's not what it's about. It's all about a value transaction that they want to take place. That is generally the case. Yeah. And they actually, I think it's almost fair to say that they specialize in being, they're trying to be. They're be fairly honest brokers in that sense because, and to honour deals, because, you know, there is a sense among a lot of, you know, a lot of Western firms if they get somebody kidnapped in Somalia, they would sort of assume that the people doing the kidnapping would be bad faith actors and that offering them ransom money would simply be chucking good money after bad, making a bad situation worse and that there'd be no reason that these people in this lawless part of the world would honour

their deal. In actual fact, I think they do have a reputation. For once a deal is struck, it usually goes through. And as you say, there's, there's, there's, there's not much relative to the numbers of people who have been taken by pirates. There's not been many cases where those people have not come home alive as long as money has been forthcoming. Whereas in Iraq or Syria, you know, you saw the majority of those, many of those cases would end up with somebody being beheaded. And there was a school of thought that says that these were not really kidnappings at all. They were more what someone described as deferred homicides.

You catch somebody, you intend to kill them, but you make out like there's going to be, you want some political concession, which you know is never going to be offered. For example, US troops being pulled out of Iraq was a common one during that time. time, yeah. And then how did you get interested or get sent to cover the war in Ukraine? How did that first come about? So, yeah, I was a jobing freelancer for the telegraph, mainly for the foreign desk, so whenever they needed an extra pair of hands on someone, I was there. And the Ukraine war was obviously one of those cases. If you cast your mind back, you remember that the war, you know, there was quite a lot of pre-indicators. that the war was going to happen. Putin doing these enormous troop buildups throughout the new year of 2022. And it became fairly obvious that he was going to make some key decision about it around

the last week of February of 2020. The 2022, the telegraph already had a couple of people in Kiev and one team in Kiev and one team in the east of Ukraine. There in Anteuro. that the invasion would start. And initially they said to me, can you go to Lviv in the west of Ukraine, just to be there as an extra pair of hands if much happens or whatever? But we don't really think it will, you know. We don't think Putin as that daft. So neither did I, of course.

So I flew in on what I think was the very last flight from Lviv on February the 23rd of 2022. The war, of course, started on the 24th. I got to the hotel, had a couple of beers, went to bed thinking, yeah, it's going to be a couple of weeks watching, covering what we call the diplomatic climb down story in the media where it's like, you know, there's been a big buildup, lots of sabre rattling, and then Putin decides not to do much in the end and maybe send a few more tanks into bits of the Donbast that he already occupied or something like that. Then a few hours later, I'm sort of woken up by flories of WhatsApp messages from colleagues in Kiev and elsewhere. saying the war has started, you know, all hell is breaking loose. And yeah, so that was that. And so the first week was, you know, was a bit frightening because I had never, I'd covered wars in Africa

in the Middle East a bit before. But, you know, this was kind of like grown-up warfare. This is, you know, the world's second superpower. And also it's Vladimir Putin. It's not one of the nice guys. And, you know, nobody really had any idea of, what kind of things he was capable of of. As we now know, you know, he's barely capable of invading the Donbass,

let alone Kiev or anywhere else. But at that time, you were expecting Russian paratroopers to land in Lviv at any moment. I was worried the border might be sealed. I was thinking, like, you know, if all hell breaks loose, can I walk from Lviv back to Poland? It's only 70 miles or something. So, yeah, it was quite sort of that first week was quite scary. it was difficulty sleeping and so on and also you're very adrenalineized just from having to

you know do the job as well the daily reporting um then on about day five i had i was you know i was tasked with replacing the team in kiev that we had who'd already been there for a month they'd both had COVID and you know they weren't feeling match fit for what could be you know an undending siege potentially so i was kind of thinking well how on earth do i get into kiev all the cars are driving the other way. The higher car shut place in LeViv has been shut, you know, and nobody in their right mind is driving down that motorway. And I was kind of despairing. And then somebody said, well, why don't you take the train? I said, well, what do you mean the train? Thinking like all the trains would have, you know, stopped ages ago. They pointed out

that the trains were, every day, they were disgorging, you know, large numbers of refugees at the border with Poland. And obviously those trains came back empty. And, and, obviously, those trains came back, empty and so you could just jump on one of them and it was one of the strangest train journeys I've ever done you know it's just almost a completely empty train me and one or one or two other a few other Ukrainians and i think an italian photographer who was told by the steward not to take to take his feet off the seat um so they're still maintaining standards the Ukrainian train service as we got into Kiev and then covered the you know the siege of Kiev for the next uh the next five weeks or so So by which time it was already showing signs of petering out.

This is when they were trying to capture the airfield and there were assassination attempts. Yeah. Yes. I mean, there was a lot of fear of Russian saboteurs wandering the streets in the first few days and the Ukrainian troops, although pretty professional most of the time were quite jumpy. Those sabotiers either were rounded up or proved to be nothing more. the rumour after about a week. Although yours had the Russians pushing into Urpin and Butcher in the Northwest. That was the main focus of their assault.

Also an area called Brovary in the East. So the combat itself was limited to certain areas. But I mean, Kiev at that point certainly felt very much like a city under siege. You had missiles coming in quite regularly in the mornings. And also just the streets were commemorating. almost completely deserted at that time, far, far quieter than they are now. And, you know, there was just signs of things kind of fraying at the edges. Lots of spots on street corners were, or streets where cars had crashed just because people were driving in a panic.

Quite a lot of people mentally unstable people out on the streets who, I think primarily people who are on medication of one sort or another. or otherwise unable to care for themselves who'd been left basically to defend for themselves and who, you know, running out of appropriate medication. Yeah, just quite a few signs that, you know, the sort of the place was buckling. But as time went on, you know, things sort of, you know, got back together, back to normal again and, you know, shops were open, cafes were open. And we saw Ukrainians rallying around in the way that, you know, he's now, you know, they're now very famous for, around the world.

What was the first time you came in contact with a foreigner that was fighting over there? Well, Zelensky announced the creation of the International Legion on about day three of the war from his bunker in the center of Kiev, a time when it all looked rather grim for Kiev and everybody was expecting that if the regime, if the Zelensky's government didn't collapse within 72 hours, three days it would be you know within three weeks or three months or whatever and he he framed it very much as an appeal to the wider world he said that anyone who uh anyone out there has got military skills um and wants to come and fight for ukraine i'm fighting i'm forming an international legion it will be for those who want to uh fight for democracy freedom human rights not just for

ukraine but for europe and for the whole of the world it's a very you know romantic appeal really and you know echoing the the spirit of the international brigade in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s when volunteers around the world flocked to fight to help the Republican government the democratically elected left-wing Republican government in Spain fight off Franco's fascists and you know so since been regarded very much as a you know, a dry run for World War II. And, yeah, so that's what he said. And within, I think, a couple of weeks, you know,

the Ukrainian government said they'd had something like 20,000 email, so 20,000 applications to join the new International Legion. I think majority, by what they meant, that was 20,000 emailed expressions of interest. But it was still a significant number. I think the first ones I met, I didn't actually meet them physically because a lot of them wanted to keep themselves fairly low profile because they were worried about getting tracked by the Russians and sometimes didn't want people to know at home that they were there because not all of them had actually told them their families that they were going, you know? I spoke to a few on the phone. A lot of them were ex-British soldiers, mainly people who were younger actually and I think quite a lot of.

who had missed out on Iraq or Afghanistan and who saw this as a chance to put their skills to the test. And in that sense, soldiering is a pretty unique profession because you can spend your life training in soldiering and never get your skills, you know, the chance to put your skills to the test. It's like being a surgeon who never operates, foreign correspondent, who never goes to, you know, covers a war, that sort of thing, you know. So there was a strong element of that people wanted to see where their skills were up to it. There were also more seasoned combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who wanted to see what it was like to fight a peer army, you know, where it would be the Russians this time rather than coalition forces that held all the aces. So there was that element.

And then there was also just quite a lot of people who had never. fought before or if they did have military experience, you know, what was limited to, you know, driving trucks in logistics squadrons and things like that, who, you know, who again wanted, you know, wanted to see what combat was like. And I think it was a fact to say for most of them, if not all of them, that was also just drawn by the cause. You know, this was a pretty unique war in that, for the first time since World War II, really, it felt like a just war with a clear baddie and a clear goodie in Zelensky

and with echoes of the land grab that hit the maid that started World War II when he invaded Poland and the Czech Republic. A lot of people saying, like, you know, I don't really want to come and fight particularly, but I feel it's my duty as a soldier and with someone with the relevant military skills, I'm going to feel shit.

if I stay at home in London or New York or anywhere while there are Ukrainians out there fighting and dying, partly because we know that this may be this may be the start of a bigger operation against other parts of Europe. And also, if he succeeds, if he's not opposed, it will be the end of the, you know, the rules-based order as we know it. and as a military-equipped individual, I feel it's my job to go out there. So those were the kind of motivations that were involved, although for a lot of them, you know, there were other factors, personal factors as well.

A lot of them had, you know, civilian lives that they weren't particularly enjoying, jobs that they found unfulfilling, personal lives, you know, marriages that were sometimes on the rocks. A few people, you know, were on the run from the law or had been in trouble with the law in the past and wanted to kind of wipe the slate clean. Which is something you also notice with, you know, people who went out to fight for ISIS as jihadists. That's the thing, you know, the sense of I've not led a decent life or I've led a bad life. This is the chance for me to kind of try and, you know, rectify that a bit.

So you have a wide range, a very colourful range of people, science. joining up and that was one of the reasons I wanted to write the book really it's it's partly an account of the combat that they faced and their experiences on the front line that is obviously primarily what it is it also tries to be a narrative of the first three years of the war so you get that as a kind of thrown in for free as it were if you read the book but it's also um trying to describe what the you know why these people go out there and and what it is about life in the home countries in America or the UK that they feel is lacking in their own, you know, and that for quite a few of them, I think, that there's what I would call the sort of fight club element to it, as in the

film, the book starring Brad Pitt, where you have a generation of men brought up these days in the United States and certainly in Britain where they've known, you know, their countries have known peace really for largely for more or less for 80 years and they don't really feel like there's you know many existential challenges left in life um that life is too to mollycoddle too soft and they want to know whether they can face up to the kind of hardships that their uh their forefathers faced in world war two or world war one uh you know they've seen it in um in programs like uh um uh oh what's it called the um sorry my memory my memory But in the brothers, yeah.

Oh, yeah. You know, they've got relatives who, you know, who fought in that war in World War II, or they might have, in America's case, they might have relatives who fought in Vietnam. And it's that sense of what's it like to fight in a real, a proper grown-up war. Can I handle it?

Here's a chance. There was a very motley crew that showed up for this international legion, especially it sounds like early on in the war. And you have a chapter you talk about the screamers. I think you guys call them waltz. You know, people are pretending to be someone they're not. And then there's this ballistic missile strike that kind of separated the wheat from the shaft. It sounded like. Yeah. So when the Legionnaires first came across the border, a lot of them were told to deploy, sorry, to go to a base in a place called Yavariv near the

Polish border. It's actually a base that was used. used prior to the war by as a kind of NATO training base. And, you know, so there's, I think there's probably about a couple of thousand of them pitched up there at the beginning of the war, all sort of sitting there waiting, you know, for orders and waiting to get trained up. And yes, as you say, some of them were, you know, fairly competent volunteers with proven military records. And some of them were not.

You had quite a lot of Walter Mitty's. i.e. fantasists. You had quite a lot who, yeah, so-called screamers, i.e. people who had no military training at all, but who bullshited it a lot that they had, you know, previous records as, you know, Navy SEALs or Delta Force or S-A-S. And then who would go off, runoff screaming at the moment the action started. And, yeah, I mean, according to some of the volunteers or spoke to for the book, you could kind of see these fantasists a mile off, you know, that they all wore kind of berets and cat badges that had, you know, insignias that, you know, nobody actually seen before.

And they would often talk about, you know, various missions they'd been on, you know, inevitably with the CIA or Delta Force. So it's a bit like, can't really talk about it too much, but it was, you know, it was real hush, hush stuff, but, you know, and you sort of think, well, if it was that hush-hush, why is it not classified, you know, why are you even mentioning it? So there was quite a lot of those sorts of people and it was a big worry for the more regular competent legionnaires to see these people having turned up because the Ukrainian military authorities didn't really have any means of vetting people at that particular point. Because, you know, if you've got, normally when you go to war,

you're fighting alongside other guys you've been with for years and years who you've trained alongside, you know, their strengths, you know, their weaknesses. Here you're being lined up to fight along with a whole load of people who are tiltless strangers anyway, some of whom seem like complete whack jobs. And then, yeah, the other problem with a lot of these people was that they had no sort of sense of, you know, secure comms at all, no situational awareness. They'd be posting TikTok videos of them, sort of saying, yo, hang in here at Yavariv, or whatever.

and sending all kinds of messages to, you know, on the social media saying where they were. And yeah, about on about March the 14th, I think it was or something, one night at that particular base, the Russians hit it with a series of missiles, hypersonic missiles, big ones. And, you know, they clearly identified this place as a haunt of international legionnaires. By some miracle, I think only one legionaire if that was killed. A large number of Ukrainians were killed in a neighbouring barracks. But as a result of that, a lot of the, it was something of a wake-up call. A lot of the legionnaires then decided,

I don't really fancy this, I feel a bit out of my league. And it was widely presumed that the reason the Russians had managed to hit this place was because there was so much digital traffic on the internet that they'd been able to easily pinpoint where it was, all the foreigners' mobile phones and so on. Personally, I think they could have probably worked it out anyway just because it was an obvious place for all the foreigners to go to. But certainly, yes, as you say,

that that kind of slightly sort of sifted the wheat from the chaff. A lot of people left deciding that this was not for them. but, you know, probably on balance, more of them stayed. And, but that was certainly very much a kind of a baptism of fire for a lot of them. Hey, guys. I'm Jack Murphy here at the team house. And today I want to tell you about the sponsor for tonight's show, Mars Men. This is a natural testosterone support supplement.

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For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts at men go to mars.com. That's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please show support for the show and tell them that the team house sent you. Thank you, everyone. You profile a lot of these foreign fighters that came over there. Some of them were professional soldiers, served in the paris. One guy was a Sandhurst graduate, as I recall.

Yeah. But then there's also like another guy who was like grew up on a farm in Scotland and just wanted to get it on. Yeah. Yeah, that was Douglas Kartner who was, yeah, he had no military experience at all. I think he wanted to join the U.S. Marines or the commandos when he was when he was a kid. But he'd, you know, had a problem with a shoulder or something like that during the qualifications. process so that had kind of ruined his dream of joining the military he became a tractor engineer instead had a perfectly happy life but he always felt there was something missing and um i think you know normally if you're a 20 something in the UK and you want you know thrills and kicks you uh you go off maybe have a gap year around the world travel to Asia and india and the far east that sort of thing

but you've set your your heart on being a commander or a member of the SAS that's not really going to be much of a substitute. So yeah, when the war came along, he just sort of thought, shall I do it? You know, why not? This is my one and only chance. And off he went, yeah, undeterred by the fact that, you know, he didn't have any military experience, undeterred by the fact that the Ukrainian embassy had told him, no, mate, just stay at home and, you know, do a bit of charity work back in the UK if you want, undeterred by the fact that his parents said to him, you're bloody daft, you'll get killed. And, you know, in fairness to him, he played it fairly carefully.

He started out with just a volunteer humanitarian unit, getting to know the ropes, getting to know the ground in Ukraine a bit, then moved to some sort of medical unit where they had a number of soldiers or ex-soldiers who were doing sort of humanitarian medical work a bit close to the front lines. And then from there, eventually moved to a sort of medical unit that was a combat unit of some sort of, I remember rightly.

And, yeah, eventually, you know, a few months in found himself heading towards the front lines, you know, ready for combat with a Ukrainian legion that took a large number of foreigners. And, yeah, we're trying to describe what it's like for him when he sort of first heads into combat is with all this all this sort of other pals many of whom are likewise rookies um and uh there's a sort of sense of like you know finally we've got the chance to get here we're sort of dreading it and yet we're longing for it at the same time then he gets to the um to the to the to the base or the trenches where you know where he's going to be based and uh he's kind of expecting to get told right you go over there you point your gun there and you know all that and he's just

left on his own in a trench, you know, not knowing what to do with this machine gun, a PKK, which is like a big belt-fed thing, a bit like a general-purpose machine gun, that he's been trained on, but he has no idea where the front line is, you know, which direction it is. And then out the blue, several soldiers start walking towards him, who's, because of the light at that time of day because he was in some woods. You couldn't see whether they were Russians or Ukrainians, but they were wandering with their guns in a sort of in a manner that didn't look terribly relaxed. Look like they meant business. And so he starts thinking, right, are those my guys or are they the enemy? And as they get nearer and near, he still thinks, well, like, I'm going to have to do

something. I'm going to have to shoot if these guys are Russian soldiers because the moment they see me, here in my trench, you know, they're going to start shooting. So they get closer and closer. He's hoping they'll, you know, you'll be able to work out who they are. Eventually, he's on the point of firing a warning burst over their heads, which I think would almost certainly have led to them firing back when one of them waved at him and said,

hi, yeah, how are you doing in English or something? And, you know, he sort of describes sort of wiping the sweat off his brow and sort of pulling his hand off the trigger grip, which is kind of, you know, just about shaking by that time. And it turns out to be the guy who's going to be his new commander, who basically just almost wiped out that very first, you know, that very first day, simply because nobody had told him which way, which direction of the point is gun in. I'll mention that because it's sort of symptomatic of the kind of unexpected chaos

you get on the Ukrainian front lines. I think people imagine it's going to be a nice straight line. It's not, it meanders in and out like a river. And it changes within the hours. And quite often people don't really know whether they're sort of, you know, the Russians are ahead of them or props a little bit beside them or behind them or whatever. So yeah, that was, I think, something of a baptism of fire for him, definitely. Yeah. Another interesting person you profile in the book is a Vietnamese American military veteran. Can you tell us about him? He had a very unique story. Yeah, I think his name is a while since I've read the book, but I think his name was Hugh Lee. And yeah, he was a Vietnamese American. His family had come over at the end of the Vietnam War to the U.S. He, you know, was very much of the opinion that America had given his family a decent life. and that, you know, when other parts of the world suffered, you know, suffered military aggression, that, you know, he had a duty to help them just as he'd been helped or his family had been helped. So at the time he was running a restaurant in Colombia, of all places, having retired from the US Marines.

And he'd served in Afghanistan as a command center sort of technical operations. more than a frontline soldier, but, you know, he'd still done U.S. Marines training. He was a capable and competent operator. But, you know, he wouldn't call himself any kind of, you know, Rambo infantry kind of guy, you know, didn't sort of oversell his skills. Anyway, he decided to go out. I think he was similar to a lot of the American soldiers out who volunteered for Ukraine, and that he had, having served in Afghanistan, he'd been quite disappointed by the pullout in 2021 of US forces from Afghanistan

and by the collapse of the Afghan army. And that had made him feel like, you know, we spent 20 years there, all that blood and treasure invested. And yet, you know, when it came to it, the moment we pulled out, the Afghan army collapsed. And what was the point of supporting these people? I know the story is more complicated than that, as does he, but. that that was the kind of the you know the rough headline or one of the things he felt and he saw the ukrainians though you know actually fighting tooth and nail against the russians and he sort of thought yeah these people are worth fighting these people are worth supporting because they're

fighting on their own accord they're not even you know asking us to come in officially you know and they're worth helping and there'll be a useful future ally for america in in the future So, off he went. Hugh did not have a good experience. He was at Yavariv when the missiles landed, but he didn't let that deter him. However, he didn't have a very pleasant time with the Legionnaires when he first met them.

He's described bumping into a bunch of guys who he summed up as special forces, washouts, basically sort of very mussely. Rambo-looking guys who he reckoned were sort of high on steroids or something who were quite aggressive and dismissive of him. And again, you know, just that feeling of like, I don't want to be stuck in a trench with these guys. I'll feel more scared of them than the Russians. And then also on his very first deployment, he was sent to Erpin in the northwest suburb of Kiev, where the Russians were pushing in during that first month in Kiev.

And his first assignment was to pick up a corpse from behind enemy lines, a Georgian fighter, a fighter from the volunteer from the ex-Soviet state of Georgia, who'd been killed. And Hugh and several other, about a dozen other guys went through the combat area to actually pick this guy's body up, the Georgian's body up. He was a big heavy guy, 15 stone maybe. And they spent the next seven hours stretching him back through the enemy lines,

through, you know, mortar fire and, you know, potential sniper areas and potential minefields back to, you know, back to the rearwood lines, the Ukrainian lines. And I don't think it was so much the, you know, the actual threat of, you know, the threat of armed danger, but the actual weight of the

corpse was made it really, really hard. They only had a kind of, they had a soft stretch of one of those ones that you can, you like it, almost like a tarpaulin with handles that you use primarily for getting people at the buildings, which are more flexible, which, but which make the actual task of carrying somebody far harder. And they said, you know, every sort of 100 yards or so, he was getting exhausted. And they also kept dropping the guy, which didn't feel very respectful. And then by the time he got back to the end, back to the Ukrainian lines, he was exhausted. He felt somewhat out of shape for what he was being tasked to do as well, somewhat rattled by, you know, his experiences with these other legionaires at the early on. And he just burst into tears and he just realized I cannot cope with us.

And as a result of that, he then went home. And I mentioned that case in the book, I think just partly to sort of show. that not everybody emerges a hero out of these things or not a hero in a conventional sense you know Hugh did still do his bit he just decided it wasn't for him but also just I think to sort of show to people that you know wartime experiences as with Douglas can't know the guy who you know wasn't told which direction to fire his gun and war time experience is never going to be what you expect them you know he was expecting to be there in a trench firing a gun and instead he's Humphan for the guy's body for seven miles, you know,

staring at a dead man in, you know, staring into a dead man's eyes the whole time. They're very much, very closely confronted with the, with the consequences of war and yet not actually participating in it, not getting the kind of adrenaline that you normally would. She's quite an unusual, perhaps introduction to, you know, a conflict zone. And, you know, it just sort of struck me that,

Again, it also underlined how different the war in Ukraine was to the one in Afghanistan, where Hugh had been before, if soldiers were killed, then there were helicopter lifted out. Usually, you know, their bodies might have had to drag them, you know, for, you know, stretch them for a short time or something like that. But it would be relatively unusual for anyone to have had the kind of experience that Hugh had in Ukraine. Whereas in Ukraine, you know, there were no helicopters flying around anywhere. there wasn't that sort of Kazabak system.

And so situations like he had were actually very common and often very, very difficult. Most of the people I spoke to who did stretch range, and jobs said it was the most exhausting thing they've ever done on the battlefield. There's another guy you profile who had a bad experience, as I recall. He got to a certain point, it was kind of like, screw this, I'm going to go guard this diamond mine in the Congo

and make some real money and then maybe come back. Yeah, that was Christopher Perriman, known as Pez, who was a highly qualified soldier. He fought in Iraq, in the Second Gulf War. He was a trained sniper. And, yeah, he went to Ukraine thinking, yeah, very much like, this is my job as a soldier. I've got the skills. I will be able to help train Ukraine. and save some other guy from losing his life because of his lack of, you know, his lack of aptitude for the task.

So, yeah, unfortunately, he, like a lot of people when he got there, found that the Ukrainian military system wasn't really capable of, you know, processing all the volunteers that were coming in, including the experienced people like him. Zelensky had not told his generals before, you know, beforehand that he was creating religion. was blindsiding them. And they didn't really have the organisational capacity to put all these people in barracks just as the war was starting to train them up and to send them off in different, you know, big battalions and foreigners or whatever

to the front lines. So a lot of the soldiers like Pess found themselves sitting around in the bases at places like Yavariv where they're getting missileed. They're doing nothing. They're just getting bored. and paranoid and wondering how much longer it's going to take before they get sent to the front lines. They keep getting promised that they'll get sent soon and nothing happens.

And he, like a lot of soldiers, that ended up just kind of taking matters into his own hands. He teamed up with a bunch of other guys, about maybe a dozen of them, or if whom had sort of got to know each other during all this period sitting around waiting in the barracks, sort of worked out, yeah, this guy doesn't look too long, looks sensible, that guy doesn't look too much like a Water Mitty, so on and so forth. And yeah, they would form these little units and then they would try and bypass the Legion bureaucracy essentially, just go off and tout their services around the front lines,

like, you know, labourers looking for work, really. And usually what they'd do is that there'd be one person who maybe spoke a bit of Russian or Ukrainian who could do the... introductions to certain commanders or some guy who maybe knew a Ukrainian commander who knew a man who knew a man and they would they would chase down those leads sometimes and in the hope that one or two of those Ukrainian commanders would say yeah I can use some guys you know you can try us we'll try you out for a couple of weeks but it was very much on promote probation and unfortunately the because there had been a few

walter mitties and bad apples already you know sort of earning the legion a bad reputation A lot of the Ukrainian commanders are actually quite unwilling to take them, and they would find themselves just being told thanks, but no thanks, or whatever. And quite a sort of unusual experience. If you go to a war, expecting the fight, and then everybody's just saying, sorry, I don't need you, you know. We're good. Yeah, normally, you know, you hear a lot of stories in militaristic about soldiers

dreading the front line and trying to get out of it. Here it was the opposite. and people sort of, you know, hunting for the front lines like a kind of military Eldorado. And Pez found himself in that situation. I think they eventually got down to some place in Mikhailive, in the south, where they got a little bit of action but nothing very much, just sort of, you know, and eventually he decided,

look, I can't keep, you know, I can't stay here forever. I've been here three months. I'm running low on money. and payment payment wasn't very regular in the Legion then it is now and so he went back to the UK and I think pursued a job guarding a diamond mine in Congo

I'm not sure whether he ever got it or not but he did resurface again in October of that same year of 2020 and joined a unit that was offered much more scope for action and there were they were out in some islands down in the in southern Ukraine on the on the on the delta area of the Danipro river Ukraine's main river where there's lots of islands at the mouth of the river as it

leads into the Black Sea and on those islands the Russians and the Ukrainians would often occupy one half you know sort of rival halves of the islands and it was Pez's job and that of his team to sort of try and keep, you know, retain their section of the island. Pretty scary stuff because there's nowhere to run to if you get stuck, you know, there's not going to be a boat that's going to let you off the island if you, if the Russians start to do as start to really pile the pressure on. And so, yeah, he was there for a few months. There was a few gun fights.

I think he had one or two disagreements with his colleagues occasionally when things went wrong. There's an account of that when a gunfight goes wrong and Pez gets blamed for not having his weapon at the time. There were reasons why that happened. But again, I use that example to sort of explain why it nearly led to fist fights afterwards.

And again, it's what anybody else would have is just as a bad day at the office with these guys. These are, you know, a bad day at work where a few mistakes are made either side. It leads to people potentially getting killed and feelings running very, very high, especially when once again these people don't know each other. Anyway, Pess continued, but...

Can you finish the story about how he narrowly avoided capture? Because I remember he, like, had to jump off a balcony or something like that. Yeah, so, yeah, I can plunge it in a bit more detail. They were basically in a house doing, you know, an O.P., an observation point in a house on this island one night and a whole of Russians suddenly surrounded them. It's not clear whether they actually surrounded them knowing that there were there were legionnaires there or that there were Ukrainians there or whether they actually thought, again, this is the element of confusion on the battlefield that these Russians actually thought it was a Russian occupied O.P. Apparently,

some Russian went knocked on the door. of the house, I think expecting to be let in. One of the other legionnaires inside challenged him with a password. The Russian was unable to produce the password. At that point, they both realized that, you know, each other were enemy forces. And I think one of the legionnaires fired a burst down the, down the stairway to keep the Russians at bay. After that, all hell broke loose, as you would imagine and they were having, there was machine gun fire

coming in through the windows, there were smoke grenades coming through the windows, the Russians were surrounding them, shouting them in English as well, sort of shouting, come out, come out your bitches and so on. So it was clear that I think they'd identified them

as foreigners at that point and there would obviously be potentially quite a big prize. A gun battle ensued for quite a long time. I can't quite remember how long. I don't think it was perhaps more than about half an hour, but I think it probably seemed like forever at the time. And eventually, as the upstairs room filled with tear gas and smoke grenade gas that the Russians had chucked in, Pez sort of decided that, you know, it couldn't see his colleagues

and his comrades anymore. And leapt out of one of the windows, the upstairs window, about 20 feet, nearly broke his ankle, smashed into a side, you know, the wall of the building he just jumped out of, smashed his head up and then kind of basically ran off through the back gardens of the house that he was in and somehow managed to get to safety and by some miracle, when they were at the agreed rendezvous point that they would go to in eventualities like this, met up with his comrades who had also survived. Again, I think we were also all likewise convinced that, you know, everybody else was dead. And as it turned out, nobody actually got killed in that particular incident.

But I've watched sort of video grabs. I mean, you know, it's absolutely terrifying. And of course, the consequences of being caught in that situation would have been, you know, would have been die. If you weren't killed, you'd have been taken Russian prisoner of war. And I mean, that is something that happened to some of the other leaders. which we can perhaps talk about as well. But yeah, Pez continued there.

He partnered the company with that particular unit and then went joined another unit and then in October 2023, which I think was sort of later that same year after that gun fight on the island. He was on another operation near Snake Island in the Black Sea. sea and he was killed by mortifier, I believe. I don't know any more details than that. Nothing else was ever released. But as you know, the Ukrainians are often quite secretive about the details of military

operations when casualties have been sustained. But yeah, he was one of a number of people who were in the book who, you know, who are not, you know, sadly not around to have seen it published. I do want to ask you about the guys who were taken as prisoners of war. Those are some of the crazier stories in this book. There were a couple different guys who profile, I believe, who were captured. Can you tell us about them a bit? Yeah, sure.

I think there's three who profiled in the book. A British guy named Andrew Harding. Sorry, yes, Andrew Harding, yes. Sorry, I may have to check his name. Andrew will call him from now, and it's been a while since I've read the book. And then two Americans, Alex Droke and Andy Hween, who may be familiar to some of your listeners.

They were the first Americans to be taken. captive in June of 2022. And yeah, so Alex was a classic legionaire in many ways. He had served in Iraq as a top gunner in about 2009 in Baghdad, which, as anyone who spent time in Baghdad during those years, we'll know it was a very dangerous job. You're driving around in a Humvee, escorting convoys of VIPs and generals. a big target and Alex's job was to be in the lead Humvee with a 50 Cal. You know, so if anybody, if any snipers or car bombers or insurgent gangs were waiting to try and take out the convoy, Alex would probably be the first to know.

So after he came back from Iraq, he had quite bad PTSD and he tried to get other civilian jobs. He tried to become a police officer, for example, and a family. that, you know, I think partly because of his PTSD, he couldn't really deal with it. And also the rules of engagement as a civilian police officer were very different from those as a, you know, a lead gunner in Iraq. And he began to feel like it was a bit of a failure in life. And also being an ex-military man, you know, a career military man, you know, he sort of felt that his life had lost purpose.

When the Iraq war started, he decided to go, despite having, you know, a 100% veteran's pension with PTSD. Many would have queried that decision, you know, saying you're, you know, you're only likely to make your demons far, far worse, surely. His view was, you know, these are demons that haunt me while I'm in civilian life, but, you know, that's a case of conditioned reflexes. And if I'm, you know, back in a combat zone, that they will be, they will serve a useful purpose. and so hopefully will I by serving in the Legion. I think I've listened to enough military podcasts to know that there are people who might dispute Alex's diagnosis of that sort of thing, but that was Alex's version of events and he said it worked.

So for the first few months when he was there, he was training Ukrainian sort of military volunteers. And he was an ex-staff sergeant, US Army staff sergeant, so he was used to dealing with groups of 20 or 30 or 3. 30 men and I think he felt he's making a lot of difference. Effectively, it's a force multiplier, more useful really in some ways than what he could achieve individually as a competent. But that training work stopped after a while, I think fell foul of Ukrainian military bureaucracy, as things often do. And I think, like many people, he was keen just to sort of see what the combat was like.

So he joined a volunteer unit up in Carpenter. They were sent to do a drone wrecky one day on his very first mission. And they were up in some forests outside of Kharkiv and they ran into a much larger Russian unit that effectively ambushed them. The unit he was with scattered. There was about seven or eight them. They all scattered in different directions. Alex and his companion had been told to look for another guy who'd gone missing. They felt reluctant to leave the area while this other guy was unaccounted for, mainly out of a sense of duty. That meant that they were still there when the Russians started infiltrating through what they saw through the woods in enormous tracked vehicle going along like some kind of prehistoric dinosaur.

That was the first glimpse of the Russians with a whole lot of Russian soldiers wandering by them. They then tried to escape out there. I think they walked for about eight, seven or eight hours. through the Ukrainian forest trying to head back roughly in the direction of Kharkiv, no idea who they might be running into, got chased by a wild boar at one point. And eventually, I think, just at the point when they were hoping they might have got back to what looked like a familiar village, they realized that the soldiers ahead of them were, in fact, a big, a large gang of Russians.

By the time the two groups laid eyes on each other. It was too late to run and they had to surrender, basically. And then Alex, he was roughed up a bit at the time. Not too badly. I think he said the Russian soldiers that caught them were like, so yeah, you know, you're another soldier. Yeah, you're a foreigner, but, you know, we're all soldiers here together. So just the usual kind of customary kicking.

And then a few conversations about, you know, what's Joe Biden like? What are American women like? You know, are they hot? All this sort of stuff. Yeah, have a cigarette, mate. Have a good drink of water. That then abruptly changed.

when they were handed over to the Russian intelligence services and Alex spent about five weeks in a Russian black site prison. We'll call it, he doesn't really know what it was, but it certainly wasn't an official prison anywhere. Somewhere probably in the Dinnets People's Republic, the separatist held a bit of Ukraine, where he was tortured pretty much non-stop by Russian secret police who thought he was a spy of some sort,

and were perhaps not surprisingly reluctant to think that any American would be crazy enough to join the International Legion. You know, he was sort of saying, yeah, I'm here as a volunteer. And they're saying, no, you wouldn't do that. You know, you wouldn't be mad enough, which was a hard one that dissuade them off. And he was electrocuted quite a few times, you know, fairly badly, which he said was far worse than any of the other treatment that he taught. they suffered. They also did noise, you know, noise torture on them, put them in a cell and, you know, playing very loud music at them. Although rather amusingly, they play bands, lots of heavy metal bands like Ramstein and other people, you know, sort of death metal and speed metal American stuff, which I think they thought would be the epitome of torture and might well have worked quite well again, you know, on Go on Hanimo Bay inmates, but for Alex, it was exactly the sort of music that suburban teenagers of Alex's generation grew up with in America. So it's, oh, you know, here's Ramstein. It's a bit

loud and it's, you know, it's the third time I've heard this one today, but it was manageable and it kind of reminded of him home. And I think they played, played this, this thing on a kind of loop of 80 tracks a day. And it allowed Alex to keep time in a way that he couldn't, otherwise, because the lights were switched on the whole time. and they had this sort of slightly surreal experience when his captors told him that they were actually going to try and negotiate for his release via a prison swap or something like that and he assumed I think as we all would that

somebody, you know, the Russian secret police secret services would have some sort of hotline to the FBI or the CIA that they could do for, you know, organizing these sorts of things. They didn't. They presented Alex with a downloaded list of phone numbers for various US departments, US government departments that they'd printed off the internet and said, right, you start ringing around these. And so he was ringing around, you know, the Department of Homeland Security Switchboard and various other places.

And, you know, most of the time never getting through to anybody. And on the other occasion where, you know, he did get through to some switchboard operator. You know, when your spiel is, hello, my name is Alex Trucke, you know, I'm a prisoner of war in Russia. I'm being held by the, you know, the Russian secret police. The answer is, yes, I'm sure you are. Thank you, sir. We do not take nuisance callers here, you know. Slav's the founder.

And eventually, I think the Russian, his Russian captors discovered a number for the veterans, the US veterans crisis line, which is a real life, you know, help, help number. on which Alex himself had rung several times when, you know, in his bad days back in the US when he was suffering badly from PTSD and overdoing it on the booze. So Alex said, no, this is not the right number to ring. This is a 24-hour veterans crisis line. To which he's captain apparently said, well, you know, this is a crisis though, and you are a veteran. So ring the line. I think at that point Alex kind of went, do you know what?

I've had enough for this. You know, you might be right. So he rang it up. And of course, being a veteran's crisis line, you know, designed for people who are suicidal, there was actually a human being at the end of the phone who did listen and who did sort of then say, yeah, okay, I'll try and find a number for somebody who can help you and short, you know, very shortly afterwards put him through to a State Department official who clearly knew who Alex was and who knew about the case, and who was in a position to start the process for negotiations for Alex's release. And I won't give away too much in the book, but Alex spent about the next four months. He was transferred to a civilian prison with a number of other volunteers, about a dozen of them,

from various different parts of the world, including a few other Americans and some Brits. and they were held there and eventually released as part of a prison swap. But the conditions in that civilian prison, although they were not getting tortured on a regular basis anymore, were still pretty grim. Alex sort of tells a story about it. There was a trustee in the prison, a, a Ukrainian inmate who was a, it was employed to sweep the cells and change the light bulbs on the CCTV. in the cell when that went wrong. And the prison guards sort of took great delight in mentioning to Alex, so that guy, yeah, he was a cannibal. He's a convicted cannibal. He's serving several licenses for eating people. And one day they, they sort of, the prison guards asked this,

this cannibal, you know, which of the three prisoners in here would you, would you prefer to eat? because they had Alex, and then they had Andy who was Asian, and they also had an African-American in the cell as well, as in which ethnicity would you prefer to die off, which I think was an example of kind of a certain sort of dark Russian humour. And as Alex, you know, Alex later reflected, though, that this, this cannibal, I think his name was ego, was actually, you know, one of the few friendly faces in the prison.

And he would occasionally give him his, you know, he's used cigarettes, cast-offs, which they would then, Alex and his friends would then sort of dissect and make roll-ups from using bits of paper, bits of newspaper. And, you know, but he did sort of say, you know, when your idea of a good day is getting, you know, cast off cigarettes that were convicted cannibal, it does sort of suggest that, you know, perhaps you're at a bit of a low point. another thing that I thought that I thought was very interesting

was he mentions how the interrogators I guess they were at the other place at the black site presumably FSB guys they were very good at torturing the hell out of people but they were very naive about

how America works like just oblivious yes I think they they thought that Alex had been, their official, their suspicion was that Alex had been sent in by some US sort of secret service to equip the Ukrainians with the means to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. The basis for this being that Alex had done a course while he was a US Army staff sergeant

on WMD disposal, which I think was a fairly standard course that a lot of US military soldiers did prior to the 2003 deployment to Iraq, all it meant was you knew how to recognise potentially hazard materials and the purposes, you know, the procedures for potentially disposing of them or making them safe. They, yeah, they seem to have no real concept of who he was or anything like that and no way of disbelieving him in any way. And yeah, more generally I think they're their their sort of a lot of their sort of expectations or preconceptions about Americans seem to be drawn from you know reading US spy novels and so on you know it was it was quite comic you would have thought perhaps it was a you know just a a play of a

ploy of some sort to hide the fact that they actually knew what they were doing but often it didn't seem like that. And then tell us about the guys in Moripal. In Maripal. Yeah. Yeah. So Maripal, as most of your listeners will remember, was the city that the Russians really laid siege to at the beginning of the war. It's down on the Azul.

I think it's on the Azov, the coast of the Azov Sea in southeast, on Ukraine's sort of southeastern border. And yeah, it was just basically raised to the ground by shelling. And there was a big sort of the Ukrainian forces there mounted a last stand at the Azov Steelworks, which is this sort of vast, complex, steel complex, one of the biggest in the world, that runs for several miles. It's just an enormous steel refinery. So there's a million and one places to hide there if you are a soldier. You know, there's gantries, there's pipes, there's underwomen,

underground bunkers, there's miles and miles of service tunnels. And also, because this is a Soviet built facility, there are lots of purpose-built military bunkers there as well that were built in the anticipation that Mario Paul and the rest of the Soviet Union will one day be attacked by the US or by the West. So it's both a factory under Citadel. And so the Ukrainians made a last stand there and among them was a British fighter by the name of John Harding and yeah he he had actually joined the Ukrainian military several years before as a volunteer having previously fought for the Kurdish as a volunteer with the Kurdish anti-IS forces in Iraq and he was an ex-parachute regiment soldier he'd also fought in Falkland's conflict in 1982, which meant he was getting on by the time the

war in Ukraine loomed. And I think in fact he was due to retire. It was his 60th birthday was coming up around in 2022 sometime. And I think a month before the war started in January 2022. He'd said to his commander, I mean, it's the time I retired. My legs are not working. they were and you know i don't want to be a liability and the commander said well fine yeah but do you know that the paperwork could be easier if you if you just wait out wait it out a month um uh said you won't stay on to the end of february and john said yeah sure and at that time none of them thought the ukrainian invasion was going to actually happen they just thought this troop buildup was just another you know another more another saber rattling exercised by putlin so he stayed on

and then on the 23rd of February, the night before the invasion, he literally had his bags packed to head back to the UK. And then he got the message the next morning from his comrades saying, oh yeah, the Russians are coming in across the border. And John said, how many of them? And the reply came, all of them. And so it was that John found himself among the soldiers manning, the Azop Brigade, who were manning the the sort of last stand in the steel factory in the Apollo, the Azov Steel Factory. And he gives a pretty graphic account of that. It's, you know, they held out for a long term,

basically managed to slow the Russian advance across the rest of Ukraine quite significantly. So the operation was a success from that point of view. But as the siege went on, I think it lasted until early May, So, you know, nearly three months. They are low on supplies and ammunition and also on medicines and anaesthetics. And then John gives a very vivid account at one point of having to, you know, soldiers, you know, suffering gangrene in their wounds and having to perform amputations without anaesthetic.

And, you know, they would have a surgeon with a bone sore who would do the job as quickly as he could on a leg or something. She used to take a couple of minutes and then they would have about six other soldiers just there to hold the patient down to try and keep them still when, you know, on the operating table. And I said to John, what was your sort of, you know, what way did? It was the only way to prepare people for this. And he said, no, not really. What he would say is this is really going to fucking hurt me. And if you want, I can stick a piece of wood in your mouth that you can bite.

but yeah that's that sort of thing absolutely extremes of experience and eventually yeah they they were ordered to surrender and sealed the place off he actually realized that he couldn't actually get the soldiers get the Azov he didn't want to send his own soldiers in

because he realised they'd just still keep getting killed you sealed it off and then the Azov soldiers were agreed to surrender an internationally broken surrender on the condition that they would not actually be that they would be taken into Russian custody but not harmed and of course they were all tortured to one an inch of their life. John was you know got a really severe kicking during his spell his five-week spell in the black sight to which he tried to make it worse by saying to them like you know you

hit like my sister you all hit like girls I think basically actually trying to get them daring them to kill him you know, rather than sort of subject him to really prolonged serious, more, you know, more considered torture. It didn't, but it did break his sternum. And then later when he was released from captivity, I think he was taken to hospital. A few months later having suffered a suspected heart attack. And the doctor said, actually, the signs that you suffered earlier heart attack, which is probably while you're in captivity. It's a miracle you're still.

alive. So yeah, John is one of, you know, one of thousands of Azov soldiers who sort of went through that experience, but one of relatively few Westerners who, you know, who's been around to tell the tale. And I think that's one of the valuable parts of the book is that you've got American and British soldiers giving first-hand accounts of what that brutality, what the brutality is like in the Russian system, because with the best will in the world, to some audiences, around the world when they hear Ukrainians talking about what happened. They often don't perhaps believe, you know, might not believe them 100% because they feel these are people who've got skin in the game, whereas that's less likely when it's Westerners who are

giving those accounts. Yeah, I mean, as you say that, it reminds me of an American World War II veteran named Jerry Sage, who was captured and he was held in that prison as like Stalog three. It was the great escape where they tried to dig out. He got transferred. He wasn't part of that. But anyway, his memoir, what you're saying that reminds me of it is in his memoir, he talks about the end of the war. And his position where he is gets taken over by the Russians. And so the Russians, you know, capture him, liberate him.

And they're going to be the ones that repatriate him back to the United States. And he saw how they treated the Poles and other Slavic people in Eastern Europe. up. It was just disgusted by it. I think he actually got released through Odessa. I think from Odessa, he sailed on a ship to Egypt and then the American military picked them back up. But history repeats itself. It does indeed. Yeah. And it's, I mean, one of the other soldiers, Andrew Hill, the guy previously described as Andrew Harding, the British guy. Apologies, Andrew, if you're listening. when he got back to the UK you know he there's no real support for legionaires who've been through trauma or injury

because the British government like the American government does not sanction them going out there to Ukraine it doesn't it doesn't stop but it doesn't sanction them either doesn't endorse them going and so you don't get you know you can't you can't can't go to the nearest US military hospital or UK military hospital and get medical or, you know, mental health trauma help. And he ended up going to some local men's help group, you know, near his house, a perfectly good, well-run mental health charity that had been recommended to him by a friend. But, you know, he, it was one of those things where you, you know, you turn up and you're the new guy in the group and it's like, you know, please share your experience.

sort of said like, you know, Andrew Hill, British military volunteer in Ukraine. I was taking prisoner of war by the Russians. And I was tortured for five weeks and then held in a POW camp where I nearly star after death. And you can sort of see, he said you could see sort of jaws dropping by a mile in this room.

And, you know, the majority of the other guys in there are people just with everyday complaints about, you know, drink, problems, drug problems, arguments with the wife, depression, you know, very much sort of civilian first world issues. And I think he talked for about an hour and a half in that first session. It was supposed to be everybody had 10 minutes each, but the rest of them were all just like, really, so what happened then? What happened? What happened? And I think it was an interesting evening for his fellow, you know, his fellow, the people also in the session. And it, it

no doubt put their problems at the perspective, but it really wasn't suitable for him, and I don't think he went back. He needed, you know, to be in with other military people. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, I mean, there wouldn't have been any other military people who would have had an experience comparable to that.

There were, you know, I don't know, is anybody in the British military living or dead in, you know, in the last century, who would have had experience of being tortured by the FSB? you might have had a few who'd been had experiences of you know mistreatment in captivity

Andy McNabb or someone like that but yeah maybe Andy McNabb in the Gulf War yeah I mean that would be the only sort of comparable experience and you know that was a long time ago and yeah

the experiences would not have been entirely comparable that anyway you know Andy McNabb with special forces Andrew Andrew Hill was not, although he'd done, you know, he'd done conduct under capture training. He was a training in the infantry guy. I think actually, given what he's been through, seemed to manage to cope quite well, although I make a point. I'm not talking specifically about Andrew's case here, but I never make any judgments about sort of, you know, what kind of mental health state,

any of the people I interviewer are in when I interview them, because they may not, they may not we'll disclose a lot about, you know, what they're feeding inside, even if Austinson, you know, they appear to be pretty stable on the outside. Yeah. And the story about how these POWs got released is like one of the most bizarre stories that anyone's likely to read in quite a while. Yeah. So I think when they were there for about four months and they were all just, several of them had been sentenced to, you know, appeared in court, in Russian-run courts, where they'd been told that they were going to get the death sentence. And if that wasn't going to happen, they thought they'd get at least 25 years in the jail

they were in, which, given the conditions there, would have meant a death sentence by the means. So very few of them, I think, expected to last more than about a year. Alex Drookie, who we spoke about earlier, had a nail hidden in his mattress, some nail that he pulled out of the metal strut for the mattress, which I think he said, you know, if needs be, I will use this to slip my throat. If this lasts beyond the point where I can stand it, you know, maybe in another year. They'd pretty much give it up home. And then there was somebody told, right, you're all moving from this jail.

They weren't told why. and initially I think they thought this was possibly the moment where they were going to be taken and sent to a firing squad. They were then loaded into a lorry in extremely uncomfortable stressed positions all kind of bound up together and driven from about 12 hours to an unknown destination all blindfolded, almost willing death by the time they got there after being 12 hours of being trussed up in stress positions. positions and then found themselves at an airport in I think Rostov-on-Dong which is one of the Russian cities that acts as a forward base for the for Russian operations in Ukraine and so they're all right we're out in the you know we're out of Ukraine something's clearly happening and then they they were then put on a plane with a whole load of Arabs on the

plane Arab men in expensive dress you know sort of expensive suits and I think what is going on here. They're still not told what's going on, really. And I'm thinking maybe, you know, these Syrians, and we've been transferred to President Assad's tender mercies, who was a mate of Putin's at the time. Or it's just the plane going to get up in the sky and, you know, we're going to be told that we're over a prison swap

and then it's just going to get shot down or develop mysterious mechanical failure. And that'll be the end of that. But anyway, they're usually like. landed in Saudi Arabia and at that point they met the US diplomats and were told, like, you've been, there's been a prison swap, you're free to head home. And some of them had had an inkling that this was happening on the plane on the way over. And the main reason for that was that they had, there was this sort of wealthy looking

businessman who wandered up and down the plane at one point. And he had a striking resemblance. to a man called Roman Abramovich. I don't know how well he... Is he well known in the US? No, not well known. Well, he's a Russian oligarch and he's famous in the UK because he owns or used to own Chelsea Football Club,

famous football club in the UK. He's a billionaire and he'd been sanctioned subsequent to the start of the Ukraine. He'd been sanctioned for his alleged links to President Putin. But he's familiar to a lot of these legionaires who are keen footballers. because of the fact that he had owned Chelsea Football Club. And one of them said to this chap,

as he wandered past this man in the well-cut suit, he said, do you don't know what, mate? You look just like that guy, Roman Abramovich, the guy who owns Chelsea. You ever heard of him? And this man turned to him and sort of said, yes, that is because they am, Roman Abramovich. And it turned out that Roman Abramovich had organized this prison swap,

brokered a deal between, well, I suppose essentially Britain, America and the Russians, whereby the foreign volunteers and about 250 other Ukrainian prisoners of war were freed in return for a number of Russian prisoners of war. And Abramovych had done this, I think, apparently to sort of, I think, to, you know, sort of mend his reputation. with the West and presumably hope long term that he would be able to regain ownership of his assets in the UK, including Chelsea Football Club. There's also no coincidence that the plane landed in Saudi Arabia,

who's a president, whose leader, Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince, was also in the diplomatic doghouse at the time over the killing of a Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which he was accused of giving the red light, the green light too. So both of them had a bit of reputational laundering to do, but that led to the freeing of about 12 or 13 legionaires and many Ukrainian soldiers who were otherwise, have probably still been there. And that's how Alex Truckee, for example, came to fly home at the tail end of 2022. and Julie Grilled for another three weeks or several hours by him, some FBI guys, which he didn't really want. But he gave lengthy descriptions of the people who tortured him and hopes to this day, I think, to maybe one day see them across the dock of a war crimes court.

I hope so. Another person mentioned in your book who has been a guest on this show before is Ryan O'Leary. Oh, yes, yes. yeah i mean Ryan i never met i think i did try to interview him once but um just the the the times never oh we we have like a three and a half hour episode with him he had a lot of yeah yeah you'll know well yes um uh you'll know most of ryan's history then but um uh i interviewed one of the soldiers in the book jack knight uh worked for ryan um uh worked under ryan um as part of chosen company and fought a number of battles with them. They were a volunteer unit made up,

mainly of legioners. And the interesting thing about chosen company, apart from the battles that they fought in was that they were essentially an effort to sort of improve the professionalism of the Legion, I think. It had got a bad reputation because of the Walter Mitty characters within the Legion and the sort of fantasists and so on. Other Legionaires, Legion units had a bit of a reputation for me only fighting one week in three and spending a lot of time in bars and brothels and brawling and other stuff.

And then there were a few other Legion Air units that were okay but didn't really do much, didn't really see much action. And Chosen was sort of formed, I think, as a sort of a more serious elite. Legion within the Legion as it were and the the selection criteria was pretty rigorous you had to have had I think prior combat experience or certainly prior military experience and also you know the idea was that you would be you

would be on prolonged deployments no sort of spend in one week in the Donbass and the next week in a bar in Kiev and also that you would be they were going to be frontline combat specialist doing trench charges and so on and that you should expect to be injured or killed, no winging or whining if that happened. So they're a pretty serious unit. And Jack Knight signed up to serve with them. Having had, I think, a slightly frustrating tour to start off with where he'd done his best

again stuck in in the action down south in Hausson in 2022. But then the Russians rather unsportingly, then pulled out the Khearsan, so the big battle for Khearsan, which I think he was hoping to take part in, didn't happen. And he sort of, the character in the book of him, sort of wandering around, liberated Kerson and being about the only person who isn't sort of cheering and waving,

sort of thinking like, you know, it's nice to be here to see everybody free, but I would have liked to have played more of a role in it. And Jack joined the chosen company, I think, partly to sort of hope to get some proper action and he had partly in his sort of military, in his family history his great-great-grandfather had won the Victoria Cross in World War I and he was keen to sort of try and following

his great-great-grandfather's footsteps because he was from a military family and that kind of thing that runs quite thick in the blood if you've got a distinguished ancestor And yeah, during one of the battles in the Dombas where they were trying to take some trenches, things did not go according to plan. There was a large number of soldiers of Chosen Company were injured

early on in the battle. And Jack, who was staying at the back at the time because he was there as a sapper ready to go in and clear mines later on, realised that he wasn't going to be doing much mine clearance of everybody got killed. and didn't come back alive so he volunteered to go into the combat zone and try and stretch a few people out and did so I think at one point having to rescue a bunch of Ukrainian guys who'd strayed into a land mine a minefield and the way he told us just decided to he had no

choice but just to walk randomly into the minefield himself to get them and hope that he wouldn't get blown up himself. Basically ignoring everything he'd spent years training to do during his Royal Ordnance and Sapper Awareness course, you know, which is always about probing the ground carefully in front of you. If you're in a minefield with a prodder thing and taking each sort of step, you know, like an inch at a time, he said there's no time for that. And, you know, there were drones overhead, there's machine gunfire.

I'll just got to go for it and try and get these guys out and hope for the best and that's what he did. And he ended up getting himself a medal and I think he felt that he'd, you know, to some extent, at least followed in his ancestors' footsteps. So again, somebody who was there very much looking for purpose who didn't really feel he terribly happy in civilian life and I think certainly found it in Ukraine doing things like that despite the sort of very high risks that you were running. And then kind of on like the darker side of things, you talk about two international volunteers who were, we think, murdered by their own people. Yeah.

I've got to be a little bit careful about what I say on these ones because I've written about these cases extensively both in the book and the, you know, and in the telegraph, the newspaper I work for. and they're both live cases as in there are you know nobody has been arrested in either case yet there is a particular suspect in one case one case involves a guy called Daniel Burke a military volunteer that I interviewed for the book several times and who I spent time with out in Ukraine he had fought like many of them have for the with the Kurdish anti-IS forces in in Syria And so when he came to Ukraine, he brought a certain amount of experience as somebody who was used to fighting in other people's wars. He knew it would be disorganized.

He knew you would probably have to get quite a lot of things done for yourself. You couldn't expect a bureaucracy to do it for you. And he was a sort of mascot in some ways for the volunteers early on. He ran a unit called the Dark Angels that did some early operations who posted details of themselves shooting up a Russian tank on social media that got huge numbers of followings. And, you know, it's kind of very much summarised the kind of thing that a lot of volunteers wanted to be doing, I think, you know.

But anyway, in late 2020, September, 23 or so, he'd actually diversified into running a humanitarian mission instead a sort of frontline rescue and support mission and he went missing for several weeks nobody knew what had happened to him it was third four at first maybe just been on a you know sort of bit of a booze bend or something for a few days and if you know the legionaire as well you'll know that it's not unusual for someone you know if they've been on a booze bend they don't expect to hear them don't expect them to declare the missing for at least about a week now but um anyway um he um he he had indeed disappeared. A police investigation was launched

and eventually his body was recovered from under a sewer or a culvert near a firing range in the countryside outside of Zaporista in eastern Ukraine. And I think initially people thought well maybe of Russians done this or something like that but it later became clear that a fellow volunteer had carried out, well it appeared

to have carried this killing out. This volunteer later claimed that he'd shot Daniel by mistake, having sort of pretended to, what was it, he said, I think the term is fragging where you point a weapon at somebody when you shouldn't do. And, you know, it's violating basic military procedure. Apparently Daniel had said to him, you're fragging me while they're out of this range. I'm just having a practice shoot or something.

Oh, flagging. Yeah, flagging. Flagging or fragging? Flagging. So flagging is when you're going over with your muzzle over friendly guys that you don't want to shoot. Fragging is when you actually kill one of your own guys intentionally. Pardon me. No, no, it's okay.

Flagging, yeah. Basically, when you're pointing your weapon at somebody, sorry, for anyone listening, I'm not an ex-soldier. Yeah, no worries. When you point a weapon at somebody, you know, who's a friendly force, you know, something that, you know, every boy were ever given a gun or an air gun from, you know, from the age of firebought, which is the first rule of weapons craft you ever told. Never point a gun at anyone, whether it's loaded or not. apparently this suspect in his shooting had he later told police that he had pointed the gun his gun at Daniel Daniels.

Don't do that mate, that's stupid he remonstrated for him at which point the suspect then apparently said don't worry the gun is not loaded and then fired you know pulled the trigger on the gun at Daniel and sure enough the gun was loaded he emptied a burst into him and killed him then panicked and hid him in his body in this sewer this was the account that he allegedly later gave to police who arrested him it's not verified so I should put that health warning on it but as you can imagine it raises more questions than it answers why would someone

was an experienced soldier ever point a gun at anybody in the first place let alone then pull the trigger on somebody because if you imagine that happening in real life, even if that gun was not loaded, the next thing that Daniel would likely have done, having already been annoyed, would probably give him a, you know, punch him in the face and say, don't you ever

fucking do that again? I would have done, I think. So the explanation doesn't seem to sort of bear much truth. Unfortunately, for reasons that have never been made clear, the Ukrainian police then let this

individual go. He was released on bail to a hotel and then he then made himself scarce, perhaps not surprisingly. And he's on the lamb. Sorry? He's on the lamb still. Yeah, and his whereabouts there's dare unknown, but he is wanted by the Ukrainian police in connection with Daniel's death. I cover that one in the book quite a bit, partly because I knew Daniel and partly I wanted to sort of try and give a detailed account of what happened. because there was a lot of great deal of claim and counterclaim in it and uh partly because it sort of when he disappeared it was very very soon the finger of suspicion pointed at fellow legionaires even though nobody knew what had happened at that point was just this sort of sense

that there are a lot of dodgy legionaires out there and it seems likely that daniels has unfortunately had some sort of running with one of them and you know just pointed to the sort of the sense that there were a lot of unsavory characters out there and that the legion's vetting was not very good. It did not point a very good picture of the Legion at that point. And that was similar in the other case that I write about in the book where a Legionaire called Jordan Chaddick, a British guy who was an ex-member of the Royal Scots Guards, who was found in a reservoir in eastern Ukraine, somewhere. from the front lines in the summer of 2023 he was lying in the dead in the reservoir with his hands tied behind his back as I say the reservoir was some way from the front lines so it was on he he

did not appear to have been you know killed by Russian soldiers there are no known Russian separatist groups operating in that area or indeed anywhere else in you know ukrainian territory so it couldn't didn't seem like it was them either and again suspicion quickly focused on his fellow legionnaires um uh and apparently he had an argument the night before with a bunch of his fellow legioners while drinking and um uh some sort of fight had broken out um and um the next thing that anybody knew was that he you know his body had shown up in this in this lake there's a there's a limit to what i can say on that one again because it's uh um It's quite a complicated story.

There's a lot of, he said, they said, I probably couldn't do justice to it on a podcast, even if I, even if I tried to be honest. But the stories given about how he ended up in that reservoir just don't make sense. No, yeah. You know, at one point it was said that he was being taken to a local police station where, you know, he was going to be held because he was drunk. But instead he ended up in this, in this reservoir.

instead and you have to ask yourself if somebody's supposed to be getting taken to a police station because they're drunk and they're you know they're they've needed to be restrained by handcuffs for their own safety because they've been involved in the punch up uh how does that end up with them then dead in a reservoir you know somebody somewhere who would have been you know in charge of him as a you know in custody uh has some questions to answer clearly because even if somebody has been violent, even if somebody has been restrained as a prisoner, you know, at that point most soldiers would know, especially if they've ever taken prisoners of war or anything, that there are certain procedures you follow to, you know, if only to prevent a prison

harming themselves or anything else. And clearly that wasn't, that didn't happen. And the tragedy of that case, or one of the tragedies is that, apart from Jordan's death, is that, you know, nobody has been brought to book for it and there's very little sign of any proper judicial process happening and very little sign of the British government really doing anything to try and question the other British soldiers who were with him at the time. I've spoken several of them. I've asked them, you know, have you had anybody from the foreign office or the British police asking to speak to you about this? None of them have, you know. And that would not be, that would not be difficult if I can find out who they are. you know the ukrainian police know who they are they interviewed them all afterwards um you just think what why is a why is a procedure not under not under way so that um jordan's mother um among other people

uh can get some proper answers about what happened even if it turns out it was some sort of misadventure but that that that is life in the legion you know you're often not fighting with um with with people who you're often fighting with kind of rough diamonds of different sorts of and some who are not diamonds at all. But, you know, it says one also draws them to it. And as one of them, I was speaking to him, who fought in that same unit with Jordan, you know, in often very tough combat.

That's why they were all pissed as, you know, as drunk, very drunk, sorry, using English to learn words. That was why they were all very drunk when this fight broke out. they were drinking off for stress and a very, very tough few months of deployment to back mutt. And yeah, I said to this guy, what, you know,

what was it like fighting out there? This other guy was in the unit and he said, yeah, it was, you know, really, really hard going, really tough, you know. And I said, you know, did you find it difficult? He said, yeah, but I fucking loved it. And I think that sums up, you know, the Legion experience

in its classic sense for a lot of them, really. And I mean, taking it from there, I want to kind of ask you about any concluding thoughts you have about, you know, your work studying and interviewing the foreigners that served in Ukraine and sort of their impact in the war. I think at the end of the book, you have an interesting segment where you talk about how, you know, every single person on the battlefield makes a difference in their own small way. but the foreigners and big picture were probably not strategically relevant to the overall scheme of the war not enough of them yeah that's right yeah yeah sure so um as i said i don't think the numbers ever reached money much more than sort of 20 or 30 000 maybe a few more um over the over the years but that sort of rough ballpark figure which is about the same actually as fought in the spanish civil war

and coincidentally is about the same numbers that volunteer to fight for ISIS, as in fighting as jihadists in Iraq and Syria from around the world, which puts it into some sort of weird perspective. So with those sort of numbers, in a war with maybe about half a million competence on either side or possibly more, 35,000 or so, even if it was that many, is not going to make that much of a difference. Where I think the Legion did make a difference there was just in morale, Ukrainians, ordinary Ukrainians in the street would see these guys wandering around in, you know,

in Ukrainian uniforms, but with these little sort of shoulder badges denoting the fact that they were from the UK or the US or wherever. And it was a huge, you know, it was a sign to a lot of Ukrainians that, you know, the world is with you here. We believe in your cause. And yes, your foreign governments, Western governments might not be sending troops. They may not be putting boots on the ground, their own private citizens are and they're here not just to hand out aid and deliver, you know, first aid packages and medical stuff, they're actually here to fight and die alongside you. That's a big morale booster, I think, as well as the, you know, the individual tactical contributions that they made, whether it was experienced US Marines, for example, teaching Ukrainian

certain tactical stuff or whether it was individual groups of volunteers showing metal and initiative on the battlefield, which might often just be like, you know, taking a Russian machine gun position there or making a good judgment call somewhere else saying, now maybe that's going to be too tough, stay away from that, that's going to be too difficult. You know, just sound tactical advice. I think a lot of that percolated through to the Ukrainians over time. But yeah, one of the, I think that because you had a lot of bad apples and because they didn't have any huge strategic victories where an individual battalion of legionnaires kind of took a town

or village there weren't many good headlines that the legion generated really unfortunately a lot of the headlines were about legioners killed legioners captured legioners murdered by the legionnaires etc and that perhaps did not encourage a you know many others to sort of join up or certainly that not as many as might have done and also the logistics around the Legion were pretty poor in terms of people coming in you know and not sort of you know the recruitment system was poor the the the the system to actually get them channeled out to the front was lousy and so on and I do make the point in the book that if they'd had a better recruitment system and sort of the mastering system and everything else, it's been better organized.

You might have had far more legionnaires coming in. This is something I'd be interested in your opinion on, actually. I know you've discussed people like outfits like Dyncoa and Blackwater a lot on the podcasts in the past. My sort of theory or one of the theories I advanced in the book is that if the West had been able to provide some sort of logistical support, support for the Legion along the lines of a dying corps or a black quarter training that could have trained the Legionaires in the same ways they trained up the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police or the Afghan army and that could have been done you know in Ukraine it

needs be I think or if need be elsewhere and it could have been done on a private basis that might have made a lot of difference because I mean uh Putin would not have those bruising experiences you know Putin got to have his little green man, why can't we have ours? Exactly, yeah. I mean, do you think, I mean, there is a political difficulty with it in the British and American governments,

for example, might feel that it was a step too far, that it was one step off training troops. But, I mean, you know, they were sending in heavy weaponry, they were sending in, you know, they were training Ukrainians in their own countries. We have Ukrainian training facilities here in the UK. They were doing everything short of that.

And in some ways, things quite beyond that with the heavy missiles and everything. Do you think that somewhere like Dyncore or Blackwater would have taken on something like that? Or do you think it would have been hard to get, you know, PMCs to take on such a thing? I think, yeah, you could probably, the thing with private military companies in the United States is that they don't really engage in offensive combat operations. we don't really have that so much. We have intelligence contractors, we have logistical contractors, security contractors that do mobile and static security for diplomats and so on. But we don't have like executive outcomes, you know, the South Africans that fought in Angola and Sierra Leone, and they really took the fight to the enemy and didn't take any shit at all. We don't really have

an equivalent of that. And I guess the question is should we have something? like that. And maybe we... Yeah. I don't even think you need the equivalent of that, though, because what this would be for would be for the training and recruiting and equipment. It would be a Ukrainian unit with military set out to the Ukrainian military units. Right. Right. Right. So you wouldn't necessarily need the organizers at the, you know, at the Sharp. A bit like what you, it would have pretty much the same models you'd have in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right. Right. Just doing a large scale sort of public sector. that the large-scale security sector training.

I think that in the United States, at least, and to a lesser extent, Western Europe, I think we were and we are a victim of, you know, 70, 75 years of analysis of the Soviet Union and Russia that turned out to be wrong in a lot of ways. And we had all these theories about escalation ladders and we're going to do this and then they'll do that. I mean, I think in retrospect,

we probably should have just thrown up a no-fly zone over Ukraine the day of the invasion. And they're like, no, like, no, this is unacceptable. And call Putin, call him out. I mean, as we know, the Russians only respond when you punch them in the nose and tell them, no. Like, that's not acceptable. Well, that certainly, there was a lot of Ukrainians asking about that at the beginning of the war. Yeah. I mean, I would have said that, even that was, that would have been riskier than what I'm sort of,

well, I sort of explore in the last chapter of the book. And also, I mean, it would have been valuable for the, you know, the Britain's, for the, for the Western forces because you'd have had loads of people going out there and gaining firsthand experience of what it was actually like to fight against the Russians, which would be, you know, which would be extremely useful. And I think it would have probably attracted, you know, potentially far more soldiers, you know, into the Ukrainian military fold. Because there'd be a lot of people who probably like US,

including serving US military soldiers, they might have had to, you know, take a sabbatical of some sort who would say that, you know, a three months fighting in Ukraine on the front lines is worth several years of training back home. I mean, it strikes me as a little bit of a failure of imagination. I can think of all sorts of good reasons why it wouldn't happen. But that's always the case when you get a war.

There's always people who are going to say, we can't do this for reasons A, B, and C. And often it's when people kind of find a reason around that, that you get a breakthrough. I'm interested to see, you know, I've not sort of found anybody who's really sort of been able to sort of argue the ins and outs of this. Well, I'd be interested to see if any of your listeners

have a reason to say, no, sorry, Paul, that wouldn't work, you know, which there may well be, but it seems a bit like a missed opportunity to me, I must say. And I do remember there's a guy in the book who I quote, who sort of says, you know, he was a former US Army soldier, I think. He was unfortunately was actually killed out in Ukraine. And he says, you know, it surprises me. They're not fat tons of guys from West Point out here just learning the ropes.

You know, he was amazed that the Legion was as small as it was. I think it was a telling point. So the book for people who want to read it, I highly recommend it, is The Mad and the Brave. It's a story of Ukraine's Foreign Legion. Available now, you can find it in bookshops or on Amazon, wherever you want to go. Colin, what's the next book? What are you working on now? Oh, no idea.

I think I've done three before. I've done one about my time in Iraq, one about being kidnapped in Somalia, or not about some other people being kidnapped and some other. I have no idea. Books do not grow on trees where I'm from, sadly. I often think I would like to do another one on the Ukrainian Legion because every time I meet a legionaire, even if it's just for a five-minute conversation,

they always tell me something that happened to them on the battlefield that makes you think, Jesus Christ, I could have got a chapter in the book out of that. I wish I'd met you before. you know, that's on the basis of a five-minute conversation. Yeah, I think you should. Millions, million and once stories still to be written about the Legion. My one basically was kind of written to deadline to make sure it came out early.

So, you know, I would not necessarily claim the stories I've done are necessarily the most thrilling stories that the Legionaires have out there. But maybe the history books will give them. Maybe I'll do another, we'll see. That'd be great. And where can people find you online? Do you have a website or social media or anything? The easiest way to reach me is on my Twitter feed, which I'm also on Blue Sky B or whatever it's called, the other one.

It's Colin Freeman 9-9 at, sorry, at Colin Freeman-99 is my Twitter feed. And also, to be honest, if you Google me, you'll see me see the book and my telegraph homepage. so I'm fairly easy to find you and I can also be found at Colin.fremont at telegraph.com. UK which is my generic telegraph email. I do check my email and my Twitter feed pretty regularly and my

and my what you call it spam so yeah if anybody ever wants to get in touch feel free to yeah and thank you to anyone out there who's listening and I hope I haven't made too many sort of faux pars or bloopers in terms of my military knowledge. No, no, it was great. We'll have links down the description for all of that stuff

where you can go and find Colin in his book. Thank you for joining us tonight, Colin. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. I enjoyed it, yeah. And everyone else out there, we'll see you guys next time. Thank you. Good night. Hey, guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House podcast newsletter.

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