Womp, Womp indeed.
Not what they signed up for I guess.Two months after answering President Volodymyr Zelensky's call, sniper Wali is back in Quebec - unharmed, though he almost died "several times. But most foreign fighters who went to Ukraine like him came back bitterly disappointed, mired in the fog of war without having even been to the front once.
"I'm lucky to be alive, it was really close," said the former Royal 22e Régiment soldier, in an interview with La Presse at his home in the greater Montreal area.
His last mission in the Donbass region, as part of a Ukrainian unit supporting conscript soldiers, hastened his return in a way. In the early morning hours, when he had just taken up position near a trench exposed to Russian tank fire, two of the conscripts came out of their cover to smoke a cigarette. "I told them not to expose themselves like that, but they didn't listen to me," says Wali. Then a "very accurate" shell from a Russian tank exploded next to them. The scene described by the sniper is bloodcurdling. "It exploded solid. I saw the shrapnel go by like lasers. My body tensed up. I couldn't hear anything, my head hurt right away. It was really violent.
He immediately realized there was nothing he could do for his two Ukrainian brothers-in-arms who had been hit hard. "It smelled like death, it's hard to describe; it's a macabre smell of charred flesh, sulfur and chemicals. It's so inhuman, that smell."
His spouse, who wishes to remain anonymous, says he called her in the middle of the night about an hour later. "He was trying to explain to me that there had been two deaths. He was telling me, 'I think I've done enough, right? I've done enough?" It was like he wanted me to tell him to come back," she confides. He was awfully quiet."
Ultimately, it was her family life that outweighed her desire to help the Ukrainians, Wali says. "My heart wants to go back to the front. I still have the fire. I love the theater of operations. But I pushed my luck. I have no injuries. I say to myself: how far can I roll the dice? I don't want to lose what I have here," says the young father, who missed his son's first birthday while at the front.
After spending two months in Ukraine, Wali's assessment of the deployment of Western volunteer fighters, which began in early March following a call from President Volodymyr Zelensky, is "rather disappointing. The number of volunteers who came forward - more than 20,000, according to various estimates - was so large that the Ukrainian government had to urgently create the International Legion for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine on March 6.
But for most of the volunteers who showed up at the border, joining a military unit was a hassle.
Zelensky made an appeal to all, but on the ground, the officers were completely helpless. They didn't know what to do with us.
He and several other ex-Canadian soldiers initially preferred to join the Normandy Brigade, a private volunteer unit based for several months in Ukraine, led by a former Quebec soldier whose nom de guerre is Hrulf.
Dissension quickly set in among the troops and a large number of fighters deserted the Normandy Brigade.
Three people who requested anonymity described to La Presse promises of weapons and protective equipment made by the leader of the Normandy Brigade that never materialized. Some of the volunteers found themselves some 40 kilometers from the Russian front without any protective gear. "If there had been a Russian breakthrough, everyone would have been at risk. It was an irresponsible attitude on the part of the Brigade," says one of its former soldiers, who asked that his name be withheld for security reasons.
The commander of the Normandy Brigade, who also asked us to withhold his real name for security reasons, confirms that he has been abandoned by about 60 fighters since the beginning of the conflict. Many of them wanted to sign a contract that would have given them status under the Geneva Conventions, as well as guarantees that they would be cared for by the Ukrainian state if they were injured. Hrulf claims that some even "conned" him out of a $500,000 shipment of weapons provided by Americans to create their own combat unit.
"There were guys who were in a hurry to go to the front without even being screened. The Ukrainians tested us, and only now are we starting to get more missions. There is an element of trust that needs to be built up, and that is quite normal," says Hrulf. A "terrible disappointment"
"Many volunteer soldiers expect it to be turnkey, but the war is the opposite, it's a terrible disappointment," says Wali.
With another Quebec infantryman nicknamed Shadow, the Quebec sniper finally joined a Ukrainian unit fighting in the Kyiv region.
But again, finding a firearm to fight with was a Kafkaesque exercise. "You had to know someone who knew someone who told you that in such and such an old barber shop, they would provide you with an AK-47. You had to cobble together a soldier's kit like that by picking up bits and pieces of ammunition left and right, in many cases with weapons in varying degrees of condition," he recounts.
Even for meals, civilians often provide them. It's the same for gasoline to get around in a vehicle. You constantly have to organize yourself, to know someone who knows someone.
After a few weeks on Ukrainian territory, some of the more experienced Western soldiers were eventually recruited by the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate, and are now reportedly involved in special operations behind enemy lines, according to one of them.
Others, less experienced, are "jumping from one Airbnb to another" while waiting to be recruited by a unit that will take them to the front lines, Wali says.
The majority, however, have decided to return home, say several people interviewed for this article. "Many arrive in Ukraine with their chests puffed out, but leave with their tails between their legs," Wali said.
In the end, he himself says he only fired two bullets into windows "to scare people" and never really came within range of the enemy. "It's a machine war," where "extremely brave" Ukrainian soldiers take very heavy casualties from shells, but "miss a lot of opportunities" to weaken the enemy because they lack technical military knowledge, he summarizes. "If the Ukrainians had the procedures we had in Afghanistan for communicating with artillery, we could have made a killing," he believes.
