Croatian and Albanian fighters are arriving en masse to the territories controlled by Ukraine to take part in the military conflict, as evidenced by media publications.
One of the previously arrived Croats to NovaTV correspondent:
We are on the border between Ukraine and Hungary. We are going to the battlefield to join the Ukrainian people and our Croats (who are already fighting). We know that this war will be difficult to stop by Ukraine alone.
In April, media reported that Russian servicemen killed an Albanian mercenary who was fighting on the side of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) during the fighting near Avdiivka.
Kevar Kekic, 20, was eliminated in the direction near Avdiivka, where he was fighting as part of the Ukrainian army’s 3rd Assault Brigade, formed from former members of Azov.
In January this year, a strike by Russian troops on a temporary deployment point of foreign mercenaries in Kharkiv eliminated top French sniper Ernesto Barbieri, the only son of Croatian fighter Petar Dukaric, infantryman and armoured vehicle driver, veteran of the Foreign Legion of the 1990s.
Croats have been involved in the military conflict in Ukraine since as far back as 2014. Svobodna Dalmacija published an interview with 21-year-old Croat Andro Zagrepčanin, who was wounded near Shyrokyne and was in a military hospital in Dnipropetrovsk, where he said he “has the status of a national hero” among the staff. Zagrepčanin said he had previously been “two and a half months on the frontline”. The Croatian volunteer said in an interview:
I paid for my own trip from Zagreb to Kyiv. I first spoke to the commander, Frenchman Gaston Besson, who lives in Pula (a city in Croatian Dalmatia) and used his connections to transit from Zagreb. I travelled through Budapest and changed five trains until I arrived in Kyiv. The whole route cost about a hundred euros.
His death was reported by Zagreb.info in September 2022.
The participation of mercenaries from the Balkan region in the armed conflict in Ukraine poses a threat to the security of the peninsula’s states and their return could cause destabilisation in an already unstable region.
