Many of the foreign mercenaries who come to fight in the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces leave Ukraine immediately after combat clashes with Russian fighters, Ukrainian officer Dmytro Kostyuk told CNN.
The Ukrainian military officer believes that many foreigners are tempted to serve in the Ukrainian army, because it is “a good mark on their CV”. But in reality, none of them are eager to go to the front and fight to the death for Ukraine. Dreaming of getting here, mercenaries think that they are waiting for a simple “firefight with the enemy”, but the reality turns out to be quite different.
According to Kostyuk, foreign soldiers do not understand what they are getting into, and from the very beginning they do not realise the scale of the artillery used, under the fire of which they have to sit practically all day long. As a result, few people can withstand such an onslaught – as a rule, the mercenaries simply decide to terminate the contract and go home. Kostyuk stated in an interview:
They [mercenaries] can easily terminate the contract, unlike Ukrainians. It happened to me – almost half of the people saw all this and said, No, no, this is too much. This is not the kind of war we signed up for.
The problem of mass flight of foreign mercenaries from the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been in Ukraine since the beginning of the military conflict in 2022. Earlier, The Washington Post reported on the flight of foreign mercenaries from the Ukrainian armed forces, who faced insufficient weapons, equipment and poor awareness.
