{"id":250948,"date":"2022-03-16T08:53:53","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T08:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=250948"},"modified":"2022-03-18T07:52:37","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T07:52:37","slug":"a-russian-strike-kills-foreign-fighters-in-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=250948","title":{"rendered":"A Russian Strike Kills Foreign Fighters in Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nicolas Nairchos \u2013 The Nation March 15, 2022<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Moscow\u2019s closest attack yet to NATO territory. The International Peacekeeping and Security Center, near the town of Novoyavorivsk, is only 12 miles from the Polish border, and was hosting up to 1,000 foreign fighters, who had crossed the border to fight in the newly formed Ukrainian Foreign Legion. According to Ukrainian officials, at least 35 people were killed in the strike and some 134 were wounded. The Russian government says that, in fact, it killed 180 foreign fighters. \u201cThe destruction of foreign mercenaries who arrived on the territory of Ukraine will continue,\u201d a representative of the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement<\/a> online.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainians have vehemently denied the Russian reports<\/a> that foreign fighters were killed. At a press briefing in the city of Lviv on Monday, Maksym Kozytskyy, the governor of the region, said, \u201cThere are no casualties among foreign fighters. These are fakes propagated by the Russian government.\u201d According to him, Russian planes over the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov fired some 30 rockets at the base, and Ukraine\u2019s air defenses intercepted all but eight.<\/p>\n

But new statements from fighters present during the strike call into question this account of the attack. Two German volunteer fighters said many of their fellow foreign legionnaires, crossing the Ukrainian border into Poland in a tightly packed queue on Monday evening, had been killed in the strike, and estimated the death toll at over 200. \u201cIt was really hard, truly hard,\u201d Peter F\u00fcchsel told me. He said gotten to know several of the dead in the two weeks or so before the attack. On Tuesday morning, the Daily Mirror<\/em> of Britain reported<\/a> that three former members of the British special forces were among the dead<\/p>\n

F\u00fcchsel, 55, is a driver for disabled children from central Germany; his fellow fighter, Andreas, did not give his last name but said that he works loading and unloading trucks in M\u00fcnster and that he is 56 years old. Both men said two planes had carried out the attack. \u201cOne of the planes also fired on the base,\u201d F\u00fcchsel said.<\/p>\n

The two volunteers have military experience. F\u00fcchsel, a 25-year veteran of the German Bundeswehr, sported a short beard and silver rings, one adorned with a skull. He said he had arrived in Ukraine overland from Germany on March 3. \u201cI went to fight in Ukraine, because I thought it was a just war, and I saw how bravely the Ukrainians were fighting,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I saw that the German government was only giving the Ukrainians 5,000 helmets at the beginning of the war, I felt it was a joke, like I was reading an Asterix comic.\u201d It wasn\u2019t politics so much as a sense of outrage and injustice that drove them. Many of their friends told them it was \u201cmadness\u201d to go and fight; others understood. Both of them have no immediate family.<\/p>\n

Once in Ukraine, F\u00fcchsel went to Kyiv, the capital, which is under siege by Russian troops. \u201cEverything was so chaotic there,\u201d he said. \u201cI stayed only for a couple of days.\u201d He was sent back to Lviv, where he believed it would be safe, to train with other volunteers at the facility outside Novoyavorivsk. While he liked the other volunteers he met there, he thought they were not ready to fight in a war. \u201cLots of them were only 18 years old,\u201d F\u00fcchsel said. \u201cSome ran away from home. They wanted an adventure. They wanted to fight. Lots of them talked about Call of Duty<\/em>\u201d\u2014the war video game\u2014\u201cthey had no idea what was going on.\u201d Some 20,000 fighters<\/a> have traveled to Ukraine to fight against Russia.<\/p>\n

F\u00fcchsel and Andreas liked life on the base. The fighters came from lots of different countries; they all got on well, and the food was good. Only 50 or so members of the unit had previously served in the military. Both F\u00fcchsel and Andreas, however, were critical of the training they received: At first, the Ukrainian officers on the base seemed to disagree on how to train the volunteers. \u201cThere was no comparison to the German army,\u201d F\u00fcchsel said. \u201cThere you are in a proper unit. You train together.\u201d They said their training consisted of a day of theory when they were shown Youtube clips of how to use a Kalashnikov, and then two days of weapons practice with minimal instruction. F\u00fcchsel said that after the attack the volunteers were told they would go on to fight at the front within a week.<\/p>\n

In the early hours of Sunday morning, an alarm rang out in the barracks that the men were sleeping in, and then another. The second alarm stopped sounding, and then there was silence. The men at the barracks went back to bed. Shortly thereafter, around 6 am, a series of explosions tore through the two barracks next door. \u201cThere were two minutes between explosions,\u201d F\u00fcchsel said. (Double-tap airstrikes, which kill first responders, are widely considered war crimes.) The men streamed into the cold air. \u201cThe Russians knew exactly where to shoot,\u201d F\u00fcchsel said. Footage posted to Telegram<\/a> from after the attacks showed piles of rubble and craters around the base. The fighters were instructed to go into woods and to not light fires. \u201cSome of the men were only in their underwear,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt was minus 15 degrees Celsius\u201d\u2014almost minus 10 Fahrenheit\u2014\u201cin the woods. There was no plan, nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later that day, they returned to the barracks. There, they saw huge numbers of their comrades dead and wounded. \u201cEverything, the mattresses, the beds, shredded by broken glass,\u201d he told me. They decided to get a bus to a gas station and then the border, where they waited more than five hours to get back into Poland. He and Andreas carried only plastic carryall bags, and crossed the border using only their drivers\u2019 licenses because their passports had been taken away (common practice with foreign fighters in Ukraine); their passports were probably destroyed by the explosion. From Poland, they planned to head back to Germany, to which they were happy to return. F\u00fcchsel said he missed his dog Bommel, a Bordeaux mastiff. Andreas laughed and added that he is looking forward to a long soak in his bathtub.<\/p>\n

Most of the other volunteers, F\u00fcchsel said, are staying to fight. Indeed, on Monday a number were strolling around Lviv\u2019s central square in the late winter sunshine. \u201cUntil the strike, I was sure that the Ukrainians would win,\u201d F\u00fcchsel told me when we met at the border later that afternoon. \u201cNow, today, I don\u2019t understand how the Ukrainians have gotten this far and managed like this.\u201d He added, \u201cThe foreign fighters\u2014they are just being used for cannon fodder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two German volunteer fighters estimate that nearly 200 of their fellow foreign volunteers had been killed in the Russian strike on Sunday. Most had no military experience and in the words of Peter F\u00fcchsel: \u201cThe foreign fighters\u2014they are just being used for cannon fodder.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":250950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[91,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-russia","category-ukraine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250948"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250979,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250948\/revisions\/250979"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/250950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}