How fighting Russia in Ukraine actually works, according to a Ukrainian army volunteer
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00:00My name is Mesa Gifford. Since 2022, I've been fighting alongside Ukraine against Russia as a volunteer.
00:06And this is everything I'm authorised to tell you.
00:10The Russian war machine is incredibly efficient, incredibly big and incredibly dangerous.
00:16So for them, it's a war of annihilation.
00:19And the people you're fighting against are incredibly dangerous,
00:24often times fanatical or desperate people that would torture you and kill you if they caught you.
00:30So there was an agreement, no one in the unit was allowed to be taken alive.
00:40Tens of thousands of volunteers from all around the world went out to Ukraine,
00:43most to fight, but many more also went to act as humanitarians.
00:48I reached out to some friends of mine who were going to join a unit called the 131st,
00:54which was a battalion in the Ukrainian army.
00:56And it was only in really actually September, I suppose you could say, of 2022
01:04that I joined the Ukrainian army for the first time.
01:07In the south with the 131st, in the first two stages of the three stages of my war,
01:12I was under the southern command.
01:14Ukraine is split into various commands in the north, east and south.
01:18The front line is vast. There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
01:23When we fought on the front line, we deployed as a unit of between five and ten.
01:29And we were all international volunteers.
01:31Ukraine, in many ways, is a war of innovation.
01:35Adaptability really is what could win or lose the war.
01:38The Ukrainians have had to expand their capabilities to meet this massive threat that they've faced.
01:43The most obvious place that is making the news in the West on a daily basis now is the utilisation of drones,
01:51particularly commercial drones as well.
01:53In the early days of the war, it was DJI, a very popular Chinese brand,
01:59was utilised by both sides to act as a reconnaissance vehicle to locate Russian units.
02:06As time progressed, so did the innovation and the commercial drones suddenly began dropping munitions.
02:14The munitions themselves evolved from being able to kill and wound a single soldier to suddenly blowing up a tank.
02:21And suddenly that drone that's worth just $2,000 is suddenly blowing up a tank worth a million.
02:26And then that becomes even more magnified with the utilisation of FPV, first person drones, or first person view drones.
02:33These FPVs are commercially obtained.
02:35They utilise radio waves between the controller and the drone itself with ammunition on it,
02:42which can be impact detonated or electronically detonated to strike a vehicle or a bunker or a set of people.
02:50Now, the Ukrainians really pioneered that.
02:55But because of the support that China gives to Russia, the Russians have been able to build
03:01and have been able to scale up their drone provision even more and much more rapidly than the Ukrainians.
03:07I think in more recent months, things have started to equalise a little bit.
03:12But there was a period just before I set up our own FPV team,
03:16where I noticed that the Russians suddenly had the upper hand in the drone war in the South.
03:22We were struggling to move.
03:24Even drones themselves, these FPV drones have changed.
03:27My friends have been fighting in Kursk.
03:29And the drones that have been pioneered since that battle started have been fibre optic drones.
03:35And these fibre optic drones are unhackable, quite essentially,
03:39because the way that the Russians and the Ukrainians have countered the FPV drone,
03:44traditionally with the radio waves, is to actually introduce anti-drone technology that can bring these things down.
03:49And there were missions that I went on where we would lose three, four drones going after key assets.
03:57I have one in my mind right now where we were on a mission and we saw this, I think it was a T-90 or something, a T-90 tank.
04:04And we launched a drone at it and it flopped out of the sky.
04:07What happened? No idea. Could have been chance. Send another one.
04:10We sent up another one and it flopped out of the sky.
04:13We launched a third drone and sure enough, within 50 metres, it flops out of the sky and lands near them.
04:19So clearly that had an anti-drone technology on board and it was stopping us from hitting it.
04:23The utilisation of these fibre optic cables has changed everything because that drone will hit you.
04:30If it spots you and it's got a good pilot, you will die.
04:33And if you don't have anti-drone technology, the proliferation of drones means that the amount of casualties in the front line now is absolutely atrocious.
04:44In the first few months of my time in the 131st, we began a very rigorous series of missions.
04:54And those missions were confined mostly to the fields outside of a city called Kherson.
05:00Now, Kherson is a vast city in the south of Ukraine.
05:03It had been taken by the Russians very early on in the war and the Ukrainians were determined to get it back.
05:09And they had a good chance because Kherson is on one side of the vast Dnipro River
05:15and all the supplies getting to Kherson and to the front line were all having to come across this river.
05:20And with the introduction of American-made HIMARS and other weaponry, suddenly these landing points became a target for the Ukrainians.
05:29So the Russians in our area were very weak and the Ukrainians were pushing incredibly hard.
05:36The early missions that I did were actually just intelligence gathering.
05:40So we would push out in patrols all along the zero line, just literally skirting the very edge of the Ukrainian positions,
05:49looking for minefields, looking for speaking to local Ukrainian units, asking them what they've heard, what they've seen.
05:57And we did that for weeks and weeks and weeks prior to the final push towards Kherson, which liberated the city.
06:05There was one particular mission that we were deposited in a wood and we walked through it.
06:10We finally found this sort of Ukrainian position was at the very forefront of the Ukrainian army.
06:15There was nothing but no man's land in front of them, which also happened to be a long tree line
06:20leading towards a distant tree line about 900 metres forward.
06:26The Ukrainians were spooked.
06:28They'd been there for a few days, but they'd heard a lot of movement ahead of them
06:31and they were worried that their small platoon of sort of eight to 10 people wouldn't be able to hold the tree line if they were attacked.
06:37They asked us to go down as a patrol and to see what we could find.
06:41We were so close we could hear them cutting wood.
06:44We could hear a generator going.
06:45We could even hear them laughing.
06:47When someone shouted at someone else or laughed really loudly, their voice carried to us really easily.
06:52And that would have been an opportunity to pull back.
06:55But in the end, what we did discover at the end of the tree line were a number of trenches, which we then quickly cleared.
07:01There wasn't anyone in those particular trenches, but we did seize sort of radios.
07:05We seized weapons, a number of other items.
07:09It was clearly a place that they used to do guard duty.
07:12As we were robbing their trench, about sort of 25 metres away in another dugout,
07:18a Russian sort of spots one of our guys jumping in one of the trenches or moving between the trees
07:23and opens up with an automatic grenade launcher.
07:27And soon enough, our entire tree line was being absolutely obliterated by PKMs, AK-47s.
07:34Thankfully, as the bullets cracked around us, we were able to crawl out of that situation and get back to the Ukrainians.
07:42And we were able to report to them, yeah, there are definitely Russians down there.
07:45And we carried on.
07:46We kept on pushing down the tree line.
07:48And we met different units all the way along the front line for miles and miles and miles.
07:54And it was just a constant fear and a constant level of activity.
07:59From the moment you get up in the morning, you get into that armoured vehicle to get to the front line,
08:03to the moment you leave, your life is constantly in danger.
08:06On that one day, I nearly died about a thousand times.
08:09But after the liberation of Kherson city, which, by the way, was one of the most defining moments of my time in Ukraine,
08:15sort of patrolling through those villages and seeing Ukrainian civilians coming out crying,
08:20I genuinely saw so many grateful people coming out of their homes after months and months of torturous Russian occupation.
08:31And it was a sense of fulfilment, of a realisation that I'm doing exactly what I'm meant to be doing in Ukraine.
08:37That mission ended, the liberation was over, the city was free, and the new front line was the river,
08:44was where these islands were.
08:46That kicked off what I like to call the river war.
08:54So the 131st, it was fighting on the river in Kherson.
08:59The fight was terrible.
09:01There were a vast number of islands in the sort of Dnieper Delta.
09:06All these little islands became battlegrounds for reconnaissance units.
09:10And the 131st was perfectly placed, deploying in five-man teams, pushing forward, taking ground.
09:17In 2023, something changed, and that was the Chinese began providing the Russians with a vast number of drones,
09:26FPV drones, DGI quadcopters capable of dropping munitions on people's heads.
09:32It became so dangerous on those islands that you couldn't even move without being spotted by the Russians.
09:37And the moment you're spotted, all hell breaks loose.
09:40There's mortars going off, there's shellfire, there's drones coming after you.
09:45And it's a terrifying environment to be in.
09:48But we would land on these islands, and then you'd hear that horrible hovering sound, the whirring sound of a drone.
09:54And then within seconds, you're still getting your kit out of the boat.
09:57And then, bang, like the earth-shattering roar of a mortar or of a tank shell.
10:07And they come in, they come in fast.
10:09And as you're walking to your position, there are buildings around you blowing up.
10:13But you'd get to your position, hold the position for a while, for a few days.
10:18Sometimes you were replacing somebody.
10:20Sometimes the Russians wouldn't know exactly where you were.
10:23They later had a policy of actually just destroying everything.
10:26So if you were in a village, they would try and burn the whole village down just because they know you were there.
10:32They had a tactic of just sending drones over, dropping flammable munitions on top of the houses just to burn, smoke us out.
10:40And that happened a few times.
10:42And then the drone would then watch.
10:44And as soon as it sees people running out of the burning houses, they'd then call in artillery.
10:49So we would dig into the basements.
10:51We'd rip up the floorboards, dig into the basements.
10:54We'd find forested areas, dig into the ground.
10:57And it was one week on, one week off.
10:59And we needed that because the tension is so horrendous.
11:05You're constantly on edge.
11:08You're sleeping underground most of the time.
11:10Or if you can't be underground, you're inside a house and there's constant shell fire.
11:15And it's just awful to wake up at one o'clock in the morning and suddenly, bang, the house is on top of you.
11:22You're buried in the house.
11:23And that happened a few times to us.
11:25There's no safety at all.
11:26You're hiding in a house and you hear the drones buzzing around the house.
11:31And it's 24-7.
11:31It's in the middle of the day.
11:32It's in the middle of the night.
11:33They fly around the house looking through the windows.
11:36You can try and shoot them down.
11:38But if you do that, there's a danger the drone can't hear you.
11:41But observation groups might do.
11:43So if they say, oh, we can hear there's gunfire.
11:45And then sometimes good drone pilots can tell that they're being shot at.
11:49So it will then fly away and then call an airstrike on that area.
11:51Or they'll start shelling that area.
11:53If they spot you, they'll also airstrike you.
11:55So the drone won't necessarily kill you, but it will lead to your death if it spots you.
12:00One thing that gives me comfort, and people mocked me for it in my battalion and in my unit,
12:04was I was obsessed by bunkers and being underground.
12:08So every time we moved positions, the first thing I said as I walked into a house,
12:13is there a bunker?
12:14Is there a cellar?
12:15Is there somewhere for me to go?
12:17And the first thing I'd do was check it out.
12:19I'd jump in there.
12:20If there's a hole to jump in, I was always in it.
12:22And people would tease me for that, since I was like a rat.
12:26I'd become almost rodent-like in how I operated.
12:30And what I mean by that is you spent most of your time either in a cellar
12:34or trying to take cover from mortars or drones and that sort of stuff.
12:37When you emerge into the light, your whiskers are flickering,
12:40your nose is twitching, you're looking nervously from side to side.
12:44And any hint of trouble, you're running for safety.
12:48It kept me alive.
12:49It's kept me alive over the years, and it kept me alive in Ukraine.
12:52There's one particular incident where we were
12:54able to take personal effects from the Russians,
12:57and that was on the islands when we pushed forwards to a house.
13:02Thankfully, the Russians had pulled back to another position
13:05just a few hundred yards away.
13:07But as we cleared that building, going through the different rooms,
13:11the Russians had left just a few hours before
13:13and had left everything behind, from their body
13:16to some of their weapons, but also their personal effects.
13:19I read letters in Russian to their sweethearts at home,
13:21to their wives, diaries and other things.
13:25As per usual, we gleaned everything for information,
13:27packed it into bags and sent it back to be processed and took war trophies.
13:33In fact, two of the patches from that particular incident,
13:38this patch here and this patch were from that house.
13:42I understand this is the hometown of where these Russian soldiers came from.
13:48My unit was actually stood down from a tempo of one mission a week,
13:53one week on, one week off, to suddenly not doing a mission in three weeks
13:58because of the danger of the islands.
14:00And it was that reason that I said to myself,
14:03there's a need here for our own FPVs, our own drones.
14:07So it was just an incredibly challenging environment,
14:10but we made it work.
14:12And the proof is in the pudding.
14:14Most of the islands in the Dnieper are free, and it's because of those efforts.
14:23The Russian war machine, it has many strengths and many weaknesses.
14:27Its strengths are the sheer size and the volume of the military forces
14:33it's able to put into the field.
14:35Firstly, its professional army,
14:37but also the fact that it's got a vast conscript pool,
14:40which on top of that was a vast amount of Soviet weaponry inherited from the USSR.
14:46It's also partnering very closely with China and with North Korea and Iran,
14:50sharing technology, sharing money, sharing resources for their own mutual benefits.
14:56The Russians have adapted to the fact that they aren't as strong as they thought they were.
15:02They thought the war would be over in three days.
15:04In the early days of the war,
15:05they sent their creme de la creme of the Russian armed forces to Ukraine,
15:11and they died in their thousands in vast convoys,
15:14either just north of Kiev or in the east and south on the way to Kherson.
15:20They had to adapt by recruiting thousands more.
15:22They had to recruit people from abroad.
15:24They had to adapt their actual assaults, their ability to fight on the front line.
15:29They could no longer do combined arms warfare because of the lack of trained soldiers.
15:33And instead, they started the human meat wave assaults because that's all they're good for.
15:38And also just the level of despair for the Russian soldiers on the ground.
15:42I saw there was cases of Russian soldiers piling up dead bodies, essentially piles of bodies,
15:47and people just being forced to do the most dreadful things by their own commanders,
15:53digging in the open.
15:54There was one position that I don't know whose idea it was on the Russian side.
15:59They were digging a trench directly towards the Ukrainians
16:02in the hope that, obviously, they had tried going over the ground and running over the field,
16:07but they weren't making it.
16:08So they decided to just dig and go through the thing.
16:10But the trouble is there's still no cover.
16:12There's no tree lines.
16:13There's no branches of trees to stop the drones from hitting you.
16:15You've got a shovel in your hands.
16:17You're exhausting yourself trying to dig through that cold, hard earth,
16:20only to have an FPV after five hours of labor crash into you.
16:25And then you've got to then crawl back with either no legs or one leg back to a Russian position,
16:30which the vast majority of the time, their ability to treat their casualties effectively is really bad.
16:37It's terrible, in fact.
16:39We'd see bodies and also capture positions where we'd look at their IFAT kits,
16:44we'd look at their medical supplies, and they were utilizing ropes as tourniquets.
16:50They had this strange sort of 1980s sort of rubber band thing that they would tie around their legs.
16:58There was reports that they were bringing tampons to the front line,
17:02and they were being told to insert tampons,
17:06commercially bought tampons into their bullet wounds to stop the blood loss,
17:10which is ridiculous, which is just not going to treat you effectively.
17:14So Russia has gone to every depth of depravity you could possibly imagine in Ukraine.
17:21There's famous memes online of Russians running off with everything from toilets that they've looted
17:28to washing machines and refrigerators.
17:31And more than that, the Russians have obviously bombed entire cities to the ground,
17:37everything from Bakhmut to Maripol, the targeting of civilians, hospitals,
17:42including hospitals that cater for children.
17:45And it makes you wonder, like, what are their tactics?
17:48What is the end goal of that?
17:49Is it worth fighting on if there's nothing left to inherit at the end of all of this?
18:00Broadly speaking, I would prefer to use a British military uniform,
18:05primarily for quality reasons more than anything else, and comfort.
18:10Also, I had quite slim body armor,
18:14predominantly because of the fact that we were a reconnaissance unit.
18:18We had to squeeze through gaps in buildings.
18:20We had to run between thorn bushes and tree lines and all the rest of it.
18:24So I tried to keep my personal kit as close to my body as possible.
18:28I had a battle belt with magazines on.
18:30I only had a couple of magazines on my plate carrier, a couple of grenades.
18:35I did often have an assault pack, which I would go and fight with.
18:40My personal weapon initially was a AK-74,
18:44which was the standard issue for the 131st in the first month of my time with them.
18:49That would change to the Polish Grot, which is a NATO standard weapon.
18:55I customized it with a foregrip and red dot with a magnifier.
19:01I obviously had Russian or former Soviet grenades, mostly.
19:06The prized ones for the Ukrainians were the American and British ones.
19:10But the ones I always had were the Russian ones.
19:13In regards to a secondary weapon, for me personally, was a grenade launcher,
19:18a 40mm American-made single-shot grenade launcher.
19:23We sometimes would bring an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade,
19:26which was a former Soviet design, to the islands to hit buildings on the islands sometimes.
19:33But in regards to actually anti-tank, it was always NATO that would provide the best kits,
19:38Enlors, Javelin, Manta D'Or, I think it was Spanish-made.
19:42We'd also have drones as well that we'd bring with us.
19:45Those were reconnaissance drones predominantly.
19:47But when we became an FPV team, when we actually set up a drone team,
19:51we actually did deploy always with FPV-related kits.
19:56And that was always batteries and controllers and signals equipment,
20:00also a number of drones to actually utilize the munitions themselves, the batteries.
20:05The vast majority of the time, we are light infantry.
20:08Obviously a knife as well, a knife constantly on my plate carrier.
20:12That's a habit I've always had since Syria.
20:15And a realization that you're going into an environment where you have to be self-sufficient,
20:21so enough food and water for however long you're going out for.
20:25Functionary and half-decent equipment was very common on the front line in Ukraine.
20:33But if you wanted the really decent thermal scope,
20:36if you wanted the very best drone that could be bought commercially,
20:40then oftentimes it is up to the military themselves
20:44or international volunteers to fundraise for that kit.
20:46I began doing things like buying drones for the units.
20:50I began buying anti-drone software and hardware to go on their vehicles.
20:57I also purchased and delivered vehicles to the battalion as well.
21:01And the best way to do that, to get the financing together,
21:04is not to rely on the Ukrainians to navigate the bureaucracy of the system,
21:09but instead go directly to my followers on social media.
21:17I suppose the third phase of my time in Ukraine, personally,
21:21was the shift from the south, from Kherson to the east, to a place called Lomon.
21:26It was the summer of 2023 and the Ukrainians were on the march.
21:32The Russians were desperate to stop them and they were counter-attacking.
21:37With us being in the south, a reconnaissance group
21:39that now specialised in drones, help was needed.
21:43Suddenly we're fighting these waves of Russians coming in tank columns.
21:48And then we also saw the terrible casualties that the Russians were getting.
21:52But again, it was strangely distant, yet also intimate,
21:56because there's something very strange about loading up your car
22:01with FPV drones and reconnaissance drones, driving to the front line,
22:05but not going to the very, very front line,
22:07maybe coming a mile off the zero line, and then sending drones over.
22:12And you're targeting people, you're trying to blow them up.
22:15You can see them running around.
22:16For several more months, I was in the cold, snowy ground of eastern Ukraine
22:22with the drone team, doing my best to support them
22:25in getting as many drones to the front line as possible,
22:28and as many Russians sent home as possible as well.
22:31I was there as a protection team for the drone units,
22:35but also as a driver as well to get them in,
22:39also as the designated medic to try and help them if they got injured.
22:43We'd set up laptops in these bunkers,
22:46we'd have big batteries for the power source,
22:49and we'd put up a little cable, sometimes tie it to a tree for the signals.
22:53And then we became observers, like sort of ghosts over the battlefield,
23:00either looking for targets or just keeping a constant eye.
23:03And again, the most abiding memory is just the fact that
23:07the number of kills increased rapidly from our time in the south.
23:12There was a lot more vehicles being destroyed.
23:19My time in Ukraine could be separated in different phases.
23:22My first phase was the pre-war phase, which was in February of 2022,
23:28when just a few weeks before the war started.
23:31The next phase was my time coming back to Ukraine as a humanitarian,
23:37training people in battlefield medicine.
23:39That was in sort of March to about sort of June time in 2022.
23:46The process of becoming an international volunteer is actually remarkably easy,
23:51particularly in relation to Ukraine.
23:53Before the war, you could fly directly to Lviv on Ryanair.
23:57With the outbreak of the war, with the fact that the Russians
23:59were threatening to shoot down any aircraft in Ukrainian airspace,
24:04the only way to get in was via the land border.
24:06And I drove across the border, and it was incredibly surreal
24:09to see the queues of people, fast queues, so long, in fact,
24:13that some people were abandoning their cars in the queue
24:16and just simply walking to the border.
24:18And the road into Kiev and into Ukraine was completely empty.
24:22And that's the tried and tested route for most international volunteers
24:25who went to Ukraine.
24:27Most of them would go on to sign up in a place called Lviv.
24:31They'd join the army, and they'd be sent off to camps.
24:33Very soon after my arrival, while I was on the ground in places like Kiev,
24:38Lviv, Odessa, I was hearing reports of the terrible war crimes
24:42in places like Bucha and Erpin, of civilians being shot in the streets.
24:47And there I was on the ground, looking Ukrainians in the eye,
24:50meeting them, getting to know them as people.
24:53And then when I heard about the war crimes,
24:55I realised that the battlefield aid, the charitable work,
25:00was only tinkering on the edges.
25:02I knew and I felt the same sort of passion and the determination
25:07to stand alongside the Ukrainians that I felt when I went out
25:11to join the Kurds against the Islamic State.
25:13If I wanted to make a stand against Russia,
25:16if I wanted to really stand alongside the Ukrainians,
25:19I had to join the army.
25:20So that's exactly what I did.
25:22Looking in, in those early days, the international volunteers
25:26may have looked like a drag on the system,
25:28because it was all hands to the pump in Ukraine.
25:30Everyone was trying to survive.
25:32Hundreds of thousands of people were turning up at recruitment centres.
25:35There was no capability for the Ukrainians to actually train
25:38their own people, let alone thousands of foreigners.
25:41But I don't see it that way.
25:43I see it that this was a burst of energy, human energy,
25:49goodwill, passion from the international community,
25:52including individual citizens, going out to support Ukraine.
25:56As far as I'm concerned, you're not a hero just for turning up.
25:59You're a hero for what you do.
26:01And many people went and left, but a few stayed,
26:06learnt the language, learnt the culture,
26:08ingratiated themselves with the Ukrainians
26:10and delivered capabilities to the Ukrainians early on
26:14that were actually really useful.
26:16I'm talking about things like battlefield medicine,
26:20the utilisation of some of the weapons that were coming in
26:22from the West at the time.
26:24They were already familiar.
26:25Many of the former service people that joined
26:27were already familiar with these weapon systems.
26:29So I see them as a band of brothers who went out
26:32to support Ukraine in its hour of need,
26:35with a few crazy ones mixed in.
26:38There are many ways to categorise the international volunteers,
26:42and they came to do different things.
26:43Some joined the army, some came as simple volunteers.
26:46You also saw people with no military experience
26:49coming out to join the army.
26:51These are the sort of passionate ones,
26:53the ones that sort of heard Zelensky's call early doors,
26:57and they were sort of politically and ideologically motivated.
27:00I can't criticise these people because I'm one of those people.
27:03I didn't have any sort of conventional military experience
27:06when I went out to join the Kurds so many years ago.
27:09Many, quite frankly, shouldn't have been there at all.
27:12They might have been fleeing something in their home country,
27:16whether that's drink or drug abuse.
27:19They might see Ukraine as a place to prove themselves,
27:24I suppose, to gain some sort of respect from the people around them.
27:28There have been far worse people,
27:30and there was the terrible case of Dan Burke
27:34and several, actually, other gentlemen
27:35that were murdered by other international volunteers.
27:39So, frankly, some very dangerous people have turned up as well.
27:43But they are far and few between.
27:45They often don't have the capacity to stay in Ukraine for the long term.
27:49But either way, all kinds of people did turn up in those early days,
27:53and it would take months and months for the Ukrainians
27:56to sort through them, find the gems,
27:58and deploy them effectively on the front line.
28:01The training that was given to the volunteers in those early days
28:05was very poor, and the organisation was very poor too.
28:09And there were some very early mistakes.
28:11One of the most noticeable and well-known
28:13was a terrible attack on a base very close to Lviv
28:18that was housing international volunteers.
28:20Dozens of people were killed and injured in that attack
28:23because foreigners were tweeting,
28:25were using their mobile phones in a war zone,
28:29perhaps obviously naively,
28:31and the Russians were able to find the location of this base
28:36and strike it with long-range cruise missiles.
28:40Things would later change, whereby the international volunteers
28:44then became more organised.
28:45So after learning about the creation of the international volunteers,
28:48the international brigades in Ukraine,
28:51and knowing that it was going to have some teething problems,
28:54I deliberately kept away.
28:55So I joined directly with the Ukrainian army
28:59and signed my contract with the Ministry of Defence
29:01and not with the International Legion,
29:03primarily just because I wanted to stay away from foreigners
29:06and work directly with the Ukrainians.
29:11I had a medical test and a fitness test that I had to go through.
29:16Once I had been cleared for service by the MOD in Ukraine,
29:22I was then liable to be taken by any Ukrainian unit
29:26that wished to have me.
29:28Now, the international volunteers that I was with
29:31were determined to get to the 131st.
29:34And the 131st, as I said, was an elite regiment,
29:37a great regiment to get into.
29:39I was actually, of my little group,
29:42I had the least experience in terms of conventional military experience.
29:46But what appealed to me about the reconnaissance group
29:50that was fighting in the south, the 131st,
29:53was because it was light infantry.
29:55A lot of the work that they were doing was very similar
29:58to the work that I did with the YPG and SDF in Syria.
30:02Now, the SDF operated in things called tabors,
30:05which were about 40-man teams.
30:07And a tabor would ride around in soft-skin vehicles
30:10with no heavy weapons, just AK-47s with body armour, grenades.
30:15They would clear buildings, they would push through villages,
30:18through mountain ranges, you name it.
30:21We had to clear it all.
30:23And a lot of those experiences in Syria,
30:26fighting in Raqqa, in places like Manbij and Tilhamas,
30:33it all lent itself to the work that I would later do
30:37for the Ukrainian military.
30:39We were a very aggressive unit.
30:41If we were told to do something, we were going to do it.
30:45No matter the casualties, no matter how difficult it was,
30:48the risks involved, you just put your head down and just do it.
30:53As long as our radio guy could speak Ukrainian,
30:56and our point man can speak Ukrainian,
31:00then we could actually operate very effectively.
31:03We had to be adaptable.
31:05We had to be able to protect ourselves.
31:08And the weapons that we chose to bring with us,
31:11from grenade launchers to anti-tank missiles
31:14to the heavy machine guns, the PKMs that we brought with us,
31:17all helped us become very self-reliant.
31:20There's a common misconception
31:22that international volunteers in Ukraine are mercenaries.
31:25Now, as far as I'm concerned, that's simply not true.
31:28A mercenary, by definition, is a soldier,
31:31a trained soldier that sells his service for money.
31:34Now, international volunteers from Britain, America, France, etc.,
31:39have all gone out to Ukraine
31:41to stand in solidarity with the local people.
31:44They get paid not a single penny more than any other Ukrainian does.
31:48We get the same benefits if we're injured,
31:51the same veteran benefits once we retire
31:53than any other soldier in Ukraine.
31:55The classic definition of a mercenary is the Wagner Group,
32:00which is the Russian mercenary group
32:03that fights in foreign countries,
32:06often destabilising them and butchering and murdering
32:09and torturing local people,
32:11but also the thousands of people
32:14that have gone over to join the Russian army.
32:17Now, the Russian army is employing the most terrible tactics
32:20to encourage people, often from the sort of the Third World,
32:24from developing countries where there is terrible poverty,
32:29to join them, and sometimes they're doing it through lies,
32:33saying that they've got a job in Moscow in a factory,
32:36but then they turn up, they're threatened with arrest or deportation,
32:40and suddenly they find themselves fighting in the Donbass.
32:43So, as far as I'm concerned,
32:45we're just simply Ukrainian soldiers fighting alongside them.
32:48So, there is a base salary,
32:50and that base salary is 500 US dollars a month.
32:53There is also a combat bonus,
32:55which brings your salary, your base salary,
32:58up to $2,000, around $2,000 a month.
33:01Only a fool, as far as I'm concerned,
33:04would go to Ukraine looking for money.
33:11This is a good point, actually, to point out my two patches.
33:14This was the Vidmark Group, or Vidmark, which is a local name.
33:18It means witcher, in fact, in Ukrainian.
33:20On the other side is my battalion insignia,
33:23and it's the traditional cross of Ukraine.
33:27The colours are red and black,
33:29and the logo, the motto, I should say, in Ukrainian,
33:34which is always forward.
33:36A lot of international volunteers collect patches.
33:39Just starting from the top, you've got the unit patch here,
33:42the 131st, here and here.
33:44These are my unit patches,
33:46the international volunteer units of the 131st.
33:49And below that are things that I was given.
33:52Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine,
33:55gifted me this patch.
33:57He also gave me this one.
33:59These are also unit patches from Ukrainian battalions
34:04that gifted them to me.
34:06And then next to that are sort of Syrian patches,
34:11I suppose you could say.
34:13This one of the YPG in Syria that fought against ISIS.
34:16Below that is Wagner Group,
34:18which is a patch taken from a dead Russian soldier.
34:21This one here and here are unit patches
34:25of the Russian military.
34:27I took these ones down in Herson.
34:30So a lot of international volunteers
34:33will collect thousands of patches.
34:35Me, I only keep the ones that I earned or was given
34:38or I took from the enemy.
34:41My real name is Harry, but I go by Mesa Gifford.
34:45Mesa Gifford is a nom de guerre that I chose
34:48when I first went out to Syria way back in 2015.
34:51I did it because I went to fight against the Islamic State
34:55alongside the Kurdish people in that area, in the region.
34:58And obviously the Islamic State
35:02were putting bounties on people's heads.
35:04They were, I was going to put a big bounty
35:07on my own head, particularly for the length of time
35:10that I fought there and the amount of political work
35:13I did out there.
35:15So it was very sensible to choose a name
35:18that was memorable, was something that people,
35:21the local people could pronounce
35:23and something that was familiar to me.
35:25I like the name, so I chose it.
35:27My journey from ordinary city worker,
35:30working in London with a girlfriend,
35:33with a partner and a flat in London
35:36to suddenly fighting first in Syria
35:39and then obviously later in Ukraine and doing other things,
35:42it all began with the rise of the Islamic State, I suppose.
35:46Very early, way back in 2008,
35:48I went out to Zimbabwe to work for the MDC,
35:51the Movement for Democratic Change, against Robert Mugabe.
35:54And after a few years of work in the city
35:57and then seeing the rise of what was going on in the Middle East
36:00with the region being torn apart,
36:02I suppose I started to remember what drove me when I was younger.
36:05First, the abiding memory that I can remember writing about
36:09for my book about Syria was this moment on a train
36:13when I picked up a newspaper and there was the title,
36:17I think it was Brave in the Face of Pure Evil or something.
36:21It was a picture of an aid worker just about to have his head cut off.
36:26And I could have just joined a charity.
36:28I could have, again, fiddled around the edges of the problem in Syria,
36:32just like the rest of the world was doing.
36:34But instead, what angered me was the images of the Yazidi girls
36:38being burnt alive in cages or being sold in slave markets.
36:42And I realised that if you believe in internationalism,
36:47if you believe in humanism,
36:49if you want to actually deal with something that is dreadful
36:52happening on the other side of the world,
36:54you are not just a hopeless spectator.
36:57You have agency, you have the ability to say,
37:01no, I'm going to go out, I'm going to do something here,
37:04I'm going to draw attention to this issue
37:06and I'm going to do the very least I can do,
37:08which, as far as I'm concerned, and this is the least I do,
37:11picking up a weapon, any fool can do.
37:13I have skirted...
37:15It is very controversial, even from a legal perspective,
37:18but I've always abided by the law, the British law.
37:21And it's...
37:23But it's something that I know is worthwhile and good.
37:26One of my biggest strengths has always been
37:28to use my privilege as a British person
37:31to articulate the cause that I'm supporting.
37:39The war zones that we go to and the causes we get involved with,
37:44they are toxic environments
37:46that play havoc on mental and emotional health.
37:50One of the ways that I've kept myself safe
37:52is the fact that I always have a plan.
37:55And that is, I compartmentalise my time
37:57in the countries that I support.
37:59I'm going for a reason.
38:01There's always something that I'm doing.
38:03I am going to set up a medical programme.
38:05I'm going to be doing certain advocacy work,
38:07whether it's writing articles
38:09or whether it's speaking in parliaments
38:11or meeting whoever...
38:13major players and decision-makers in certain quarters.
38:17If I can do all of that, and it's quantifiable,
38:20it could be written down and articulated,
38:23again, it gives me purpose, it gives me focus.
38:26But if you don't have that mentality
38:28and you're just waiting to see what happens,
38:30or the grass is always greener
38:32or you're running from something from home,
38:34your problems will catch up with you eventually.
38:36And in a war zone,
38:38and with the stresses that you're under as well,
38:40you're not going to find salvation.
38:42It's a very dark and difficult place.
38:44I've lost so many people that I've known
38:47over these more than a decade
38:49of fighting and working in various conflict zones.
38:52There was one incident in Raqqa
38:54when myself and two other guys crossed a road
38:57and there was a machine gun at the end of the road,
39:00an ISIS machine gun, and they shot left to right.
39:02I was the third guy on the end.
39:04They shot and killed the first two guys.
39:06They actually shot me as well.
39:08They hit my body armour and I was flung to the ground
39:11and I crawled off the road.
39:13But I survived.
39:15And as I said, it's pure chance,
39:18whether or not you live or die sometimes.
39:20That's not always the case.
39:22There's a famous saying that I've never forgotten,
39:24which is,
39:26how do you get so lucky?
39:28The more I train, the luckier I get.
39:30It's kind of like that too.
39:32The more you experience of war,
39:34the more you experience of the terrible things
39:36that can happen to you,
39:38it helps you to survive.
39:40Oftentimes, I've seen a lot of guys die
39:42because they underestimated the enemy.
39:44They didn't know exactly what it was like to fight.
39:49And a lot of guys I met in Ukraine,
39:52a lot of them are former service people too,
39:54a lot of them hadn't fought
39:57in particularly difficult environments in the past.
40:01And they sort of came to the conflict zone
40:03thinking it was going to be much of the same.
40:06And then they would die
40:07because they didn't take cover that time.
40:09Because they thought,
40:10ah, the Russians never do this,
40:12the Russians never do that.
40:13And then the one time the Russians do what...
40:17have always said that they weren't going to do
40:20is the day that you die.
40:26My time in Ukraine ended
40:28just before Christmas in 2023.
40:33My father was very unwell
40:35and sadly within a month of me returning home,
40:37passed away.
40:38And it gave me a new perspective
40:41on what I was doing in Ukraine.
40:43And largely I'd completed
40:45much of what I wanted to achieve.
40:47I was still able to raise $100,000
40:49for the Ukrainian military in that time.
40:51But I also started to remember
40:53that there were other causes as well
40:55that I wanted to support.
40:57And the news recently has been things like
40:59the conflict in Syria is back, is hot topic.
41:04The Donald Trump presidency.
41:06There's a lot going on in the world
41:08and I'm not going to rush anywhere.
41:10I'm going to focus on myself, my family,
41:13come up with a clear plan, a clear goal
41:16and I'm going to choose my next mission.
41:20So one of the things that's kept me sane
41:22since I've left Ukraine has been my writing.
41:25It helped me so much when I left Syria
41:28all those years ago.
41:29I wrote a book called Fighting Evil,
41:30which came out in 2020.
41:33I did start writing a book,
41:35an account of my time in Ukraine.
41:37But actually one thing I've always enjoyed
41:40and always been intrigued about
41:42is writing fiction.
41:43So one of the things I've been doing
41:45over the last few months
41:47is writing a fiction book about Ukraine
41:51and about the war against Russia.
41:53At the same time, I was able to come back
41:56with a huge amount of footage.
41:59Just by the nature of this conflict,
42:01it being the most filmed war probably of all time,
42:05I think putting that together
42:06into a really compelling documentary,
42:09into something that will tell the story
42:11of the international volunteers,
42:12that will tell the story of Ukraine
42:14through the eyes of people
42:16who have gone out to support them
42:17would be a really good thing.
42:19If I am to build a life after this
42:21and whatever life that might be,
42:24it would be good to go back to my old name,
42:27which is just simply Harry.
42:28Harry from England.
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