BY MICHAEL WASIURA IN ODESA, UKRAINE
Former British soldier Shareef Amin walks with a limp, the result of injuries sustained to three limbs by Russian tank fire, mortar rounds, and bullets during the successful Ukrainian effort to liberate the city of Kherson last fall. Just under one year after being dragged off the battlefield by his Ukrainian comrades, Amin is capable of nearly winning a footrace along the trolley tracks on the eastern edge of Lviv's Market Square.
As part of his mental recovery, Amin has written a book, Freedom at All Costs, which details how a disappointed Afghan War vet found himself fighting to defend a foreign nation's existence.
Like many of the foreign veterans who flocked to Ukraine in the early days of March 2022, Amin recalls seeing President Volodymyr Zelensky's February 27, 2022 video address calling for international volunteers to "come and fight side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals." Unlike most of the tens of thousands of military-aged males who entered Ukraine in the early days of the full-scale war, Amin has remained.
"When I got to Afghanistan, I didn't love the country, but I loved what we were standing for," Amin told Newsweek. "I believed we were making a difference, and then, when I saw that after everything that so many of our boys gave, Afghanistan was just given back, I felt gutted."
Just over six months after the fall of Kabul, however, "Ukraine happened, and I thought, 'maybe I can do something,'" Amin recalls. "When I got here, I realized that everything I had done in Afghanistan wasn't just wasted effort. It was preparing me for this."
Despite Zelensky's call for help, getting into the fight in Ukraine required significant effort and initiative from foreign volunteers. When Amin arrived in country in early March with a group of around 15 other British veterans, none of them had any idea what to expect.
"I remember thinking that we were going to cross the border and suddenly there would be Russians there shooting at us," he said. "Instead, we had to cover our faces because there were so many members of the media looking for stories about foreigners coming to fight."
After getting across, no one from the Ukrainian side was there to meet them, let alone to equip them. They had no real plans, no reliable contacts, nowhere to stay, and no idea that a 5 p.m. curfew was in effect.
"We crossed the border, flagged down a bus, somehow got the driver to take us towards Lviv. Halfway there he tells us, 'in two hours you all have to be inside,'" Amin said. "We were 15 dudes with kit on us in the middle of Lviv, and so we just sat inside the bus station and started making phone calls."
One member of Amin's group managed to get in touch with a Canadian acquaintance who was affiliated with the Georgian Legion. Through the Canadian, they managed to arrange for a Sprinter van to shuttle Amin's group to a university campus where the legionnaires had settled in.
"We spent two weeks with the Georgian Legion guys, and they were trying to get us to go to the front lines without contracts and without weapons," he said. "They told us we'd be armed once we got there, but we refused."
After leaving the Georgians' camp, the group used its connections to find a "safe house" and plan their next moves. Instead of joining up with the International Legion, however, they began transporting medical supplies for a humanitarian group. After a few weeks spent shuttling supplies all around the country, mechanical problems put Amin and his comrades back on the path to war.
"We broke down in Odesa, and a group of female volunteers there connected us up with villagers who lived right near the coast," he said. "They could see the Russian ships, and everyone was worried the Russians were going to invade, and so we went down and started training the civilians to resist."
Over the course of the next three days, Amin taught enthusiastic Ukrainian civilians how to conduct patrols and how to fire a weapon at Russian paratroopers should the need arise. He also celebrated his 40th birthday.
"It's the first time anyone ever threw me a birthday party, and it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life," he recalled. "They sang to me twice: once in the morning and once in the evening. They made me a cake. It was the first time I had borscht. Alcohol was illegal at the time, and so what we had was self-brewed."
The training work that Amin and his five or so remaining group mates did put them on the radar of a Ukrainian Territorial Defense unit that was stationed in Odesa at the time. After some haggling, they worked out an agreement to sign up for the Ukrainian military in an instructional capacity. The green volunteers lining up at recruiting stations certainly needed the help.
"There were 130 Ukrainian blokes, and the officers said, 'these guys are going off to the front lines in two weeks," Amin said of his first group of trainees. "Your task is to give them six months of NATO/British training in that time.'"
After providing three groups of new Ukrainian territorial defense units a crash course in how to be a soldier, in May 2022 Amin and his British colleagues deployed to the front lines in Mykolaiv region. For many of them, it was a new experience.
"When we were the British army, we had the tanks, we had the bombs, we had the planes," he said. "The Taliban called us 'donkeys' because we were so slow moving."
"But in Ukraine," Amin continued, "it felt like we were now on the other side of that kind of battle, and a lot of American and British soldiers aren't used to being in a situation where, if you do get hit, you don't have an Apache coming in to get you out of there."
Amin's service in Ukraine also differed from his time in Afghanistan in another significant way.
"When you're on deployment with the British military for seven months, you're at war, war, war, war, war. You are patrolling every day, or else you're on guard duty, and if you can, you sleep. You might get 10 days of R&R at some point, but aside from that, you're always on," he said.
For Ukrainian soldiers assigned to hold trenches, day-to-day life is largely similar to what Amin experienced in Afghanistan. However, for Westerners who arrived in Ukraine with higher-level skill sets, there is often the opportunity to participate in missions commensurate with their abilities. After spending some time with the Territorial Defense forces around Mykolaiv, Amin found his way into a unit that specialized in reconnaissance.
"It was more like what the SAS or the SEALS do," he explained. "You have an objective, you prepare for that objective, and then you're out there beyond the front lines, integrated into where the Russians are, doing stuff like what you see in the movies."
Such missions could take one day, or they could take two weeks. In between assignments, however, life for specialized soldiers like Amin was deceptively normal.
"Once your objective has been completed, you get pulled off the front line," Amin said. "The infantry are still there holding their positions, and you're back in Mykolaiv or Odesa sitting at a cafe with sand in your boots. One minute you're dealing with a catastrophic bleed, and two hours later, you're sitting there with a pint in your hand surrounded by people who are just living their lives. It's so surreal."
Although Amin has spent most of the past years recovering from the injuries he sustained in the Kherson counteroffensive last October, he continues to do what he can to aid the war effort, using his military experience to train Ukrainian troops and telling his story in an attempt to prevent Western support for Ukraine from flagging.
Despite the limp and the fingers missing from his right hand, Amin still frequently talks of his desire to return to frontline service.
"I love this country," he said, "and I will be happy to die for this country."
Unlimited access to Newsweek.com
