Kevin, a former US soldier, said he and his team were trapped for days inside a "house of hell."
(Mick Krever/CNN)
Kevin, a stocky American in his early 30s, climbs over the charred rubble of a former sauna and shines the light from his iPhone through the dust.
“We’re not going to go any further, because this wire is intentionally tied off to something and then buried right here,” he warns. “A lot of the Russians came back through some of these places and re-mined them, put [in] booby traps.”
Kevin is part of a group of elite foreign special forces veterans, primarily American and British, who have enlisted to help the Ukrainian cause.
He says that back in March, the group spent four days in the health spa — they called it “the house from hell” — often just 50 meters from Russian troops. It was, he says, the furthest-forward Ukrainian-held position in Irpin, a suburb on the outskirts of Kyiv, as Russian forces tried to push on through to seize the capital.
The once-affluent suburb is now synonymous with alleged Russian war crimes — a pilgrimage site for visiting dignitaries who’ve beaten a path to its shell-scarred streets. Kevin says he and his men were among the first to witness attacks on Ukrainian civilians here.
Despite a former career as a top-level US counter-terrorism operative, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kevin says it is here in Ukraine that he has faced the most intense fighting of his life.
He says he and his new comrades-in-arms have implemented many of the guerrilla tactics that were used against the American military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They are the insurgents now.
“Everything is much more decentralized,” he explains. “Small group tactics is definitely a huge advantage here.”
We are not using Kevin’s full name because of the nature of his work in Ukraine.
“Being on this side now, and hearing their conversations on their radio — and them knowing, okay, they’re out there somewhere, we don’t know where or who it is — there’s definitely an advantage to that,” he says.
“Real combat experience”: Like many military veterans, Kevin says he had felt adrift since originally leaving the battlefield several years ago. He had a full-time job in the US, but quit when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put out a call for experienced foreign fighters at the beginning of the war. He arrived in western Ukraine, was driven to Kyiv, and was on the frontlines of the battle for the capital within a matter of hours.
He joined Ukraine’s International Legion, launched by the government in the first days of the war. The government pays him and his colleagues a modest salary of between $2,000 and $3,000 a month, though Kevin says they have spent far more than that buying equipment. The International Legion even got its own website, instructing would-be foreign recruits on everything from how to contact the Ukrainian embassy to what to pack.
In those first weeks, the government struggled to weed out the pretenders and war tourists who were out of their depth. By March 6, they had received more than 20,000 applications, according to the foreign minister.
The number of foreign fighters now in Ukraine is a state secret, but a spokesperson for the International Legion told CNN that the “symbiosis” means Ukraine’s “chances of winning are greatly increased.”
“The best of the best join the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” Colonel Anton Myronovych told CNN. “These are foreigners with real combat experience, these are foreign citizens who know what war is, know how to handle weapons, know how to destroy the enemy.”
For the first time in his life, Kevin was defending against invasion by a better-equipped enemy. He, not the enemy, was the one who had to worry about airstrikes. There was no master plan, no air support — and there would be no evacuation in case of disaster.
“It was like a movie,” he says. “It was insanity from the start. We started taking indirect fire driving in — small arms fire driving in. And I was in a pickup truck, just driving down the street.”
“There’s tanks, and above us there’s helicopters. And you can hear the Russian jets flying by. And out in the open fields the Russians were dropping troops off in helicopters. And so you’re like: ‘Woah, wow!’ It’s a lot.”
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