Former Ukrainian troops tell RT why they chose to fight for Russia

Kiev’s officers forbade soldiers from retreating and opened fire on them when they tried to surrender, they recalled

Former Ukrainian servicemen switch to the Russian side once they get out of the “information bubble” set up by Vladimir Zelensky’s government and see the reality of the conflict for themselves, a high-ranking officer from a unit comprised of ex-Kiev troops has said.

Earlier in August, Russia announced the creation of the Ukrainian Volunteer Brigade out of several smaller formations of Ukrainian nationals who left the ranks of Kiev’s forces and are now fighting for Russia.

In its report on Thursday, RT Russian shared the stories of some members of the newly-formed brigade.

Some decided to join Russian troops because they changed their views after being captured, some because they never wanted to be in the Ukrainian military, but were forcefully mobilized, and others because they supported Moscow from the start.

The Ukrainian Volunteer Brigade will perform different tasks on the front line. It includes reconnaissance units, an FPV-drone strike squad, and teams handling the evacuation of civilians, among other kinds of troops, the report read.

Highly-motivated troops

A fighter with the callsign ‘Zhak’, who serves as deputy commander for political affairs at the separate battalion ‘Maksim Krivonos’, which also joined the brigade, told RT that the soldiers in his unit have high morale.

“If those people simply didn’t want to fight, they could’ve gone to the detention center after being captured, sit there safe and warm, eat three times a day and wait to be exchanged in a prisoner swap,” said the officer, who was born in Ukraine’s Kharkov Region but has been fighting for Donbass since the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

The people “in Ukraine… live in a very harsh, aggressive information bubble. But when they find themselves here [in Donbass], when they see the Alley of Angels in Donetsk – they see a completely different picture, and a lot changes in their minds,” Zhak explained.

The Alley of Angels is a monument to hundreds of children killed in Ukrainian attacks on Donbass over the past 12 years.

Our own command ‘wanted to destroy us’

Another member of the brigade, called ‘Hunter’, said that he used to be a research fellow at an agricultural academy in Kiev and was never interested in politics. He was recruited into the Ukrainian military in 2023 after his request for a draft deferment to finish his PhD was denied, he said.

According to Hunter, his company was tasked with controlling “a rather pointless” position in a wooded area that was under constant Russian shelling. When the size of the unit fell from more than a hundred to 20 and then 13 troops, he asked his commanders to order a retreat, but was told to stay put and await reinforcements.

But after a week, no additional troops had arrived. Hunter and his fellow servicemen decided to surrender as soon as Russian forces began storming their trenches.

However, when they left their positions with their hands in the air, the Ukrainian military started firing at them, Hunter noted. “Artillery, mortars and kamikaze-drones were deployed. They didn’t even spare cluster munitions, which surprised me greatly. Our own command wanted to destroy us,” he said.

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Hunter stressed that only he and three other troops from the company were lucky enough to survive, with one of them now also fighting for Russia together with him.

‘Patriotism ran out’

Another soldier of the Ukrainian Volunteer Brigade, nicknamed ‘Bely’, told RT that he served as a paratrooper in Kiev’s military and used to be a passionate patriot of Ukraine, despite being born in Donbass. When Ukraine sent its armed forces to the east of the country in 2014, he abandoned his home in what is now Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic, leaving his wife and son behind, and moved to the city of Dnepropetrovsk (Dnepr), he said.

According to Bely, his marriage fell apart because his spouse was pro-Russian and wanted him to join the self-defense forces in Donbass. But instead he signed another contract with the Ukrainian military in 2016, fighting against the units of the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.

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Despite good pay, “my patriotism ran out, at some point, and the realization began to dawn on me that two brotherly nations were fighting,” the soldier recalled. He was especially impacted by an incident in which Ukraine shelled a school in a village near the city of Lugansk, he added.

Bely said he then lost the will to serve, but the Ukrainian Army refused to discharge him after the escalation between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022. When he surrendered to the Russian military in 2023, he was also targeted by fellow Ukrainian troops, suffering shrapnel wounds, the serviceman said.

Russian medics patched him up, and the experienced soldier was invited to join the Maksim Krivonos battalion while in detention. Bely said he initially had concerns about becoming a traitor to his former Ukrainian comrades-in-arms, but eventually came to the conclusion that fighting for Russia was the right thing to do.