POLITICS
During negotiations in Istanbul in early May, the Russian delegation claimed it was prepared to fight for “however long it takes” and rejected President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ceasefire proposal. Putin is trying to convince the international community that he can negotiate from a position of strength, arguing that time is on his side. He claims Russian forces are advancing and that Russia has more manpower — both due to the country’s larger population and the presence of large numbers of North Korean troops on the front lines. In response, one might ask: why shouldn't Ukraine also bolster its armed forces by bringing more foreign fighters into its ranks? Only a few thousand foreign nationals are currently serving in Ukraine’s military — significantly fewer than in many past conflicts. This shortage stems not only from domestic legal constraints in Ukraine but also from the deliberate policies of Ukraine’s allies, who — despite Russian propaganda — have actually discouraged their citizens from participating in the war.
How many foreigners are fighting for Ukraine?
Foreign nationals have taken part in Ukraine’s military efforts since 2014, though in the early stages of the conflict most foreign fighters supported pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. Of the more than 17,000 foreign fighters active from 2014 to 2019, fewer than 4,000 were on Ukraine’s side — and these included around 3,000 Russian citizens.
On Feb. 27, 2022 — just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion — Ukraine began recruiting for the International Legion of its Territorial Defense Forces. Ukrainian officials initially claimed 20,000 volunteers from over 50 countries had signed up. In reality, by 2023, independent sources estimated (1, 2) that only 1,500 to 2,000 were actively engaged in combat. Organizational and logistical challenges — including issues with command, supplies, and pay — soon plagued the Legion.
Foreign volunteers receive the same pay as Ukrainian troops: 20,000 hryvnias (about $480) per month in non-combat areas, 50,000 hryvnias (about $1,200) in combat zones, and up to 120,000 hryvnias (around $3,000) for front-line duty. Contracts typically last six months, after which foreign volunteers are free to leave the service if they so choose.
In recent months, the International Legion and affiliated units have largely withdrawn from active combat. Recruitment is now handled by specific brigades within the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard. Reports from Ukrainian and Western media (1, 2) suggest that foreign personnel in these units number only in the dozens (especially when excluding recruits from post-Soviet states). The fact of limited foreign presence is indirectly supported by the relatively small number of public obituaries. According to estimates by pro-Russian open source intelligence (OSINT) site LostArmour, fewer than 750 foreign volunteers have died since the start of the war.
Number of foreign volunteers killed fighting for Ukraine
Infographic: The Insider
At the same time, Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) paints a picture of far greater foreign involvement in the war on Ukraine’s side. In its most recent report on the matter, released in March 2024, the ministry claimed there were exactly 13,387 “mercenaries” — precise down to the last individual — and claimed that 5,962 of them had been “eliminated.” Notably, the Russian MoD made no mention of the two largest groups among the so-called “mercenaries” fighting for Ukraine: citizens of Russia and Belarus.
The ministry’s numbers not only contradict independent sources but also conflict with data from Russia’s Investigative Committee (IC). In early May 2025, IC head Alexander Bastrykin claimed that 9,900 “foreign mercenaries” were fighting for Ukraine, with the largest contingents allegedly arriving from the U.S. (816), Canada (719), Georgia (712), and the UK (694).
The Investigative Committee has concluded 127 criminal cases related to so-called mercenary activities, resulting in 97 convictions: 42 from Georgia, 13 from the U.S., 10 from Latvia, and four each from the UK and France. Surprisingly, Poland — the top contributor according to the Russian MoD’s statistics — was completely absent from the Investigative Committee’s report.
Still, even Russia’s exaggerated estimates show the relatively minor role foreign fighters play among Ukraine’s approximately one million security personnel.
Why are there so few foreign volunteers?
There are far fewer foreigners fighting for Ukraine today than took part in past conflicts of a similar scale. Over the course of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), a total of over 30,000 individuals from more than 50 countries fought for the socialist government as part of the International Brigades. Recruitment, training, and logistics for these volunteers were supported and organized by the Soviet Union. And on the opposing side were much larger expeditionary forces from fascist Germany and Italy, also officially considered “volunteers.”
In the brief but intense Winter War, which lasted from November 1939 to March 1940, Finland succeeded in attracting more than 10,000 foreign volunteers — mostly from Sweden and Denmark — and received several times that number in applications. In the UK, a special committee was formed to facilitate recruitment for Finland (despite the fact that the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act made it illegal for British citizens to fight abroad against a nation with which the crown was not at war). In 1940, the British government issued a special waiver to allow the committee to operate.
Even recruiters for the Islamic State in the mid-2010s were more successful than the Ukrainian government in attracting European volunteers. By some estimates, around 5,000 individuals from EU countries — primarily from France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium — fought for the Islamist group in Syria and Iraq. Many later returned home, becoming a serious concern for law enforcement agencies.
None of Kyiv’s Western allies has launched an organized recruitment drive for the Ukrainian military. One partial exception is the so-called “Ukrainian Legion” in Poland — but it targets Ukrainian citizens, not Poles. Legal hurdles persist in Ukraine itself. Foreigners were first allowed to serve as officers in the Ukrainian military starting only from fall 2024, and any foreigner applying to join the AFU, National Guard, or State Special Transport Service must also pass a complex screening process that includes a polygraph test.
Ukraine is unlikely to replicate Russia’s use of North Korean forces, who played a widely publicized role in Moscow’s efforts to drive Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk Region. Pyongyang sent well-coordinated and fully trained units of its regular army, complete with their own officers and ready to function as combat-ready formations from day one. It is clear that no Western ally is willing to send its own troops — not even under the nominal label of “volunteers” — due to domestic political risks and the threat of direct confrontation with Russia.
How is the West responding to volunteer recruitment efforts?
As early as March 2022, the justice ministers of Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Luxembourg issued a joint statement urging their citizens not to join Ukraine’s International Legion. Since then, Western policy experts have continued to publish analytical articles (1, 2, 3, 4) warning about the potential dangers posed by foreign nationals fighting for Ukraine.
The return of such individuals to their home countries is widely viewed as a serious security risk, with many drawing direct — albeit questionable — parallels to the return of Islamic State militants from the Middle East. According to some reports, a number of these Ukraine-bound volunteers are associated with various extremist ideologies — with one article describing them as “far-right versions of al-Qaeda.” Even if these fears are exaggerated, large-scale participation in foreign conflicts tends to foster informal networks of battle-hardened individuals with shared values, which can evolve into criminal enterprises or paramilitary political groups. This pattern has been seen among Russian veterans of post-Soviet conflicts who later became core members of separatist militias in eastern Ukraine — and in the mercenary Wagner Group.
In the European context, experts frequently point to German neo-Nazis who fought alongside Croatian forces during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and later returned to Germany, where they established far-right groups involved in activities that included smuggling weapons from the Balkans.
Whether such fears are truly justified is difficult to determine. Even if recruitment were limited to Europe and North America, and even if a large number of volunteers — say, 200,000 to 300,000 — signed up, this would still represent a minuscule fraction of the nearly one billion people living in those regions and would likely have no measurable impact on local crime rates.
In any case, not a single one of Ukraine’s allied countries has launched an organized effort to recruit volunteers. In fact, in many of them, existing legal frameworks explicitly forbid citizens from taking part in armed conflicts abroad — with no exceptions made for the war in Ukraine.
In February 2022, then-UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss publicly supported citizens who wished to travel to Ukraine to fight against Russia. But her remarks were met with immediate backlash, with critics pointing to the UK’s aforementioned 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act.
In many other countries, joining a foreign military — including Ukraine’s — requires a complex legal process similar to obtaining a special license. In the Czech Republic, for example, the president has to personally authorize such a request. Between the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion and November 2024, authorities received 181 of these applications; only 60 were approved. Those who go to Ukraine without permission must later request a legal pardon — an “abolition” — from both the president and the prime minister.
So far, prosecutions of foreign volunteers who joined the AFU remain rare — and cases of those individuals being deported to Russia are even rarer.