The International Volunteer: Ukraine’s Most Exotic Import
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 4 October 2026
There are many strange things in wartime Ukraine. There are coffee shops operating during air raids, pensioners calmly walking tiny dogs while explosions reverberate somewhere beyond the ring road, soldiers ordering sushi, electricity disappearing halfway through dinner and returning just in time for the bill, and bartenders who regard an air-raid siren as principally an instruction to turn the music up. Yet amongst all the curiosities produced by the war, perhaps none is quite so fascinating as the international volunteer.
I do not mean the ordinary foreigner who comes to Ukraine for a few weeks, takes photographs beside sandbags, writes solemn things on social media and returns to Brussels. Nor do I mean the professional humanitarian employee equipped with a lanyard, risk assessment, hostile-environment training certificate and an expense policy so complicated that it may constitute a second Geneva Convention. I mean the people who actually stay: the foreigners who somehow find themselves living in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Dnipro, Odesa or Kyiv, volunteering with military units, driving elderly people out of villages, carrying medical supplies towards places sensible people are leaving, feeding abandoned animals or doing some other improbable thing that their former schoolteachers could never possibly have predicted. These people are, almost without exception, extremely unusual.
This should hardly surprise us. Consider the selection mechanism. Imagine assembling one thousand perfectly normal inhabitants of Britain, America, France, Germany, Canada or Japan and informing them that there is an active war in Eastern Europe. Missiles fall on cities. Drones explode into apartment blocks. There are mines in fields, checkpoints on roads, occasional electricity shortages and, depending upon where one goes, the evening entertainment may include listening carefully to determine whether the explosion one has just heard was outgoing or incoming. Nine hundred and ninety-nine people will say, “Good heavens.” The thousandth will say, “How do I get there?” That is your international volunteer.
The first important thing to understand is that the international volunteer has usually experienced what might politely be called an unconventional life trajectory. Nobody wakes up after twenty-seven contented years working in middle management for an insurance company in Swindon, surrounded by a loving family, a sensible pension scheme and an immaculate herbaceous border, and suddenly thinks: “I wonder whether the Ukrainian military needs another pair of hands near Zaporizhzhia.” There is normally a backstory, and the backstory is seldom short.
Ask an international volunteer what he did before Ukraine and you may discover that he was successively a carpenter in Oregon, a nightclub bouncer in Prague, a theology student in Belgium, a commercial diver in Indonesia and briefly the owner of a ferret sanctuary in rural Wales. There will be an unexplained three-year period in South America. He may mention Afghanistan but decline to elaborate. There is frequently an ex-wife somewhere, and sometimes there are several. At least one government department in his home country may have a file bearing his name, although not necessarily for sinister reasons. Then, somehow, he came to Ukraine.
The explanation for this decision can range from the profoundly admirable to the magnificently incomprehensible. Some came because they genuinely believed that Ukraine was defending principles worth defending: national independence, democratic government and the right of smaller countries not to be invaded by larger ones. Some possessed military or medical skills and concluded, reasonably enough, that these might be useful. Some had Ukrainian friends or relatives. Some saw Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol on television and decided that watching from the sofa was insufficient. Others appear to have arrived because conventional civilian life had rejected them like an incompatible organ transplant.
Ukraine possesses an extraordinary capacity to absorb people who do not quite fit anywhere else. In peacetime London or Chicago, the man who owns four tactical backpacks, sleeps happily on floors, speaks conversational Georgian for reasons nobody understands and regards a seven-hour bus journey as “not too bad” may struggle to find his social niche. In wartime Ukraine he is suddenly useful. Somebody needs antibiotics delivered to Sloviansk. Somebody else knows a guy with a van. Another guy knows a guy who knows where diesel can be obtained. Within twenty minutes our eccentric has acquired a mission, three telephone numbers, a plate of borshch and possibly a cat.
This last point is important because international volunteers and Ukrainian animals seem mysteriously attracted to one another. A battle-hardened former infantryman who can discuss artillery calibres with unnerving fluency may become emotionally paralysed by the discovery of a hungry kitten beneath a parked car. The same man who regards incoming shellfire as an occupational inconvenience will spend forty minutes attempting to persuade a suspicious tabby to eat half a sausage. The cat generally wins, because in Ukraine the cat generally wins everything.
Perhaps this is because war does peculiar things to the hierarchy of human emotions. Once one has encountered enough large horrors, small acts of kindness acquire disproportionate importance. Feeding a stray dog does not stop a missile. Delivering medicine to one elderly woman does not change the front line. Making coffee for exhausted soldiers does not alter the geopolitical balance between Russia and NATO. Yet these tiny things remain within the realm of individual control, and therefore they become precious.
This is where the international volunteer ceases to be merely funny, because many of them are damaged people. That observation should not be interpreted as an insult. Human beings acquire damage merely by living, and war accelerates the process considerably. Some volunteers arrived with wounds that Ukraine did not cause. Some came partly because whatever they had left behind no longer felt like home. Others arrived comparatively intact and accumulated their ghosts here. The peculiar danger is that wartime Ukraine can make an extraordinary amount of sense to people for whom ordinary life never made very much sense at all.
In peaceful societies, existence is cluttered with ambiguities. One attends meetings about future meetings. One answers emails about documents nobody will read. Corporations invent “strategic priorities” that change every quarter. People become anxious about whether somebody has used the wrong tone in a WhatsApp message. An entire afternoon can disappear because a printer refuses to acknowledge the existence of A4 paper. War is horrific, but it can also be brutally clarifying.
A village needs food, and you have food, so you take it there. A wounded man needs evacuation, and there is a vehicle, so you put him in it. A family needs somewhere to sleep, so you find them somewhere. A cat is hungry, so you feed the cat. For certain personalities, this terrible simplicity can become almost intoxicating. Their lives suddenly have immediate consequences, and nobody asks them to prepare a PowerPoint presentation explaining the key performance indicators associated with rescuing an old woman from an artillery zone. There is no quarterly appraisal. Nobody from Human Resources sends an anonymous survey asking whether they feel sufficiently engaged with the organisation’s mission. The mission is standing in front of them.
This also explains why international volunteers can be absolutely unbearable. Spend enough time amongst them and you will encounter magnificent quantities of ego, paranoia, rivalry and theatrical nonsense. Every volunteer community eventually produces somebody who claims mysterious connections with intelligence services, somebody who insists that everyone else is an intelligence agent, somebody who wears military clothing despite never having served in any military, somebody who has actually served in several militaries and never mentions it, and somebody who begins every third sentence with the words “I probably shouldn’t tell you this”. He then tells you, usually before you have had the opportunity to ask him not to.
Volunteer circles generate rumours at industrial scale. Somebody has stolen money. Somebody has slept with somebody else’s girlfriend. Somebody is secretly working for the Russians. Somebody has been banned from Poland. Somebody has three passports. Somebody has been arrested in Moldova. Somebody claims to know Zelensky. Somebody else claims Zelensky knows him. A third person says both are lying and produces seventeen screenshots from Telegram as evidence. By midnight everyone hates everyone else, but at 7.30 the following morning they are loading humanitarian supplies into the same van.
This contradiction is essential to understanding them. International volunteers are rarely saints, although occasionally one encounters somebody who appears determined to try. They are human beings operating under unusual pressures in an environment that rewards initiative, courage and improvisation while simultaneously magnifying vanity, recklessness and psychological instability. The qualities that make someone sufficiently unconventional to travel voluntarily towards a war are not necessarily the qualities that make them easy company at breakfast. Indeed, the truly surprising international volunteer would be the perfectly balanced one.
Imagine him: emotionally serene, financially prudent, happily married, entirely free of substance problems, possessing no complicated relationship with authority, uninterested in danger, psychologically untouched by previous experiences and blessed with a flourishing career waiting patiently for him at home. Such a man might exist somewhere in Ukraine, but I have not met him. Instead one meets people whose lives resemble novels rejected by publishers for implausibility.
They have crossed continents, changed professions, survived accidents, married catastrophically, fought in obscure conflicts, started charities, lost fortunes, acquired inexplicable languages and accumulated friends in countries most people cannot locate on a map. They tell these stories casually over coffee while the air-raid siren sounds outside. Then something explodes, nobody moves and the conversation continues with the solemn question of whether another round of beer should be ordered.
This may be the point at which the foreign visitor finally understands why these people are here. They are unusual because Ukraine itself, under the conditions of war, has become a magnet for unusualness. The ordinary social sorting mechanisms of peaceful countries have temporarily ceased to apply. Here the eccentric can become indispensable, the restless can discover purpose and the person who never fitted comfortably into ordinary society may suddenly discover an environment in which his peculiar collection of skills makes perfect sense. There is something both beautiful and dangerous about this.
War should never be romanticised. It kills the interesting along with the dull, the brave along with the frightened and the generous along with the selfish. The fact that some people discover meaning amid catastrophe does not make catastrophe desirable. Nor should every eccentric foreigner who arrives in Ukraine automatically be considered heroic. Ukraine has attracted adventurers, fantasists, opportunists and occasional outright crooks alongside people of tremendous courage and generosity. Yet perhaps that is inevitable, because a country undergoing an event as enormous as this war becomes a stage upon which every variety of human character appears in exaggerated form. The courageous become astonishingly courageous. The dishonest discover extraordinary new opportunities for dishonesty. The mad become spectacularly mad. The kind become almost unbearably kind.
And through all of this wander the international volunteers. You see them in Kharkiv cafés wearing battered boots and drinking elaborate cappuccinos. You encounter them on trains carrying suspicious quantities of equipment. They appear in bars telling stories that begin plausibly and deteriorate rapidly. They rescue dogs, deliver generators, argue on Telegram, fall in love unwisely, acquire Ukrainian tattoos, lose their luggage, complain about bureaucracy, disappear towards the front and reappear three weeks later asking whether anyone knows a good dentist. They are occasionally infuriating, frequently ridiculous and sometimes magnificent, and perhaps that is precisely why they belong here.
Ukraine does not need foreigners to save it. Ukrainians have demonstrated quite conclusively that they are capable of saving themselves. Rather, there is something reassuring about the fact that, when one country was subjected to an enormous act of violence, scattered individuals from thousands of kilometres away looked at the situation and made the objectively insane decision that it had somehow become their problem too. Normal people sent money. Very sensible people sent thoughts and prayers. Governments sent diplomatic notes. International volunteers bought one-way tickets.
Somewhere tonight in Kharkiv, while an air-raid siren screams over the city and the bartender continues polishing glasses with magnificent indifference, there is probably an American former barista discussing combat engineering with a British lawyer, a Japanese humanitarian feeding somebody’s abandoned cat and a Canadian whom nobody quite understands explaining that he knows a guy who can get hold of a generator. This is completely absurd, gloriously human and, in its own peculiar way, one of the reasons Ukraine survives.
