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Roving Periscope: Now, Russia, Ukraine invite ‘foreign fighters’ to join the war

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Virendra Pandit

 

New Delhi: Last week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the establishment of an international legion of volunteers to fight the war against Russia, thus prolonging the conflict and making it more expensive.

“This will be the key evidence of your support for our country,” he said.

On Friday, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin also green-signaled thousands of fighters from the Middle East to fight against Ukraine.

He assured the Russians that he will not send conscripts—able-bodied people forced to enlist in the war—to Ukraine, which has also banned the exodus of men, except children and old people, from the country along with refugees.

With this, the world is entering a new era of international volunteer guerrilla warfare in which stateless armed militia, unaccountable to any country, could interfere anywhere. Most of them are unprofessional soldiers, but some are also retired servicemen who often train them, and civilians, into the art of war.

Addressing a meeting of Russia’s Security Council, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the Middle East has 16,000 volunteers. They are ready to fight with Russian-backed forces in the breakaway Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

“If you see that there are these people who want, of their own accord, not for money, to come to help the people living in Donbas, then we need to give them what they want and help them get to the conflict zone,” Putin said, according to the media reports.

Shoigu also proposed that Western-made Javelin and Stinger missiles, captured by the Russian army in Ukraine, should be provided to the Donbas forces.

“Please do this,” Putin, who recognized the two breakaway territories as independent states prior to the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, told Shoigu.

Russia claims it was forced to announce the “special military operation” in Ukraine which it accused of Russian-speakers’ “genocide”, a pretext Kyiv and the West rejected as baseless war propaganda.

Shoigu said the Russian military planned to strengthen its western border after an ‘increase’ in the West’s military units on Russia’s border.

Following the call, volunteers from the Ukrainian diaspora and others flocked to the war-ravaged country. According to Zelenskyy, over 16,000 foreigners volunteered to fight in Ukraine in the first week of war itself. Soon, his Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said, the number soared to about 20,000. These fighters reportedly came from 52 countries, including the United States, Canada, Finland, Georgia, Sweden, the Czech Republic, France, Belgium, and Belarus.

Some leaders even endorsed their citizens to fight Russia in Ukraine. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss supported citizens “fighting for freedom and democracy not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe.”

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said, “It’s a choice that anyone can make. This goes for all Ukrainians who live here, but also for others who think they can contribute directly to the conflict.”

In the recent past, conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Syria, and Iraq witnessed the mobilization of thousands of foreign fighters.

But their entry into Ukraine has changed the war game. Russia could use their presence in Ukraine and endorsement by foreign leaders as evidence that NATO and its allies are engaged in the war. Volunteers have reportedly been assembling rapidly, at a far faster rate than even in 2014 in Syria and Iraq — the last major episode of an influx of foreign volunteers.

However, their entry into the Russian-Ukrainian war is fraught with risks. They may prolong the war and make it costlier for the two sides. In Chechnya and Syria, the influx of jihadi foreign fighters turned a nationalist cause into a religious one and gave a propaganda tool to their regimes to label all regime opposition as jihadi terrorists. The survivors returning home became battle-hardened fighters, putting to risk peace and order in their own countries.

After the rise of the Islamic State in 2014 in Iraq and Syria, the U.N. Security Council had adopted sweeping resolutions favoring efforts to prevent the recruitment and travel of foreign terrorist fighters. But it seems to have made little impact.