British volunteers shouldn’t be fighting in Ukraine

What’s going to happen to British volunteers captured while fighting Russian forces? According to Ukrainian analysts, there is intelligence to suggest that Russia is planning to parade them through Red Square. You read that correctly: Putin is planning to march 500 captured soldiers in the annual 9 May victory parades. Wasn’t this kind of thing always going to happen if British volunteers joined the Ukrainian war effort? And should Foreign Secretary Liz Truss really have said that she ‘absolutely’ backed anyone who travelled to the country to fight Russian troops?

Unprepared veterans and untrained civilians really aren’t that much help in the war effort. It’s difficult to co-ordinate in a high stress environment with people who can’t speak Ukrainian and are unfamiliar with the topology of the country. Instead, both the Russians and the Ukrainians see western fighters as a potential source of valuable propaganda. Earlier this month, Shaun Pinner, a former British soldier and volunteer, was captured in Mariupol and paraded on Russian state TV, regurgitating scripted Kremlin lines under duress and begging Boris Johnson to release him.