Ukraine’s ‘Foreign Legion’ Appeal- 27 February 2022 18:16 (GMT+2)
In the early hours of Sunday, an appeal and statement* from Volodymyr Zelensky was published on the President of Ukraine’s website calling any foreigners who wanted to join Ukraine to help protect the country – “Anyone who wants to join the defence of Ukraine, Europe and the world can come and fight side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals.”
This was echoed in an earlier address on Saturday by the President calling for “every friend of Ukraine who wants to join Ukraine in defending the country please come over, we will give you weapons.”
Dmytro Kuleba, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine further added on his official Twitter account:
“Foreigners willing to defend Ukraine and world order as part of the International Legion of Territorial Defence of Ukraine, I invite you to contact foreign diplomatic missions of Ukraine in your respective countries. Together we defeated Hitler, and we will defeat Putin, too.”
All of this is in line to a 2016 decree published by Ukraine which stated the right for foreigners to join the Ukrainian army as long as this was on a voluntary basis according to president Zelensky.
Some 22,000 individuals crossed from Poland in Ukraine alone to help the fighting efforts.
Furthermore, the appeal quickly circulated on Reddit’s “volunteersForUkraine” forum which saw hundreds of responses from nationals from as far as the US wanting to join Ukraine’s forces.
Liz Truss, the UK foreign secretary stated her support for individuals from the UK willing and wanting to go to Ukraine. This was in an unprecedented turn of events, as in the past Britons wanting to travel abroad to defend other countries were warned about possible prosecution if they had decided to do so. Such was in the case of Syria in 2014.
*The presidential website is currently down and showing an error message