Our name is not Legion: Why so few foreign volunteers are fighting for Ukraine

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.