'When I got here, I realized that everything I had done in Afghanistan wasn't just wasted effort. It was preparing me for this,' U.K. volunteer tells Newsweek.
Former British soldier Shareef Amin walks with a limp, the result of injuries sustained to three limbs by Russian tank fire, mortar rounds, and bullets during the successful Ukrainian effort to liberate the city of Kherson last fall. Just under one year after being dragged off the battlefield by his Ukrainian comrades, Amin is capable of nearly winning a footrace along the trolley tracks on the eastern edge of Lviv's Market Square.
"I remember thinking that we were going to cross the border and suddenly there would be Russians there shooting at us," he said."Instead, we had to cover our faces because there were so many members of the media looking for stories about foreigners coming to fight." "We spent two weeks with the Georgian Legion guys, and they were trying to get us to go to the front lines without contracts and without weapons," he said."They told us we'd be armed once we got there, but we refused."
"It's the first time anyone ever threw me a birthday party, and it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life," he recalled."They sang to me twice: once in the morning and once in the evening. They made me a cake. It was the first time I had borscht. Alcohol was illegal at the time, and so what we had was self-brewed."
"But in Ukraine," Amin continued,"it felt like we were now on the other side of that kind of battle, and a lot of American and British soldiers aren't used to being in a situation where, if you do get hit, you don't have an Apache coming in to get you out of there.""When you're on deployment with the British military for seven months, you're at war, war, war, war, war.
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