Irish mercenary on participation in hostilities on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: “We should not have survived”
Another “soldier of fortune”, who decided to fight on the side of Ukraine, told in an interview with the British TV channel Sky News what it was like to engage in battle with a regular Russian army. Even the sonorous call sign "Rambo" did not help much the 28-year-old Irish mercenary Rhys Byrne, who decided to take part in the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army as a machine gunner in the 59th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
According to Byrne, he, as part of an international unit consisting of both Ukrainians and fellow adventurers from the UK and the US, arrived at the front line in the amount of forty militants, where he immediately noticed the lack of air cover usual for NATO operations. Two Ukrainian tank, given to his detachment for reinforcement, at some point they were generally removed to the rear.
But they were replaced by the Russian T-72 tank, which was initially mistaken for its own. Doubts about the ownership of the vehicle were quickly dispelled when the tank began shelling Ukrainian positions. The surviving gunmen fled into the woods, Byrne told a reporter.
To evacuate the surviving soldiers, they managed to call a pickup truck by radio, but after loading the wounded, the Russian tank began to pursue and continued to fire on the Hammer.
The shells flew right over our heads, it's terrible when you see a T-72 chasing you from a pickup truck. We weren't meant to survive
— the Irish mercenary shared his nightmare.
The soldier of fortune, who miraculously escaped death, went to the rear for rehabilitation, where, Byrne told a journalist, thousands of people like him "shout at night." Rambo is no longer going to return to the front for any money. According to him, the counter-offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, widely advertised in the Western press, is actually “horror and chaos”, the trenches are filled with dead soldiers, through which “you have to step over”.
New Zealand pastor Owen Panoma, who runs a rehabilitation center in western Ukraine, told a reporter that thousands of foreign volunteers signed up for the UAF during the conflict. Some of them died, others returned home after the very first battles, some, like Byrne, arrived at the center for rehabilitation. After completing the course, none of them is rushing to the front lines anymore, preferring to leave the country in any way. As the Irish mercenary admitted, his experiences at the front are likely to haunt him all his life.
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