In the opening salvos of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Kyiv issued a worldwide plea for volunteers. Among those to answer the call were dozens of Lithuanians. But how many of them, and who, have reached the frontlines?
In early October, Ukrainian forces entered the occupied Kharkiv region. Soon after, a video appeared showing Ukrainian troops burning Russian flags and posing in front of the re-captured administration building. Next to the blue-yellow patches, however, they also wore the Lithuanian tricolour on their chests and arms.
This was the first footage confirming that Lithuanian volunteers were not merely involved in training Ukrainian troops but were also fighting on the frontlines.
Vytautas, not his real name, is one of them.
Like most other Lithuanian volunteers, he shies away from cameras, refusing to be photographed. Only after multiple persuasions and a nudge from a friend, another Lithuanian legionnaire, Vytautas agrees to an interview.
We meet at a cafe in Kyiv. He arrives walking with a slight limp, nursing a wound he had sustained at the frontline. Vytautas still has weeks of recovery to go before he can head back out.
Vytautas has seen months of combat, most recently during the Kharkiv counteroffensive. Serving with the Ukrainian special forces, they were often the first to enter occupied towns and villages, staging ambushes, gathering intelligence, and prepping the ground for the bulk of the forces to make their assault.
During those routine missions, often at night, they have run head-first into the Russian army. Close combat ensued.
“You don’t want to kill him, you want him to lay down his weapon and stop fighting so that he surrenders and stays alive,” he says. In one such encounter, they “managed to talk two Russians into surrendering”.
“It’s a good feeling at that moment. First of all, you remained alive. At the same time, [taking Russians prisoners] is the best trophy as a Lithuanian – both historically and personally. Like catching a big fish.”
The other Russians were gunned down.
“He fires first and then you have no chance [to convince him to surrender], you have no more questions,” Vytautas adds.
He describes seeing a silhouette, before firing a series of shots. “And then I saw how he...,” Vytautas pauses for a second, looking out the window. He doesn’t finish the sentence.
While speaking, he often jumps between seemingly contradictory arguments, his sentences peppered with pauses and curt statements. Seemingly, he embodies the duality displayed by many of those who fight in Ukraine – trying to conceal pain but being barely able to gulp down emotions when speaking about deaths, as well as the killings.
“Yes, you think about the [psychological side], you think a lot, more than you should, more than you did before. There are many thoughts.”
“I spoke to one Lithuanian who knows what war is, what it is like to fight, what problems soldiers have after missions. People cannot live with it after, [and] I think Ukrainians will need a lot of psychological support. To speak with a professional psychologist, if he is available, is very good.”
“But it’s not very good when someone tries to draw information out of you. You need to understand yourself that you need support,” Vytautas adds. “Soldiers don’t want to [help each other], they are closed up.”
Ukraine’s Health Ministry expects about 15 million people will require psychological support after the war, including the soldiers.
Sipping borscht, Vytautas goes back to the moment he was injured.
“We were on the street among the first [who entered the city]. We cleared one building, and we had to go around these garages to take a look. You check the door, open it, see what’s inside. And there was [a Russian soldier], he was hiding somewhere else entirely, waiting.”
Vytautas took a bullet in the abdomen, just below the armour plate. A few centimetres up and he would have been fine. But a centimetre down, as the medics would later tell him, and he would have died.
“I had two medics at that time [in the unit]. One couldn’t do anything at that moment, he simply froze. Luckily, I had another medic.”
He was evacuated to the nearest field hospital. Then, taken to Kharkiv, the regional capital.
“There were many people who immediately started asking if I needed anything. They have everything at the hospital – from clothes to medicines, to additional food.”
Although volunteers offered to take him to Lithuania for treatment, he refused, saying he receives all the help he needs in Ukraine.
In Vilnius, he would not qualify for the same treatment and rehabilitation programmes offered to the Lithuanian military. As one volunteer recently found out, they have to pay themselves for extensive treatment at home.
Now, Vytautas is recovering in Kyiv, which is also bringing him face to face with a different reality, one where war has entered the everyday realm.
“There is that moment when you start thinking – why? Why can’t people live like in Lithuania, relaxed, simply being able to walk around in the streets, where there is no alarm? You sleep well when you come home, you can plan half a year ahead, maybe go on a holiday.”
“Nothing like this exists here, you don’t relax here.”
Lithuanian Legion
It’s difficult to measure Lithuania’s impact on the battlefield. Although the country is small, it has punched above its weight in providing weapons and aid. In terms of volunteer fighters, however, citizens from a population of just 2.8 million people are seemingly few and far in between.
A Lithuanian volunteer, who recently gave an interview to Delfi TV in Vilnius, said some 40 Lithuanian soldiers were serving in Ukraine, but only 14 remain in the country. Three of them were recently injured, leaving just 11 still in the fight.
According to testimonies of other foreign volunteers, seeing the reality of combat has pushed a large chunk of the legionnaires to turn back. Although Ukraine’s losses are kept secret, the death toll has decimated ranks of individual units, including among the legionnaires.
“In my unit, there were several other Lithuanians. Now, they are no longer here. Also Latvians, Estonians. You can feel like they are people close to you, [...] you understand each other well,” Vytautas says.
Meanwhile, the first real attempt to organise – and showcase – Lithuanians fighting in Ukraine is a Facebook group and an NGO, Lietuvių Legionas (Lithuanian Legion).
“We use this group for communication. We all have our units, but we still meet because they may need some help, or simply visit each other,” says Vytautas.
It’s not a single unit but a platform to make sure they are visible, which also helps gather donations to buy equipment, gear, and vehicles.
As of November, their group on Facebook has profiled at least ten different Lithuanian soldiers serving in Ukraine and has attracted a following of 4,000 people.
But despite the cultural proximity, Vytautas, as well as yet another volunteer, who is serving together with several more Lithuanian nationals in a different Ukrainian unit, said they preferred to stay with locals.
“It’s completely different to work with Ukrainians and Lithuanians. They [Ukrainians] know the country, this is their home,” says Vytautas. “When you work with them, you feel more like fish in the water.”
Experience and motivation are other factors, according to Vytautas.
“You can see that the person knows what he’s doing. He is fighting since 2014, and he shows you a map and says – we will do this and that, if it goes badly, we will do it like this. He can see a few steps ahead.”
“You can see how the Ukrainians are fighting, how many injured there are, how many are killed, and you know that you don’t have a choice. You need to go and do the work because they also have no other choice,” adds Vytautas.
'You can feel respect'
According to sources in Kyiv, Lithuanian officials have little understanding of how many volunteers from the country have joined the fight in Ukraine.
There have also been calls from some politicians to provide better support, but nothing concrete has happened so far. The topic is delicate because it may be seen as the country entering the war directly.
But “I think Lithuania is involved from the very beginning”, says Vytautas.
“If a president can meet with the president [of Ukraine], maybe someone could come to meet with Lithuanian soldiers. There could be support with resources, as there aren’t that many Lithuanians here anyway,” he adds.
All volunteers have to sign up via Ukrainian institutions or by first visiting the country’s embassy. Thus, only Ukraine has the true picture of how many volunteers from each country have arrived to fight.
Besides claiming in March that over 20,000 people have applied, Ukraine has kept the exact figures of foreign legionnaires under wraps.
“All the time, when you speak with someone in the hospital or in different military units, you can feel respect [that you are Lithuanian], an honest thank you that you came here,” says Vytautas. “Because they understand that there are people in Ukraine who are trying to avoid service or do not want to fight. And you came here by your initiative.”
Another reason to go public is to encourage more Lithuanians to join the fight.
“We saw the message from [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky that they need help and you can come. Maybe some have doubts, but we could still get them to come. I think there are still people who could come [to fight].”
Lithuanian legionnaires 'invisible'
One Lithuanian volunteer, however, does hold a grudge for the alleged lack of support from Lithuania.
“Lithuania helps Ukraine, everything is fine... but us, Lithuanian legionnaires, are somewhere on the invisible sidelines, as if we weren’t fighting in Ukraine,” Rimas Armaitis, call-name Diedas (Old Man), writes on Facebook.
He comments on an image posted by the Lithuanian defence minister, which shows the country’s armed forces handing over SUVs to Ukraine. “Sometimes you get the feeling we are enemies to Lithuania,” writes Rimas.
He is serving with the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment in Ukraine, a Belarusian unit fighting against Russian forces. A small band of Lithuanians is also among them.
Rimas also directs criticism toward retired members of the Lithuanian military. They have tried to invite former officers to at least help train the locals, not necessarily join the fight, he says. But so far, their efforts have been in vain.
In early October, Rimas returned to Vilnius for a short trip, the first since he began fighting in Ukraine in early March. We met for a chat.
“Everything is nice on Facebook, but in war, it is all different. When someone says that the Ukrainians are doing everything very well, [...] no one is talking about the price. When you inflict losses [on the Russians], the same thing happens to you.”
Rimas served 20 years in Lithuania’s anti-terrorist police unit, ARAS, as an explosives specialist. He built up his experience working during the mafia-ridden era of the 90s, complete with car bombings and assassinations.
As Lithuania was entering NATO, they were being trained by professionals from future allies, including Germany, France, and the United States. Now, he is transferring the same expertise to the Ukrainians.
“I haven’t met a Ukrainian who would say that I was forced to fight,” he says, adding that wherever they go, they are approached by soldiers asking for training to learn new skills.
“We see their motivation. They approach us themselves,” he says.
Although initially Rimas only planned to train Ukrainians in Kyiv, he eventually joined the fighting in southern and eastern Ukraine, clearing paths through minefields and dealing with explosives.
His operations rarely ended without a shot being fired. Many times, they were hit in the open by Russian artillery.
“We finished [demining] one road and started to head out, but we missed a drone above. We’ve been spotted. Shelling began, we had time only to lay down.”
A shell landed on the road between Rimas and another soldier. The ditch saved Rimas from injuries but left the other man with a concussion.
“I will not forget this explosion until the day I die,” Rimas adds.
The injured man was urged to seek treatment but he refused, saying he needed to complete the mission. “And he died during the operation. A high-calibre bullet hit him, he died on the spot.”
During such operations, Russian shelling wreaks havoc among the light infantry and scouts, the main roles of foreign legionnaires. The fields and steppes of southern and eastern Ukraine provide few options for cover.
“If you are in the trenches, you got lucky. If not, if you went out on reconnaissance where there are no trenches and your [map] square gets covered in cluster bombs, that’s it. No one from that group will come back. There have been many such cases, but no one speaks about it, no one shows it.”
Rimas has lost a number of comrades and friends in the months of fighting.
“During the last battle, we lost a 25-year-old. Our losses were one killed and five or seven injured. From the American group [next to us] – one killed and around seven injured, two very seriously,” says Rimas.
The small American group of legionnaires had practically ceased to exist. “Maybe five people remained from their small group [of legionnaires],” he says.
As Rimas is 55 years old, many of his fellow soldiers, often merely in their 20s, look up to him.
“It’s difficult for me, when in many cases they look at me like some sort of a god, as if you have an answer in every situation. But there are cases when you don’t know yourself and think, what should I do now.”
Ukrainian troops can head to their families for days or a week at a time. For the Lithuanian volunteers, however, home is too far for a routine break. This leaves them facing burnouts and dealing with traumatic effects alone.
“When you stay there [at the frontlines] for a long time, you start going crazy, your speech becomes slurred or you start having trouble speaking.”
The first time he saw the effects of PTSD was when one soldier, after recently returning from the frontline, suddenly dropped to the floor and started shaking. Only medics were able to bring him out of that state, says Rimas.
The other, less visible effect, is being mentally stuck at the frontline.
“When they are constantly on the frontline, they cannot come back. When you stay there for a long time without rotation, you go back to civilian life, where no one is shooting, you don’t need to count explosions, you feel like you are missing something, you feel like you are not in your place.”
“The people who stay there for a long time, cannot come back. And I have doubts they will ever come back from that war.”
In the end, this leads to them “taking too many risks”, which may lead to the deaths of everyone in their units.
To survive, you need to know “the system”.
“It’s the same as in civilian life – you can cross the road when the red light is on, but you will run out of luck eventually,” says Rimas. “There are certain rules that you need to adhere to – if you keep breaking them, you will be killed sooner or later. If you heed them, there is a chance you will survive.”
“[But] if we keep having such casualties, if we continue losing that many people in every Ukrainian village as we are doing now, then our own [legion] will be wiped out.”
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