‘I was doing nothing at home’: the Chinese nationals fighting for Ukraine | Ukraine

IOne of the worst of the war, characterized by brutal attacks on civilians, took place on July 8, 2024. Russia’s missile attacks Killed at least 43 people in cities across Ukraine during one of the deadliest days of the war last year. One of the most shocking blows came to the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in central Kiev, which destroyed the country’s largest pediatric clinic.

Tim, 43, was distributing aid on the outskirts of Kiev when he heard a missile fly overhead. Shortly after, he saw the news on his phone that the children’s hospital had been hit. The Chinese national, who asked to be identified only by his English name, rushed to the scene with a British friend to help with rescue efforts. The father of two children, with tears in his eyes when he remembered this memory, said, “I started crying when I saw the severed limbs, some of which belonged to children.” “I thought about the kind of anger the Chinese have. Once it’s fired… It’s intense. I decided to join the army.”

More than a year later, Tim is designing drones for the army’s ground forces from his barracks in southern Ukraine. He is one of the few Chinese who have defied their government and mainstream public opinion by risking their lives to fight the invasion of Russia, Beijing’s most important geopolitical partner.

Tim arrived in Ukraine in July 2023. He had been watching anxiously from China for months, occasionally donating money to online fundraisers for relief efforts. But he wanted to do more. “I was unemployed in China at the time. I just wanted to go to Ukraine as a volunteer, see a country struggling with difficulties, and distribute the donations that many of my close friends gave me to help people in need.” So he applied for a business visa through an agency in China and embarked on the long journey west.

Like many Chinese volunteers, Tim is motivated by a combination of elements: Sympathy for the Ukrainian cause and growing despair at the direction of his own country. Before coming to Ukraine, the only country he visited other than China was Japan. But he had been thinking about emigrating for more than a decade.

Tim said of China: “Fifteen years ago you could see the problems, talk about them freely, and there would be people willing to discuss them.” But he feels those days are now behind him. He learned about the war in Ukraine by using a virtual private network (VPN) connection to watch videos on YouTube, which is blocked in China. “I never read the news on Chinese sites because all the news there is fake,” he said.

He traveled back and forth between Ukraine and China for a year, taking long and indirect routes with several stops each time, gradually coming to the conclusion that Ukraine had a “bright future”. Even though he was at war, people were friendly to him as a foreigner. He began making plans for his wife and children to join him, and the subsequent missile attack on the children’s hospital encouraged him to enlist.

Foreigners can serve in regular Ukrainian army units or in one of the two international legions. Kostyantyn Milevsky, a Ukrainian military officer in question We said in August that there were approximately 8,000 foreigners in the ground forces, and perhaps twice that number in the army overall. The Ukrainian military does not publish a detailed breakdown of the nationalities of international soldiers but many come from South America on salaries that can exceed $3,000 (£2,244) a month for the most dangerous missions. Basic income is close to $500 a month. Chinese volunteers in Ukraine estimate that at most a few dozen people from mainland China serve in the army.

The Chinese public’s views on Russia are complex. Some nationalists have never forgiven Tsarist Russia for annexing large territories from the Qing dynasty in the late 19th century, but China’s war in Ukraine was accompanied by aggressive propaganda from state media that blamed the United States for the crisis.

Beijing officially claims neutrality in the conflict and calls for peace. But Chinese President Xi Jinping has sided with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin throughout the war, and western analysts believe it will be very difficult for Moscow to continue fighting without China’s economic support. Bilateral trade between the two countries has risen to record levels since the 2022 invasion. China is not thought to provide direct military aid, but it does export components used to make weapons. such as fiber optic cablesincreased sharply. Components are also shipped to Ukraine, but at much lower levels.

Research by Tao Wang of the University of Manchester found that 80% of Chinese surveyed held pro-Russian views in the first year of the war, and as the war progressed “government-controlled media managed to influence public opinion in favor of Russia”.

But Wang said “a large portion of the Chinese population sympathizes with Ukraine, and this has been largely ignored.” People are often afraid to express such views openly because it is “seen as unorthodox.”

It’s not just ideology that draws people like Tim, an unemployed auto mechanic who left China in 2023, to the front lines. China is in the grip of an unemployment crisis that has fueled dissatisfaction with the government.

Fan, another Chinese volunteer whose name the Guardian withheld to protect his identity, also came to Ukraine to escape what appeared to be a hopeless future back home.

Until he left China earlier this year, the 39-year-old’s life in China consisted of “laying down properly,” he said, using the Chinese expression for passive unemployment. The pandemic had decimated his business ventures and he had fallen into debt of 3 million yuan (£314,000).

One day, while browsing Western social media, he read that the Chinese were fighting in Ukraine. He learned about Peng Chenliang, a Chinese volunteer from Yunnan province who served in the Foreign Legion and was killed during a combat operation on the eastern front in November 2024.

“I wasn’t actually doing anything at home… I felt like I couldn’t continue living such an ordinary life,” Fan said. He wanted to “make something that felt more meaningful.”

Chinese social media is full of videos selling the benefits of being a mercenary for Russia. After two Chinese citizens were captured while fighting on behalf of Moscow in the east of Donetsk in April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that more than 150 people had carried out the same action. There is no indication that China, which has refused to provide military aid to Russia, supports these mercenaries but has allowed the videos to spread over the country’s tightly controlled internet.

Fan told ChatGPT that it was much harder to find information on how to fight for Ukraine. He eventually found his way to a recruiting office in Lviv, leaving his wife and daughter in China. With no military experience but a hobby of playing with drones, he was deployed as a drone operator on the front line in eastern Ukraine, but the language barrier caused him to retreat from the war zone. He now spends his days guarding a warehouse. “It can be a little lonely,” he said. But he spends his time practicing Ukrainian on his phone.

Fan is not an overtly political person. But he still felt China’s crackdown on civil society was tightening, especially since the outbreak. In addition to suffering financially, he said he has seen many of his favorite bloggers persecuted or detained on charges such as “picking quarrels and causing trouble,” a blanket term used to target anyone the authorities don’t like. “Many ordinary people ended up being treated unfairly just by expressing views that did not align with mainstream opinion in China on live broadcasts or personal platforms,” he said.

“I’m almost 40 years old and I’ve never voted in my life… The government never listens to the voices of ordinary people. I don’t want my child to grow up in such an environment.”

Fan has yet to figure out how to get the rest of his family to Ukraine, but returning to China could be dangerous. Chinese law does not specifically prohibit citizens from joining foreign militaries unless it poses a threat to China’s national security, but many fear punishment. Brunko, another Chinese soldier who wanted to be known by his call sign in Ukraine, said that the Chinese national security police questioned his family about him.

Tim sees his time in Ukraine serving many goals. When asked why he would risk his life for another country, he said that his main goal was to build a new life for himself and his family in Europe. “Second, I want to show the world that there are many Chinese people like me. I want the world not to give up on China,” he said. “Don’t always associate China with negative things. In fact, there are many good people and many positive ideas in China.”

Additional research by Lillian Yang and Jason Tzu Kuan Lu