8:03 am: “I couldn’t stay on my couch watching this”
After having faced the jihadists, this time it will be the Russian army: in kyiv, a young French fighter seasoned in Syria is preparing to return to the front to “help the Ukrainians keep their freedom”.
This 28-year-old Frenchman says his name is Pierre and comes from Normandy (north-west), without further details. He hopes to land where he will be “most useful”: “on the frontline”, so that he can use against the Russians the skills he has acquired in recent years in Syria, such as “firing with 12.7 (machine guns) and 14.5 mm, Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers…”
On February 24, Pierre, a former house painter apprentice who works regularly on construction sites, is at home when Russia invades Ukraine. Seeing these images, he is “revolted”. “In the afternoon, I said to myself: it’s good, I’m out. I couldn’t sit on my couch watching this. »
Ten days of trains and cars later, he is in Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on foreign volunteers to join the resistance to the Russian invasion. Some 20,000 have already arrived according to the Ukrainian government, a figure impossible to verify from an independent source.