British Mercenary Condemns Widespread Theft, Corruption & Desertion Among Ukrainian Forces

In a wide-ranging discussion with a YouTube host, a former British soldier has described shocking levels of graft at his assigned military base, widespread desertion by his fellow mercenaries, and extraordinary incompetence by Zelensky regime forces.

A mercenary from the UK who fought on the side of the Kiev regime denounced the theft of multiple “trucks full of weapons and ammo” by Ukrainian militants in an interview published this week.

“We had two trucks with 84 M4s, 12 SCAR-Heavies… a couple of Javelins, and some M240-Bravo’s, and an absolute truck full of ammo – [which] just went missing in the convoy,” complained British mercenary Joseph McDonald in an interview with YouTuber Nikolas Lloyd.

“These vehicles just disappeared as this convoy was in transit.”

McDonald recently returned to Ukraine after having engaged in hostilities against Russian troops since March; however, he previously left the battlefield after contracting Lyme disease. This week, he appeared on the Lindybeige YouTube channel in an attempt to justify his absence from the combat theater.

Casting doubt on the idea that such a theft was the responsibility of “some random pair of happy-go-lucky, opportunistic, g*psy thieves… who just saw these two trucks and popped into it,” McDonald notes that “‘in Ukraine there’s a roadblock sodding everywhere.”

“Every 5 kilometers maximum there’s another road block with some troops, and at any one of these, they can stop you and check your ID. And if you drive in a truck full of military stuff they’re almost certain to,” the former UK soldier explained.

“So how these two ‘random mystery thieves’ got away with two trucks full of weapons and ammo, and just disappeared into the ether, I don’t know,” McDonald added. “But they were very lucky, if that’s actually how it happened — which is the official explanation of how a whole company’s worth of Western weapons went missing.”

“There was an awful lot of looting going on” when McDonald arrived, the former soldier claimed. “Like, a lot of looting.”

“It appears a lot of people who came to volunteer for the Ukrainians were also kleptomaniacs – or just total gits – who’d gone there with the intention of plunder. That was a problem that the legion kept having for several months: people who’d turned up to go on the rob.”

McDonald painted a disturbing picture of his time fighting in Ukraine – one which stood in stark contrast to the optimistic portrait of victorious Ukrainian forces which prevails in Western media.

The mercenary described the serious problems which he witnessed as a natural consequence of the “no-vetting, sign up, we’ll take anyone, free-for-all” attitude imposed by the Zelensky regime, noting the strategy “drew up a lot of undesirable types.”

His journey through the proxy war battlescape in Ukraine reportedly kicked off with a Russian missile strike directed at his military base and quickly converged with the notorious Georgian Legion, a ‘volunteer battalion’ in Ukraine best known internationally for recording its executions of surrendering Russian soldiers.

According to McDonald, his military base at Yavoriv (near the Polish border) came under fire from Russian missiles early on in the conflict, and his group ultimately ended up wielding weapons “looted” from Ukrainian supplies by the Georgian Legion – “who were there with us [were] not the most uniform and regimented group of guys,” he adds.

The “quite pirate-y” Georgian Legion “decided in the midst of the attack” on the Yavoriv base “that they didn’t like being unarmed,” and ripped open a shipping-container-turned-armory open, McDonald says.

“And me and my NCO, Chris, [told them] ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be doing that. Stop doing that, we’re all gonna get in trouble!’ And they turned around and sort of hissed and growled at us like a pack of hyenas.”

But the Kiev regime’s apparent incompetence didn’t stop there.

“Then… just as it went dark – to give any aerial enemy maximum chance of spotting the lights on your vehicle – they’re like, ‘Right, we’re gonna go in a big convoy of buses with police cars escorting us with the blue lights strobing,’ and we’re like ‘We’re all going to die, aren’t we?’”

The widespread Ukrainian ineptitude sparked a wave of Westerns forsaking Kiev’s cause, per McDonald.

“There was a thing called ‘The Great Desertion’ in this time… where about 600, 700 people either went home or went off to join some other unit or some other militia in Ukraine that they thought would be better – that they thought would give them all their equipment straight away and would allow them to shoot lots of Russians without ever getting shelled.”

Now, McDonald says, such an idea “seems to be a fantasy that sadly a lot of people have entertained when they volunteered in Ukraine — that there’s a ‘sweet spot’ of the war where you can just go ‘pew, pew, pew’ and shoot the Russians, and you won’t be getting horribly shelled and mortared and fired at by tanks and cluster bombs.”

McDonald underscores that no such “sweet spot” exists. “If you’re fighting the Russians, you’re getting horribly shelled. No one gets the ‘Call of Duty’ experience. The artillery strike is on all the time.”

The constant artillery-based harassment seems to be a big part of the reason that McDonald was one of many foreign mercenaries who ended up less than impressed with the fighting capabilities of his American counterparts.

“There’ve been 20 years of Afghanistan,” he noted. “No one’s had to make a fire over there. You just go back to Camp Bastion everyday and eat from a nice canteen. Or a McDonalds, or a KFC in a big truck in the desert.”

“A lot of the Americans, the only way to describe them is spoiled. It’s very easy to be the best army in the world when you can get an F-16 to go and blow up a mortar team on a hillside. I heard one of them going ‘we need air support,’ and it’s just like crickets. “Air support? I haven’t seen a fighter plane this whole bloody war.”

And it wasn’t just Americans who were found wanting. “The rest of [the Canadians] proved a bit on the cowardly side,” McDonald lamented. As soon as they faced “medium shelling… they turned tail and went home.”

Though McDonald returned to Ukraine, it seems his fighting spirit may not have. He concluded the interview by complaining that his Ukrainian superiors didn’t seem to be fully engaged in the fight:

“The Ukrainian commander… seemed to think that picking a nice house for him and all his drivers to stay in was much more important than picking a house where you had radio coms to your units in the field. After a few weeks of basically being in a [command post] where I did nothing but sit around and smoke cigarettes and barbecue food for the Ukrainian officers once a day, I had enough of that.”