Why American veterans are dropping everything to train Ukrainians

What moves people from passive sympathy to active participation? American military veterans who got off their couches to help in this war cite Ukrainian resolve and the conflict’s moral clarity.

The former U.S. Army combat medic watched the war unfold from the safety of his Maryland home, his admiration growing for Ukrainians’ courage in the face of an overwhelming Russian invasion force.

For him, previous foreign conflicts had been no more than news headlines: Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, for example, or Moscow’s role propping up the Assad regime in Syria by hammering rebel strongholds to rubble.

But this Ukraine war “burned in me” from the start, says Jason, who asked that his surname not be used. It prompted him to drop his life at home and become one of hundreds – if not thousands – of former American service members and other military volunteers from around the world to answer Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s call for help.

“What made me know I was coming here immediately was just the sheer determination and motivation of Ukrainians,” says the veteran, who wears a hat and a hoodie with a medical green cross shoulder patch.

“I’ve seen shopkeepers, 17-year-old girls who are students, and farmers – people who have never held rifles in their lives. ... It’s inspiring,” Jason says in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he has joined the nonprofit Sons of Liberty International (SOLI) to help train Ukrainians for the battlefield. “They’re doing it with nothing; they’re giving it their all.”