Jordan O'Brien, a New Zealander who has fought for Ukraine since the 2022 full-scale invasion, including at Kherson and in the Kursk operation, said he would warn other foreigners against joining. "If Kyiv wants more foreign fighters, it needs to fix the ridiculous bureaucratic bias that screws all of us foreigners over who have already fought for Ukraine," he said. O'Brien, sentenced in absentia by Russia to 14 years in prison, said he was fined on the spot when immigration found his military contract contained errors made by his units.
According to the defense ministry, some 16,000 foreigners from 72 countries were serving in the armed forces as of August, helping a 900,000-strong military that is chronically short of recruits. Last year parliament passed a law requiring foreign service members to file paperwork by November 10 to obtain temporary residence permits. Deputy Defense Minister Liubov Halan said in a social media post that without changes, "after November 10, a significant number of the foreigners defending Ukraine will technically be in the country illegally." That contradicts official recruitment information, which states a contract is the basis for legal long-term stay.
The military ombudsman's office has fielded more than 300 complaints this year from foreign volunteers and families, covering combatant status, contract termination, and medical care. An American volunteer's report for the Center for European Policy Analysis said neither he nor most comrades had received their UBD, the document confirming combat participation. An uneven transition from paper to digital military IDs has left many foreign volunteers out, and a Ukrainska Pravda study found language barriers are a major problem, especially for Spanish-speaking Colombians, the largest foreign group. Veterans discharged from the forces can sometimes face deportation.
Kyiv is responding. The defense ministry last month started a working group to improve terms of service, legalization, and treatment of foreign soldiers and their families, and parliament is working on legislation to simplify and extend deadlines. Halan noted that many fighters cannot complete residence paperwork because they are on combat missions far from their unit's base. Liudmyla Kalenchuk, head of the soldiers' rights department in the ombudsman's office, said legalization problems are not widespread, but acknowledged vulnerable categories, including those who lost passports, such as citizens of Russia, Belarus, and South Africa.
Recruitment continues to grow, from about 100 a month in 2022 to 600 a month now, with about 40 percent from Latin America. Ukraine offers pay up to $10,000 per month for dangerous front-line duty, the same as Ukrainian soldiers, with a three-year contract that can be quit after six months. But family complaints are also mounting: more than 10 percent of ombudsman complaints come from families seeking confirmation of whether a volunteer is missing or killed. Meaghan Mobbs, president of the R.T. Weatherman Foundation, said some families have learned of deaths from fellow soldiers or social media before official notification. "What began as an emergency wartime mechanism became something much larger and more permanent. The system now has to catch up," she said.