Men who once stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the French Foreign Legion have found themselves on opposite sides after the Russian invasion, writes Anthony Loyd in Kyiv
Franck sang his way across the Ukrainian frontier. In the absence of a passport, one particular song allowed him to pass through the border control post and onwards through the gateway to war: Le Boudin, the marching song of the French Foreign Legion.
A Ukrainian legionnaire in Paris had told the former sniper, 50, that the song would be enough to serve as an unofficial laissez-passer. It was 3am when Franck got off a night train in Poland and sang it to a specified Ukrainian border guard. It worked.
“I entered Ukraine vouched for by nothing more than the Legion’s song, and I have never been back home since,” said Franck who, restless in civilian life, served a ten-year stretch in the renowned corps as a younger man.
He made the border crossing just a few days after the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, and he has been fighting for Ukraine ever since. Many of his former brothers-in-arms from the Legion have served alongside him — but others have been fighting for the Russians.
The 9,000-strong Legion bonds together the men of 140 different nations who serve in its ranks with an overarching sense of warrior élan, codified by the regiment’s motto Legio Patria Nostra (The Legion is our Fatherland). The war in Ukraine has tested that bond, pitting both deserters and men from different nations who had served out their contracts to France against each other, on different sides of the front line.
“They were my brothers but now, if I saw them face to face, I’d kill them, or they’d kill me,” Franck said. “The life in the Legion we once shared together was very different to our lives today. I respect them, and their wish to kill me. It’s normal. I want to kill them too.”
There were 710 Ukrainians and 450 Russians serving in the French Foreign Legion when President Putin ordered tanks across the border in February 2022. Though no official figures have been released by France, scores of former and serving legionnaires are believed to have gone to Ukraine to fight since.
General Alain Lardet, head of the Legion, gave a video address to Ukrainian and Russian legionnaires soon after the invasion, exhorting them to remain loyal to the corps and not desert. Ukrainians were offered two weeks’ special leave to assist family members caught up in the war, but that was simply not enough: many made the decision to leave and fight for their homeland, giving up on the chance of French citizenship and the €30,000 golden handshake that would come with the completion of their terms of service.
“I have met scores of legionnaires fighting here,” said Franck, whose call sign “Berlioz” is taken from Hector Berlioz, the French 19th-century romantic composer. “Guys like me, who had completed their service in the Legion, and guys who had deserted to fight.”
Just five days after singing his way through the Ukrainian border Franck was in action, joining a sniper team targeting Russian units approaching Irpin, north of Kyiv. All had French Foreign Legion origins, including a man who served 21 years with the corps. Some were Swedish, others Slovakian — and, of course, fellow Ukrainians.
“War and the army are passions in which I found my talent,” said Franck, who joined the Legion as a troubled French teenager, listing his nationality as Swiss when he was hired to the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment, in compliance with Legion statutes for French citizens.
“I don’t live at all in civilian life,” he said. “Here, I am alive. It is like a drug for me. You can’t explain that to civilians.” He said he had left a sealed letter to be given to his eight-year-old son in France if he is killed, explaining his choice to fight in Ukraine.
Contracted to a special unit that is part of Ukraine’s own “international legion”, Franck has seen action in hotspots all across eastern Ukraine, including Soledar, Bakhmut, Severodonetsk and Zaporizhzhia.
“I have become fatalistic,” he said. “The war is unlike anything any of us have previously seen in scale and intensity, like the Second World War combined with the trenches of the First World War. The horrors that waited for professional soldiers here — seeing men with no faces, comrades blown in half — were worse than anything we had seen before. Here I learnt that death chooses soldiers in its own time.”
That sense of fatalism was sealed in one particularly horrific mission that has become part of the legend of foreign fighters in Ukraine: a group of 30, Franck among them, led by a British former SAS NCO, tried to fight their way into a four-storey house during the battle for Soledar. The aim was to rescue nine Ukrainian soldiers trapped in the basement by Russian forces on the upper floors. After repeated attempts to breach the doorway of the building, and fierce, close-quarter fighting, the group came under Russian tank fire.
The SAS veteran had the insides of his thighs and the front of his head blown off. Another British fighter lost a leg. Two other members of the unit were killed and numerous others wounded, and the group was forced to admit defeat.
“That was a number one bad mission. One shell went off right in front of me and killed a man behind me, wounding a Polish fighter next to me, while leaving me untouched,” Franck said. “In that battle I learnt to accept the awards of destiny.”
There are hints of professional pride in his grim stories of war: he spoke of his most accomplished long-range kill as a sniper, when he shot a Russian soldier, probably a Wagner fighter, at a range of 1,662 metres with a .50 calibre rifle. “He was nothing special, just an unlucky soldier,” Franck said matter-of-factly. “One hit with a .50, and he completely disappeared.”
The presence of French fighters in Ukraine was highlighted on Thursday when Russia claimed to have killed more than 60 French mercenaries in a strike on their accommodation in Kharkiv. The claim was denied by French authorities, and Russia produced no evidence to substantiate it.
Yet despite the war’s horrors, and the way it has tested and sometimes cleaved loyalties, traces of enduring honour between former legionnaires have emerged. Yevhenii Kulyk’s death is a case in point: a 23-year-old Ukrainian deserter from the Legion, he was killed in January last year while fighting against Wagner Group troops on the outskirts of Bakhmut. His body fell into Russian hands.
Three days later the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin referred to Kulyk on his Telegram channel. “Colleagues from the French Foreign Legion asked us to find Yevgeny Kulyk,” he wrote, months before his own death in an explosion on his private plane. “We regret to inform you that a French Foreign Legion soldier was killed on the DPR [self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic].”
That suggests that communication existed between legionnaires on the opposing sides; certainly, the Wagner troops were known to include several former French Foreign Legionnaires, including Vitali Perfilev, who served with the corps’s elite parachute regiment, 2REP, before heading the Wagner operation in the Central African Republic.
The strange connotation of enduring honour suggested by Prigozhin’s Telegram post was given further intrigue when a video was released by the Russians showing a masked Wagner fighter, speaking in fluent French, laying the Legion’s flag over Kulyk’s body prior to its repatriation to the Ukrainian side for burial.
“Each of us has fought in many places,” the Wagner fighter said above Kulyk’s open coffin. “We send our Legion fighter back home.”
The poignancy of a warrior’s death resonated with Franck’s own mortal vision, and his hope for a Viking eternity — despite his avowed willingness to kill former legionnaires fighting for the Russian side. “I’ve never left Ukraine since coming here, but most of the guys I knew at the start of this either went home or were killed,” he mused last week in Kyiv, a few days before setting off on a new mission. “I know only four still here who I fought beside in those early days. I’ll go home at the war’s end if I am still alive. But if not? Then it’s Valhalla!”
