Russian forces in the country’s Kursk region have captured a British man who volunteered for the Ukrainian Army, Russia’s state news agencies reported, in what would likely be the first case of a Westerner detained on Russian soil while fighting for Ukraine.
A Russian state news agency identified the detained individual on Monday as James Scott Rhys Anderson. The agency, Tass, reported that he was part of a battalion of up to 500 Ukrainian servicemen sent to the sliver of land in the Kursk region that has been occupied by Ukraine since August. Mr. Anderson said he was deployed there against his will, according to Tass.
When asked about Mr. Anderson being captured in Russia, the British Foreign Office said only that it was “supporting the family of a British man following reports of his detention.”
Before being dispatched to the Kursk region, Mr. Anderson, a former signalman in the British Army, was training Ukrainian soldiers at a military range near the village of Inhulets in central Ukraine, according to Tass.
Tass also referred to an unverified video, posted by a pro-Russian military blog on Telegram, a popular messaging app, in which Mr. Anderson, said in the video to be 22, said that he had served in the British Army for four years, starting in 2019, but then “got fired” from his job. He then decided to join the international legion in Ukraine.
“That was a stupid idea,” Mr. Anderson said in the video.
Yuri Podolyaka, one the most popular pro-Kremlin military bloggers on Telegram, said in a post that Mr. Anderson was captured in the village of Plyokhovo, about a mile north of the border between Russia and Ukraine. Plyokhovo has been the scene of some of the most intense fighting in the area.
Over the past few weeks, Russia has been trying to drive Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region. So far, at least a third of the captured territory has been retaken by Russia in bloody assaults against some of the best Ukrainian units.
After more than two and a half years of heavy fighting, both Russia and Ukraine are suffering from troop shortages. But with a much smaller population, the difficulty has been more acute for Kyiv.
Russian investigators are now likely to charge Mr. Anderson with being a mercenary in a foreign conflict. If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison.
In June 2022, a court in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine sentenced to death two British men who had been fighting for Ukraine. They were released in a prisoner exchange that September.
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