Ever since Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, a patch of lawn in Kyiv’s Independence Square has served as a makeshift memorial to the nation’s war dead. On it are planted tens of thousands of tiny flags, each put there in honour of a fallen soldier. Amid the sea of blue and yellow are Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes and European tricolours. They honour volunteers who came to fight for Ukraine’s International Legion – and who paid the ultimate price.
Not everyone who is remembered there, though, died gloriously in combat. One flag that has fluttered since 2023 commemorates Jordan Chadwick, a volunteer from Burnley in Lancashire. Aged 31, he was a former member of the Scots Guards, a regiment with a fighting history stretching back nearly four centuries. Their motto, Nemo me Impune Lacessit, translates as “No one assails me with impunity”. Tragically, however, that seems to have been exactly how Chadwick met his end.
On 24 June 2023, Chadwick was found lying dead in a reservoir outside Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine that lies close to the Donbas front line. In a part of the country that is repeatedly hit by indiscriminate Russian missile fire, such grisly discoveries aren’t unknown, but Chadwick’s death was no random act from afar. His hands were tied behind his back, and his body had been in the water for no more than a day or two. Someone, it seemed, had taken him prisoner before killing him and trying to hide his corpse – unaware, perhaps, that the reservoir was still fished by local anglers, who found his body in a reed bed close to the shore.
Who, though, would do such a thing, and why? Had he been captured by Russian troops, not best known for their respect for the Geneva Conventions? Or, as many now believe, was he killed not by enemy forces at all, but by fellow Legionnaires?
Last month marked the second anniversary of Chadwick’s death, since when a lot has changed in Ukraine. The much-vaunted counter-offensive that he was taking part in that summer, which the West hoped might halt Putin’s invasion for good, petered out with little success. Today, it is Russian forces that are gaining ground around the Donbas, moving ever closer to Kramatorsk. Yet the circumstances of his death remain as murky as the water he was found in. “Everyone has a different theory,” one volunteer told me. “But those who really know don’t want to talk about it.”
That much I have also learnt, having spent the last three years reporting from Ukraine for The Telegraph, and also writing a book about the Legion’s role in the war. During that time I have interviewed scores of Legionnaires about their experiences – some on front lines, some in bases, bars and hospital wards. Many of their stories sound like an Andy McNab novel on steroids, with battles that make Afghanistan and Iraq seem like child’s play. Amid the tales of heroism, however, there is a darker, less-talked-about side to life in the Legion, which has proved to be a magnet for hotheads and ne’er-do-wells. As some volunteers only half-joke, the people they watch out for most in Ukraine are not the Russians, but fellow Legionnaires.