an Englishman explains his commitment to Ukraine
A 22-year-old former soldier, Ismaël Barry, originally from Annecy, has decided to join the Ukrainian territorial defense. At the microphone of BFMTV, he tells his daily life.
Among the soldiers engaged in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, some are French. This is the case of Ismaël Barry, a 22-year-old former soldier from Annecy in Haute-Savoie. When war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, he was working at Samu in France. Touched by the fate of civilian populations, he decided to join Ukraine and engage in territorial defence. “I didn’t want to stay at home doing nothing,” he explains at the microphone of BFMTV.
“I thought maybe I had a role to play. So I took my bag, my plane ticket and I came,” he says.
“Russian soldiers have the ambition to annihilate every last bit of Ukraine”
Within the Ukrainian territorial defense, the young man deals in particular with the care of the wounded, “whether civilians or soldiers”, specifies Ismaël Barry. “Afterwards, we can carry out various combat and reconnaissance operations, along the entire length of the front.”
Of the exchanges he has with the civilian populations and his comrades, the young man says he is surprised “to see the violence in which the Russian army is engaged”.
“Exactions, war crimes, systematic rapes, executions of civilians (…) rapes on women, sometimes on children”, he lists.
According to him, this violence and this regime of terror imposed by the Russian forces on the Ukrainians serve only one objective: “The Russian soldiers have the ambition to annihilate to the last parcel of Ukraine.” And our interlocutor concludes: “For them, it’s something that should not exist.”