This post is the second in a new series I’m doing on speaking to people in/around Ukraine about the popular stories which have arisen since the start of the full-scale invasion. I’ll be posting more info about the project and more interviews as I bring things together.
This discussion is with Aidan, an international volunteer who I’ve previously spoken to during the chevrons project (Ukraine Interviews: Aidan Lynch)
Vic: First up, can you tell me your name and a little bit about yourself?
Aidan: My name is Aidan Lynch. I’m from New Zealand originally. I went to volunteer in Ukraine in the winter of 2023 over the new year into 2024 for three months, mostly doing humanitarian work.
Vic: Cool. As most international volunteers do. You’ve spent time in pubs in Ukraine-
Aidan: I sure have.
Vic: Can you tell me the story that you were told in Lviv?
Aidan: Yep. So we walk into a pub, and our friend Tom is there a few pints deep, and he’s talking about how he’s met some soldiers who were showing him some fun things on their phone. Some of them are captured Russian phones, and some of them are like ones that they’ve taken themselves.
The one that comes to mind is relating to a soldier who for some reason, either they didn’t want to leave the trench that they were retreating from, or they were too wounded to leave, or too crazy to leave. As the Ukrainian soldiers retreated at this trench, they left a box with a large amount of grenades. I think the number was said to be around 200- that’s almost certainly, you know, ridiculous, a ridiculous number. And they expect, well, we’re not going to see him again. He’s too wounded to move, he’ll blow himself up, and it’s very tragic. Few weeks later, they recapture said trench, and they walk in to find that same soldier still kind of sitting in the corner with an empty box of grenades, kind of yeeting them over his head blindly. And it seems that he’s- he’s been holding out for however long it was by himself, by just blindly blowing up the area around him, at which point he kind of goes, “oi, where the hell have you been? I need more grenades”. So it’s a, almost certainly has a seed of truth. But as for the details, I’m sure they’ve been exaggerated and warped over time.
Vic: Did you hear any other good stories while you’re in the pub?
Aidan: There’s always like the kind of standard ones. So a lot of them kind of floating around since the very start. So Ghost of Kyiv, Ukrainian Reaper, and they’re almost certainly false all of them, though. The interesting thing is, they’ve become less and less notable as time goes on, because there have actually been instances of people doing essentially what those legends say, but not getting publicity for it. So I remember, like day four, there was supposedly a soldier out in Kyiv who got 20 confirmed kills, like with a gun, which is quite unheard of in modern warfare. And they called him the Ukrainian Reaper, and he almost certainly didn’t exist. But there are, you know, dozens of examples of people who actually do that, and we have video footage of them killing double digit numbers of Russians in a trench with a gun, let alone kind of drone pilots who have kill counts in the hundreds- who have met a few of them, and they have confirmed video of large amounts of casualties they caused. So the legends are kind of not actually living up to the reality anymore.
Vic: Where do you tend to hear about these kind of legends?
Aidan: Initially, it was social media, of course, especially if you’re on the other side of the world, like I was, Most of your news comes from either your mainstream news sources, which are two to three days behind, especially when you account for time zones because they need to fact check things, or it’s raw stuff dumped directly off social media, which is about 50% false. But what is true, you’ll get instantly. So you get lots of legends, but you also get lots of interesting occurrences in real time.
Vic: Can you think of any other stories that you might have heard off of social media?
Aidan: In terms of legends, not particularly. There are lots of stories that are definitely true, like a guy who sacrificed himself to blow up a bridge kind of early on, which blunted the advance enough that he probably saved lots and lots of lives, like he got a middle for that. So it’s not a legend, per se, but it’ll probably go down history within the Ukrainian nation for that.
Vic: Do you remember what bridge it was or whereabouts?
Aidan: I do not. I believe it was north of Kyiv. But as for details, I can’t remember.
Vic: So going back to the initial story, you mentioned that you were at a bar and you ran into a friend and chatted about that guy in the trench. So, I know which bar you’re referring to. Can you tell me what it’s colloquially and known as?
Aidan: So yeah I don’t know its Ukrainian name, but the English volunteers will call it Mano’s Bar after one of its very dedicated patrons, Mano, who, I believe is a French volunteer. But it’s known as Mano’s bar, to the point where if you’re a newbie and you turn up in Lviv and you ask where to go, you’ll be directed to Mano’s bar. There is a map pin on Google Maps called Mano’s bar, despite that not being the name of the place.
Vic: Who’s Mano?
Aidan: Yeah, French volunteer who was highly, highly skilled at drinking a lot and producing funny stories out of it.
Vic: Can you tell me any Mano stories you might have heard?
Aidan: Well, the first time it was explained to me, it was essentially said that on his first day in Lviv, he got so drunk that he pissed in a bin inside the bar, and was somehow so charismatic that he got away with it, and they let him keep coming back. Possibly the amount of money he spends on drinks may have something to do with that. Another story that comes to mind is allegedly, during a missile attack, he went outside and showed his bare ass to, you know, the missiles in coming, and the drones incoming. Mooning the missile attack.
Vic: Does Mano get discussed a lot?
Aidan: Um, I think if you’re in the friend group that he’s part of, he definitely does. I’m somewhat tangentially related to him, so I don’t- I haven’t seen him for a few years now.
Vic: So you have met him in the past.
Aidan: I’ve met him a couple of times, and he seemed very, very lovely and was very friendly to me, but I’ve, I’ve not had anything to do with him since.
Vic: I think that’s all the questions I had for this, unless you’ve got any other like interesting, noteworthy folk heroes that you can think of, that you’ve seen on social media or discussed with people?
Aidan: Not particularly. A lot of the really interesting ones don’t have an official name, or like they’re redacted because they don’t want to become targets. I will say, a lot of the international volunteers don’t seem to follow that, and it doesn’t tend to end well for them. So there was quite a high profile French sniper who joined the Foreign Legion and made a whole big media fanfare about it. And I don’t think he ended up doing particularly well, and I think he quit the Legion. So the kind of real heroes will go unsung for quite a while, I imagine.
Vic: So were there any stories about that guy?
Aidan: There were lots of stories about what he did in previous conflicts, but there were mostly stories of drama he caused and interpersonal problems within the Legion when he turned up. I think a lot of foreign fighters with previous experience have difficulty adjusting to a war of attrition, or, you know, kind of cataclysmic full mobilization war that Ukraine is. Lots of stories of kind of American veterans from Iraq turning up and then being aghast at the idea that they can’t get helicopter medical evacuations because obviously they don’t own the skies here. They’ve been used to shooting at guys in Afghanistan with an AK and nothing else to their name, and then turning up and finding one of the most powerful militaries in the world that actually has air defense, and you can’t just run circles around them with your planes anymore. It’s quite a shock to them.
Vic: Do people discuss these or are you following these people on social media and hearing their stories there?
Aidan: Social media is the main one. I don’t have a huge amount to do with actual fighters, at least not the foreign ones. They’re all out further east than I tend to go, but because of the funding sort of mechanisms that the units use, the more high profile you have on social media, the more likely you are to get donations. So they’re incentivized to go and tell their stories. Sometimes they’re incentivized to exaggerate their stories because of that, but you do get some who seem to be quite genuine about the situation.
Vic: With regards to fundraising, do they ever sell, like, for instance, commemorative items around particular events?
Aidan: They do tend to do a lot of auctions. So kind of Ukrainian state produced a lot of commemorative coins for different things, like I own one for the Bakhmut airport back in the initial Donbas war with the cyborgs, you know, held the airport for many, many days. Nowadays, it tends to be less official. Battle flags are very, very popular. So you get a unit to sign your Ukrainian flag or your unit’s flag, and then sell that off. And then just, you know, bits of military equipment. So there was an auction a while back that was selling the cover plate of a Patriot missile battery. So when the missile fires out, it has this plate over the top stopping rain and crap getting into the missile compartments. That’s blown out by a charge, and it kind of separates into four triangular pieces, which are then completely useless. So it was your chance to own a piece of the billion dollar American, kind of, marvel of technology. So that went quite well. Unfortunately, I was not successful in my bid.
And then you have sort of like battle trophies, so there are bits of a KH-101 cruise missile, or part of a broken windshield from an attack helicopter. Clocks out of tanks are quite popular. Pieces of Shahed drones, laser cut artillery shells. You can do some quite. Beautiful art with them, yeah.
Vic: What kind of art do they do?
Aidan: A lot of sort of unit insignias. Sometimes, if they’re commemorating a fallen soldier, they’ll have a picture of them, sort of laser cut into the shell. And then you can have a lot of patriotic imagery. So the St Michael and the angel of Kyiv, you know, with this flaming sword, that sort of stuff.
Vic: Who are the cyborgs.
Aidan: So the cyborgs, this is quite embarrassing. I don’t actually remember too much about them, but they were, they were the Ukrainian military unit who held the Donbas Airport during the initial, the initial war. So they, they held up for a ridiculously long time. I think they- their record has been broken several times in this war by some of the bigger, high profile battles? But at the time, it was kind of ridiculous that they held out for as long as they did, essentially, the airport and everything around it was turned to rubble, and they lived in the rubble for so long that they were referred to as you know “they’re not even human anymore. Only a robot could survive for that long in such horrible conditions”. So they started calling them cyborgs.
Vic: Did they ever use any imagery around that, like robots?
Aidan: Not that I’ve seen, but I haven’t looked into them as much as I probably should have, considering the historical significance.
Vic: Do you feel a need to learn about these sorts of things?
Aidan: I think it’s important for Ukrainian culture going forward. If- there’s kind of a general opinion that Ukraine wasn’t a real nation before the conflict started, but the conflict has forced them into becoming more of a united front, and now they are a real nation. So this, if that theory rings true, then this would essentially be the sort of foundational story for the modern Ukrainian state. And kind of the stories of sacrifice like that would be very important going forward.
Vic: Do you think there’s been less of these types of stories appearing in the past couple years?
Aidan: It’s hard to say with this list of the stories appearing, and whether it’s that sort of the media and people’s attention has moved on. They call it the battle fatigue, war fatigue. Just there are other horrendous things happening around the world, and the media likes to go to whatever’s new. So I’m sure there are many more stories happening, it’s just we haven’t been seeing them kind of on our social media feeds, and not many people actually go to Ukraine to talk to people. So, you’re not likely to get a first hand account as easily.
Vic: Do you see Ukrainian people posting about these stories less on social media?
Aidan: I’d say they’ve kept it up quite well. Yeah, they’re definitely not getting bored of the cataclysmic war they’re being forced to endure. So they’re still they’re still posting about it.
Vic: But maybe figureheads that were big at the start of war, like Ghost of Kyiv.
Aidan: Yeah, so kind of legends like that definitely have died out once you get kind of irrefutable proof that they weren’t really real. But also, kind of expectations around the war have changed so much- as I said before, like the real legends, like reality is outliving the legends or outdoing the legends, and people don’t really care anymore.
So lots of things have happened during this war that would have been completely unthinkable, like Ukraine took Russian territory around Kursk. So I believe they’re the first nation in the world to invade a nuclear power. That would have been completely unthinkable, you know, 10 years ago, and now it’s brushed off as nothing. Russia’s bombed several nuclear power plants with drones throughout this conflict- would have been completely unthinkable. So kind of, the goalpost of what’s considered remarkable these days has definitely shifted compared to the start of the war. The start, you know, blowing up a tank with a Javelin, even the Americans didn’t really do that, despite it being their kit. Whereas now you’ve got guys wandering around with double figure tank kill counts, and that’s kind of normal.
Vic: Do you have any other stories that might have popped up in your head during this conversation?
Aidan: None have come to mind, unfortunately. All right, thank you for your time.
Aidan: My pleasure.
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