ZELENSKY’S FOREIGN LEGION

Colin Freeman

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Why have foreign fighters flocked to Ukraine? Veteran foreign correspondent Colin Freeman investigates and finds that Orwellian, Spanish Civil War type idealism is far from the only answer. For some, it is a yearning for adventure and a desire to embrace old-school warrior values that the West no longer seems to prize.  For some, it is a flight from a life gone wrong. 

ZELENSKY'S FOREIGN LEGION delivers the intense frontline storytelling of a 3-Para or Black Hawk Down, while teasing out psychological complexity from the testimony and the back-stories of the soldiers Colin has interviewed at length. His thorough research and in-person experience have combined to create a fascinating new perspective on an era-defining conflict.

Colin Freeman is a former chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph, now a freelance foreign affairs writer. He has been reporting on Ukraine since the outbreak of the Russian invasion, writing mainly for the The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator.

He started his journalism career on the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, before moving to the London Evening Standard. In 2003 - bored with a job covering local government -  he moved to Iraq to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent, spending two years in Baghdad. He spent the next two decades reporting all over Africa, the Middle East and Asia, covering events including the Arab Spring uprisings, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa, and the Somali piracy crisis. Over the years, he has written for the Economist, the British Journalism Review, Tortoise Magazine, The Lady, Country Life and pretty much anywhere else that will have him. He also contributes regularly to From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio Four. 

He is the author of three previous books:

The Curse of the Al-Dulaimi Hotel and other half-truths from Baghdad (Monday Books, 2008) was about his time reporting post-Saddam Iraq

Kidnapped: Life as a Somali pirate hostage (Monday Books, 2011) was about his experience of being abducted in Somalia in 2008.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The mission to rescue the hostages the world forgot (Icon Books 2021). The story of a former British diplomat's rescue of three ships's crews hijacked for nearly five years in Somalia