International Brigade

“Obviously it’s a difficult situation. It’s war. It’s a special military operation,” Puello-Mota says in the video, adding that he was lucky to be with “people from the international brigade.”

But Mindaugas Lietuvninkas, a volunteer sniper with Ukraine's International Brigade, has other motivations for helping the war effort.

He had initially wanted to organize an international brigade to help Muslim Bosniak forces fighting the Serbs, but decided he would be more effective making a film.

He flew from Manchester to Ukraine on 13 March and joined the International Brigade of Ukraine in Mykolaiv.

Guha calls them “rebels” and likens them to the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, but this wrong-foots the reader since no soldiering awaited these travelers to India.