Jamal Marcelin

“God, please forgive your sons. Don’t let anyone come to Russia because they are just selling themselves to go and die. Nobody is coming home.”

“What’s the name of those creatures in Harry Potter that Luna Lovegood says only appear to you after you’ve seen death? Well, whatever they are, we’re all gonna be seeing them now forever.”

“Through our work, we want every single living member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to know firstly, no matter who you are or how you were killed, we will get you home. And secondly, we want every enemy soldier to know: we will find you, and we will make you pay for every single body you see here strewn across the ground. There is no escape, and there will be no mercy.”

While air raid sirens have become a daily reality in Kyiv—a somber ritual of drone waves and rockets—a different kind of battle is being waged in the political corridors of the West. It is a war against isolationism, the "country-first" siren song that Reinier van Lanschot, a Dutch Member of the European Parliament and co-founder of the pan-European movement Volt, described as a lethal trap during a recent interview.

During the first days of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the International Legion of Ukraine was associated with volunteers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Today, that reality has changed: the most visible foreign presence on the Ukrainian front is predominantly Spanish-speaking, especially from Latin America.