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Moira:

Doctor Monahan, welcome back to Tech Nation.

Shannon Monaghan:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be back.

Moira:

Well, on 02/24/2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Three days later, president Zelenskyy announced the formation of a voluntary international legion. A week later, he reported 16,000 foreign volunteers had attempted to join. If you are living anywhere, I'm I keep thinking, how would you even begin to join Ukraine's International Legion?

Shannon Monaghan:

I think people did it in a variety of ways. And actually, I was told that most people figured out their own way to join. Of the men in this book, the one with the most, you know, the best story about it essentially contacted the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington DC, where he was introduced to the military attache, you know, who went through his documents and basically said, All right, looks like you're he'd been a sergeant in the US infantry. He was out of the army at that point, a complete civilian, volunteering entirely on his own. The guy said, you know, this is going to be unlike anything you'd ever seen.

Shannon Monaghan:

Are you ready to to go over there and to kill? And he said, yes. He was given essentially grid coordinates, got on a plane to Poland, and went across the border and joined the legion.

Moira:

Wow. It's it's amazing. And when you read this, it's like, where did all these people come from, and how did they get here? And and not all of them had military background.

Shannon Monaghan:

That's true. So the most of the men in this book who ended up joining one of the pretty elite units of the international legion, and if you're interested, there are essentially two sections to the legion that I can explain. Most of them are former NATO trained special forces of some type, But there was actually one man on the team who went by the name Tex who was untrained. He actually tried to join the US military earlier. He had a little blip in his background that meant he wouldn't have been looked at, but he was just the most natural born fighter.

Shannon Monaghan:

And on top of that, just as everyone said, the nicest guy you will ever meet. Incredibly hard worker, and they would not have traded him for

Moira:

anything. So all of these people arrive one way or the other in Ukraine. What happens then?

Shannon Monaghan:

So they they come and what I found as a military historian so interesting is that they're essentially self sorting into teams. One of the things that modern militaries work really hard on, particularly in terms of special operations, is how do you create the right selection system to get the right people? You probably heard of BUDS, which is a selection system for US Navy SEALs or the rather infamous Q course for American Green Berets, our special forces. We're always trying to figure out how do you select the right guys. What happens in Ukraine is that you have people coming across, they don't know one another, but they're essentially, particularly in very early days, forming their own teams.

Shannon Monaghan:

That can be a little bit of a messy process, but what it means is that once they figure out who they want to be with, these form really high performing, very high trust, small units incredibly quickly. And what they're they're able to do and what they're willing to do for one another is tremendous.

Moira:

Now it's one thing to equip and train your own army. Now we have people coming from all over the world. They speak different languages, and I don't care how prepared or unprepared Ukraine may have been. I'm sure they weren't doing a lot of preparation for an international legion. I mean, what about, you know, uniforms, all the equipment that goes with this?

Moira:

You know? What about equipment and training? How organized was that? What was there? What wasn't?

Shannon Monaghan:

Initially, in the very beginning, you have an entire country under siege. Things are getting missile. There's artillery everywhere. You're really under a tremendous amount of pressure. The former infantryman, the sergeant I mentioned earlier, by the name of Ginger, he actually chose and was told, You don't need to bring your own kit, as they call it.

Shannon Monaghan:

Just bring yourself, showed up. As he said, you didn't wanna get arrested as, you know, some right wing, you know, growing up

Moira:

That's right. Paramilitary. I brought my entire soldiering kit with me. It's like, you're not gonna get on the plane much less off of it. Yeah.

Shannon Monaghan:

Right. He's just trying to go to volunteer to fight the Russians who are at this point massacring civilians who are outside of Kyiv. Bukka is happening and whatnot. But it turns out that when you need to mobilize that many people at once, there's not a lot of good stuff. So he is actually on the ground in a suburb of Kyiv fighting through artillery with what he called, I think he called it a janky plate carrier, where your plates go into body armor and whatnot.

Shannon Monaghan:

He had an AK 74, which was an AK 47 with the drum magazine, it can hold more rounds with a broken front sight on it, sneakers, and I think candy bars in his pockets at that point because they didn't have MREs. So early on it was quite hairy. The guys joked over time that it was a little bit like playing Call of Duty where as people rotate in and out, they get access to more gear and you quote unquote level up with your stuff. So they did eventually get some very nice rifles made by a Czech company called Bren2s, a new assault rifle that they really liked, and eventually they were able to get the things that they needed. But at the very beginning, you're putting on your colored armbands to properly legally identify.

Shannon Monaghan:

You signed on the dotted line. Everything's above board, but it's pretty chaotic.

Moira:

And do they get paid?

Shannon Monaghan:

They are officially Ukrainian riflemen, which is the equivalent of a private. So they are uniformed legal combatants. They are, when the pay system is functioning, being paid as Ukrainian privates. But remember early on in the war, this is under a tremendous amount of stress. Frequently they don't have everything that they need.

Shannon Monaghan:

They're being supplied as much as the Ukrainians possibly can. It's not like they're being treated differently. You know, arguably they might've been treated better. But there are some moments of, of pretty severe, stress, when you're, you are watching buildings getting shelled while you're eating your Milka cookies and cream chocolate bar because that's what we've got that day.

Moira:

That's on the menu. No protein. Just that. Okay.

Shannon Monaghan:

Yeah.

Moira:

Now you did mention some of the people in this core group. Let's go over all of them and and give us a a sense of the age range on these people.

Shannon Monaghan:

Yeah. I think one of the things that surprised many people about the war in Ukraine is that this isn't a bunch of 18 year olds. For a variety of reasons, both the Russians and the Ukrainians have chosen to conscript from bulges in their demographic pyramid of men who are older. But what's interesting about this group is that these aren't 18 year old cowboys either. These people, with the exception of our Texan, all had military experience.

Shannon Monaghan:

They'd been in the military. They'd gotten out of the military, so they're in mostly their late 20s and 30s. There's a former US Navy SEAL named Dan. There's Ginger, the former infantryman I mentioned. There is a former US Army Ranger named Beaver, and they're not all Americans, so there's also a group of French foreign legionaries that they work with, one of whom ends up on their team named George, who's Canadian, but has served in the French foreign legion, not in the Canadian army, and they are all working under Ukrainian commanders.

Shannon Monaghan:

So, that's the other rule to remember as well, that you have these foreigners, but they don't, with the exception of our medic, Greg, who was born in Ukraine but brought to Canada when he was a child and grew up there and had actually gone back, They don't speak Ukrainian, so obviously you need to have that liaison with your officers. Their commanders, a man named Alexey Shiboshov, very interesting man who He was actually a television star in Ukraine, a journalist actually.

Moira:

He was a what?

Shannon Monaghan:

He was a television star. He was a journalist.

Moira:

They all television stars in Ukraine from the president on down?

Shannon Monaghan:

No, multi talented people. So Aleksey had had a TV show before the war had started and it was a reality show. For part of the show, he was going through the Ukrainian Special Forces training system, actually, like I mentioned, selection earlier, and he made it. And he actually ended up going into the army. He had come out before the war started and then rejoined when the Russians invaded, and actually he ended up as their commander.

Shannon Monaghan:

And then there was his second in command whose call sign was pirate because he had this rather tremendous ish beard. So that was kind of who's in charge of this whole

Moira:

listening to Tech Nation. I'm Moira Gannon. My guest today is military historian doctor Shannon Monahan. You may know her from one of her books, including a quiet company of dangerous men. She's here today with to die with such men, frontline stories from Ukraine's International Legion.

Moira:

Well, as we go along throughout history, all military history is a story of technology. You know? It's like suddenly you could break down this wall or suddenly you could you have some capability. What was shocking to me is in addition to whatever equipment they were provided, some of which, you know, it's like these are very it's familiar. You know, you were talking about the Bren's, rifles, and, you know, Javelins.

Moira:

I mean, you're you're talking about the real stuff on the front line. Well, they all had cell phones. They had connections to the Internet from Starlink. They could call anybody they wanted.

Shannon Monaghan:

Yeah. Which is just tremendously different. So I think this war has been obviously the technological evolution from February 2022 to now has been absolutely tremendous and is more than anyone ever expected. But it's come with also with this kind of high low mix. So on one hand we have, these guys do have a Starlink terminal and they have, you can have cell phone access though for security reasons people are using clean phones.

Shannon Monaghan:

They're always a tremendous risk if you're captured and whatnot. The Ukrainians have developed a really impressive essentially battle management system where you can know where you are and friendly forces and whatnot on a map basically. You mentioned the Javelins, which was actually really important early on. Ginger, who I mentioned, was a trained Javelin gunner. Early when you have Russian tanks and armor moving through, being able to target them with this very valuable American weapon tremendous.

Shannon Monaghan:

But I was actually initially trained as a first world war historian way back when. What I never was not on my bingo card that the cheap Mavic DJI drone was going to be the barbed wire of the twenty first century. Here we are with, as they say, a completely transparent battle space with everything from those little DJI quadcopters to much more sophisticated drones that, or, or drones that have now been specially purpose built to take out other drones or to interfere or now have thermal on them or the first person view suicide drones. It's a whole new world.

Moira:

A whole new world. And when you say thermal, they're able to detect humans and animals.

Shannon Monaghan:

Yeah. Anything with a heat signature. So it will see it will see humans. It will see animals. It will also see a running engine, right?

Shannon Monaghan:

So actually the Javelin, which uses a dual computer system, the Javelin missile is heat seeking and you will actually look through a thermal computer when you get the lock on that target and what it's looking for is something thermal because it's obviously designed to hit something expensive. What it's what you're mostly going to use it on is something like that.

Moira:

So far, we've been talking about this sort of from a bird's eye view or perhaps we'll just say, these days, a drone's eye view. You take us from the battle of Kyiv, through the fall of Bekhmat, which is some fifteen months with this group of men. And what struck me about this is you we are advancing on the ground with these people and ex filling and backfilling and attempting to sleep and engaging in military operations right from the first paragraph, right from there throughout. This isn't about and then they did that. It's like this is almost like a diary of what these people are doing.

Shannon Monaghan:

Yeah. When I was invited to do this, I thought this would be an opportunity to create a primary source that we've really never seen before. Obviously, you can go and watch as much horrifying drone footage and body cam footage as you'd like. It's all out there on the internet for everyone to see. But I thought having as a historian, having tried to piece together what's actually happening from multiple perspectives in the past, I thought it would be very valuable to be able to do that where we do have so much information because of this technology.

Shannon Monaghan:

So a lot of these guys are wearing body cams. You know, those little GoPros, either on their helmets or it's attached to the webbing on their chest. So we do have multiple angles of the same firefight going on at once and so I'm able to essentially give, not to self aggrandize, but this kind of Blackhawk Down style view of what the fight is like because I was able to go through all of that footage with them and was able to do these extensive interviews either immediately afterwards or essentially pretty close afterwards so that we really know what happened, which is oftentimes just tremendously confusing.

Moira:

I think it's time, though, we do, reveal that you do have a personal connection with one of the soldiers, which is part of the invitation. Of course, that brought all of those soldiers in to provide you with different information and connections. What did that include?

Shannon Monaghan:

Yeah. So I had a personal connection to one of them. And, well, I guess actually, a silly funny story. I had just finished the last, I think it was the 1,000, one hundred and ninth footnote from my last book, which was about an equally interesting group of British officers who fought together in World War II and the Cold War, and I got this call. It was June 2022, and the team had just gotten out of this huge battle in Severodonetsk.

Shannon Monaghan:

It's still the war of movement. The Russians are pushing very fast in the East, and it was kind of one of these last stands. They're nearly surrounded. They've gotten into some really massive fights in the city. They had just lost two men, their commander, Alexey Shiboshov, who I had mentioned, and a young Brit who had been on a sister team who had been operating with them.

Shannon Monaghan:

I do want to indicate they do work with sister teams and as the book goes on and time goes on, multiple people beyond who I just mentioned have been on this team and have been huge contributors. But they were very aware that what they were doing was far bigger than them. This was an important story to tell for Ukraine and for the West. And they were extraordinarily aware that they were not all going to make it out. And so they said, would you do this?

Shannon Monaghan:

Would you write this story so that we can tell it for everyone else. And my I have to tell you that my initial reaction was kind of one of of horror of as a historian, you know, I don't do live ones.

Moira:

As we're making history? No. No. No. No.

Shannon Monaghan:

But I had, as a historian, seen so many good people whose stories I would have loved to have known more about, would have loved to have been able to tell who died before we could capture that information. I thought that, you know, I of all people absolutely had an obligation to provide that for them and for the future. And so I said yes and that was just a completely different world. I spent a tremendous amount of time with each of them going through their experiences, tracking them as they went. And these people became very close friends of mine and we spent time reliving some of the proudest and worst moments of their lives together.

Shannon Monaghan:

And I'm very grateful that, that they let me do

Moira:

it. I have to say that, of the many histories that I've read and the data that comes out of them, some there's some very famous ones, you know, about how they took diaries and all that, put together charts, and this kind of thing. The idea that you could ask a question at a particular day, it's like, hey. But what about that other thing, you know, you wrote in the diary yesterday would be incredibly valuable.

Shannon Monaghan:

It is. I think it also helps us understand the confusion, particularly of modern urban warfare. There have been moments in which someone has said to me, Do you know what happened right there? We're all trying to reconstruct in the aftermath. Where was that tank that nearly took us apart?

Shannon Monaghan:

Actually, a couple of weeks ago, George texted me and said, Can I have another copy of that map you drew or Severinetsk that shows everyone's positions? Because I used to have it and I really wanted it. So it's an interesting experience to try to find all of that because we all know that memory isn't perfect, right? We all know that you can be really certain in your memory and yet it can be inaccurate in some specific way that might be very small or that might be very important. To have that overlapping ability to figure out what what indeed actually happened was, as a historian, you know, tremendously valuable.

Moira:

Now also of interest to me was not just the, here we are, here's what we're doing, and all of that. Frequently, when they overtake what had been held by Russians, it was amazing the amount of intelligence and the kind of intelligence they could get by what the Russians left behind.

Shannon Monaghan:

Yes. On one hand, obviously you have intelligence out of drones and intercepted radio chatter and whatnot. There's this moment in this battle in Severodonets where they lose two men where they find out after the fact from their intel guys that the Russians were convinced that they'd been hit by a battalion. Now, a battalion in The US at the very least would be about a thousand men. There were about 20 something guys who hit the Russians in this particular spot on that day, but they brought so many rockets and firepower with them and were so aggressive that the Russians were convinced there was more.

Shannon Monaghan:

There's that version, but you also end up moving into a place and you pick up weapons that they've left behind and material like this, which goes again to the technology. This doesn't get included in the book, later, you know, obviously still in touch with one's friends. They ended up in Actually, this was near Bachmann. They ended up in a trench where they picked up two World War II era guns and were using them. One was an MG 42, You know, the famous German machine gun.

Shannon Monaghan:

And the other was something that was called, it was referred to as a sewing machine because it made this rotten noise. So it gives you this kind of indication of the different positions than the other guys.

Moira:

Perhaps not as well equipped. We have drones and World War II rifle. I mean, it's like, wait.

Shannon Monaghan:

Yes. I actually found this rather interesting as well. Obviously, as the technology has developed, each side is getting better and better at countering drones. But there was that moment early on when the drones start to get really big where everyone realizes the cheapest way to deal with this because shot exchange value is so important. I don't want to spend a 100 times what that other thing costs shooting it down.

Shannon Monaghan:

That some World War II era and very old stuff was actually really good for shooting down drones because essentially you don't need a very sophisticated fire control system and you had it. So, again, a very strange mix.

Moira:

But at the end of the day, you are a military historian besides collecting and cataloging all this information. You and I'm quoting here. I'm going, my goodness. How did she do this? Here's the quote.

Moira:

Compared time stamps, isolated audio, cross check quotes, stories, after action reports, timelines, and photographic and video evidence, gone back and asked clarifying questions over and over, checked kit, compared suppressed versus unsuppressed fire, and examined bullet reports and impact. It's like how this is an enormous task. How do you coordinate? How do you drive all of this information?

Shannon Monaghan:

Oh, and we have to you have to go battle by battle really, but, I think I was so driven like they were to just kind of figure out what happened that you're really trying to work down the timeline. It was a great relief figuring out what happened exactly where. But I would also say that it was for me, you know, as the historian, but also personally some of the most rewarding and hardest part of the experience to isolate the shot that you know kills someone, you know, to figure out exactly which blast happened where that kills someone else. It's something I had not obviously had not done before and was a something I was willing to do in order to get to the most accurate picture that we needed.

Moira:

How has this experience changed you as a military historian?

Shannon Monaghan:

I think we'll have to answer that with the next book.

Moira:

Good.

Shannon Monaghan:

I think it gives you even more than I already had a deep appreciation for how hard it is to do the work on the ground and has dramatically lessened my patience, for the armchair view of why can't you just do it this way or the armchair criticism, that really knows nothing about what it's actually like to be the guy being shot at or the guy carrying your dead friend through artillery fire in order to get them out because this is not a war with immediate helicopter Kazakhs that's going to put you on a plane to Rammstein. It is a lot harder.

Moira:

Well, doctor Monahan, thank you so much for coming in, and and thank you for your book. I hope you come and see us again.

Shannon Monaghan:

Thank you so much.

Moira:

My guest today is doctor Shannon Monahan. Her book is to die with such men, Frontline Stories from Ukraine's International Legion. It's published by Hearst. I'm Moira Gunn. You're listening to Tech Nation.

Moira:

It's published by Hearst. For Tech Nation, I'm Moira Gunn. Great. Got it. That's good.

Moira:

We'll sell a lot of books. Now don't hang up. We