The 27-year-old former British soldier knew something was wrong only when he tried to get back on his feet.
Just moments earlier, the platoon commander—identified only by his call sign, Snow—had been walking out of a frontline position in eastern Ukraine. The foreign volunteer was serving with Ukrainian forces and leading a rotation away from the battlefield.
On September 28 last year, Snow entered a forest with two newly recruited Ukrainian soldiers under his command. A drone passed overhead, and he assumed it belonged to their side.
It did not. The aircraft was Russian and had been tracking the soldiers’ movements.
When the three men emerged from the trees, Snow realised they had been led into an ambush.
“We didn’t even make it five metres when a fibre optic drone came up off the ground,” he says. He is referring to kamikaze drones connected to their operators by cable, making them far less vulnerable to the radio jamming that can disrupt conventional systems.
Snow shouted for the two Ukrainians to turn back towards the forest, hoping the trees would provide protection. There was no time.
“I pushed them in,” he says. “I went to the right and the drone hit me.”
Snow, 27, from Northamptonshire, is a platoon commander with the Rifleman Battalion of the 3rd Assault Brigade in eastern Ukraine. At a Kyiv clinic, he undergoes physiotherapy and has adjustments made to his prosthetic limb.
Snow, who comes from Northamptonshire, trains Ukrainian recruits at a military camp in the Kharkiv region.
The explosion severed his left leg below the knee.
“At first I stood up and I stood up on bone,” he recalls from Kyiv’s Bez Obmezhen rehabilitation centre, where he is being fitted with a new prosthetic leg. “Then I looked down and thought, ‘Oh, it’s missing.’”
Even in shock, Snow relied on his military training. He picked up his radio and transmitted the code “300”, signalling that he was wounded, before calmly adding: “There has been an amputation.” He then sat down and assessed his injuries. “I lost a pint-and-a-half of blood straight away. My other leg had shrapnel as well, and my back.”
“The two Ukrainians put a tourniquet on, but didn’t do it correctly. At this point I think I died because I felt like I came out of my body. I looked at myself lying there and I shook my head. I then went back inside my body. I woke up, put the tourniquet on below my knee.”
Snow continued directing the two men, telling them to move him into the forest and hand over the radio so he could call for a casualty evacuation, or CasEvac.
He survived the journey to Kharkiv in an armoured vehicle. During more than three months of treatment, including over 20 operations while he waited for a prosthetic limb, Snow says he considered taking his own life.
Once his new leg was fitted in Kyiv, however, he taught himself to walk within a week. After completing rehabilitation, he made the extraordinary decision to return to his unit and serve close to the frontline again.
Snow says returning was his intention from the moment he was wounded.
“Instantly, I was like, OK, I have a leg problem. I’ll get a prosthetic and I’ll go back,” he says.
I first met Snow a year ago at a covert training base in the Kharkiv region. Even then, I was struck by his direct, unsentimental account of the brutal realities of life as a soldier.
‘I expect to die out here,’ he calmly told me at the time, adding as long as his recruits accept that too, ‘we’ll be OK’.
We stayed in touch, and when I inquired about a story last winter he delivered the news of his injury with characteristic bluntness.
‘I lost half a leg mate so I couldn’t give a f*** about anything else currently.’ A second message followed swiftly: ‘How are you?’
It was that message that brought me back to see him.
The softly spoken former member of the Royal Anglian Regiment, from Northamptonshire, has already given so much to his Ukrainian cause since 2022.
Snow served in the Royal Anglians for six years where he saw action on a peacekeeping tour of Mali in 2017. On leaving the military he became a livestock haulier for a few years but quickly grew bored and missed army life.
Snow has rejoined the Ukrainian war effort against Russia after losing his leg in the conflict
Having followed the Ukraine conflict closely since 2014, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he came out to help the cause later that year.
‘I have the skills and experience and I wanted to help. They were invaded. Ukraine is beautiful too, I always wanted to come. But to be honest, I also always wanted to be in war since I was a child.’
On coming out to fight, Snow, who has a six-year-old son back in Britain, lost touch with friends and family. ‘I ended up cutting everybody out,’ he says. ‘People back home, they don’t really understand what it’s like to be here. Plus I’m in the war. I’m doing my job. I don’t have time.’
Before joining Third Assault Brigade, where he commands a platoon of English-speaking fighters from a range of countries in the Rifleman Battalion, he served with the special forces of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence, known as the GUR. During that period he learnt to speak Ukrainian fluently.
He has fought in Russian territory in Belgorod and Bryansk and has seen heavy fighting in the Ukrainian cities of Kup’yans’k and Chasiv Yar, as well as the regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, earning him both the Presidential Medal and the Special Operations Medal.
Under his left eye are three teardrop tattoos – two blue, one red – each for ten Russians killed.
Before his injuries, Snow was constantly on assaults – on the front line for weeks at a time before rotating out for days in Kyiv then back in.
It was on one of these breaks that he met his Ukrainian wife, who cannot be named, in a bar in the capital in 2023.
‘I had just finished my special forces course and had two weeks’ free time. We got talking in a bar and hit it off.
‘We got married in July 2023, it was just a little ceremony with my team and some other local friends.’ Another tattoo on his eye has the wedding date.
So what motivates him to carry on, even now? For Snow, continuing to serve is a matter of principle. ‘I’ve just come here to do what I feel is right,’ he says simply.
Today he is one of the most decorated foreign fighters in Ukraine. Receiving the Presidential Medal from Volodymyr Zelensky helped secure his citizenship, which is notoriously difficult to obtain.
‘That medal is very, very, very difficult to get,’ he says. Snow, who has not returned to the UK since 2022, is proud of his Ukrainian citizenship and now feels more affinity with the country than his native Britain. ‘I’ve done more for this country than I did for mine,’ he says. ‘When I’m here I feel very free. Everyone is more relaxed here. You don’t get the bulls*** you get back in England.
‘Like with my tattoos, I’m very heavily tattooed. In Britain people would assume I am a criminal. But here, they understand it’s military.’
Snow served in the Royal Anglians for six years where he saw action on a peacekeeping tour of Mali in 2017
Since we last met, he has had a spider web tattoo added to his face to mark his time with the 2nd Mechanised Battalion in Third Assault Brigade whose motif is a black widow.
He was serving with them when he lost his leg. Since returning to service, he has formed his own platoon of foreign fighters who communicate in English and Ukrainian.
‘I’ve got Polish, German, American, Belgian, French – a whole mixture,’ he says. ‘But no Brits – they don’t seem to stay long,’ he jokes.
His return comes as Ukraine prepares for another brutal winter. Following the parliamentary election ‘victory’ for Vladimir Putin’s party in Russia last week, Moscow barraged civilians with rockets and drones, firing 30 ballistic missiles at Kyiv alone in 30 minutes on Wednesday night. Soon Putin is expected to mobilise a further 500,000 men.
‘They have to mobilise, they are losing too many men,’ Snow says matter-of-factly.
While he can no longer lead assaults on the ground, he commands his platoon from an underground command centre six miles behind the front line.
‘I’m there with them,’ he says of his men, who go on assaults as a team of ten to 12, split into two, with the first group seizing and holding ground before the second joins.
‘We control them from the sky via drones,’ he says. ‘We watch them. I talk to them by radio. Tell them how to move when it’s safe to move. They don’t move unless we say. But if they’re in a firefight that’s when the freedom goes to them.’
He has only just returned from the front for two weeks’ leave when we meet. While waiting for adjustments to his new prosthetic, he pulls out his phone and shows me a map with the positions of his men in an undisclosed location in eastern Ukraine. ‘We snuck up behind them,’ he says proudly of an assault just days earlier. Pointing to a treeline, he adds: ‘They took this whole area. Now they are holding it.’
Gesturing further across, he continues as if discussing a mathematical equation that needs solving. ‘Here’s the enemy,’ he says. ‘That’s what I want to do next.’
Yet directing his men by radio is not the same as being beside them. ‘I used to like to lead on the ground. Lead from the front. Now it’s different, I can’t do that. So this is the second best.’
He talks fondly of the men he commands, but it is tempered by frustration at no longer being able to join them on assault. ‘If I could, I would be there with them,’ he says. ‘But at the same time, I’ve done a lot for this country. I’ve done a lot for my part, so maybe it’s time for them to be able to do it.
‘But I have the same ambitions for them that I have for myself. I want them to be successful. I want them to climb higher, to become sergeants, to take the medals.
‘So now I need to give them my knowledge and experience.’