Country’s death toll in brutal war actually equals or exceeds the death toll among French and German volunteers
Tom Blackwell
February 17, 2026
National Post
The Canadian soldier’s cries are anguished, made all the more poignant by the fact he’s recording the sounds with his own Go-Pro camera. “My foot is f—ed. Help me,” he shouts into the darkening Ukrainian forest, no-man’s land between friendly and Russian lines, before groaning in agony. “Hey, someone, come help me.”
The 21-year-old fighter and medic in Ukraine’s Khartia Corps, identified only as Cooper, had just stepped on a Russian land mine, then tightened a tourniquet around his mangled leg to stem the bleeding. But his appeals that day last fall were in vain and no aid came. So he began to hobble and crawl toward the safety of a Ukrainian position, hoping against hope he wasn’t spotted on the way by a Russian attack drone.
Cooper was finally discovered by Ukrainian soldiers who dragged him to relative safety and later sent him, still bleeding profusely and falling in and out of consciousness, to a combat hospital. Surgeons there amputated part of the Canadian’s leg.
Many soldiers would have called it quits at that point. Not Cooper, it seems. He recently told an interviewer with the Khartia Corps that he plans to return to the fray, after officers commended him for saving the lives of 50 wounded Ukrainian soldiers. “I’m not done yet,” he said during the video interview, in between repeated drags on a cigarette. “What am I going to do about it? I lost my leg — move on, right? I can’t change what happened. I know what I signed up for. I don’t regret it.”
Khartia identifies Cooper only by his call sign, as required by Ukrainian military rules, and he declined through the Corps to be interviewed by National Post. But his compelling story of personal courage and narrow escape from death underscores an almost-forgotten phenomenon: the scores of Canadians who have risked everything to help defend Ukraine from the invasion Russia launched four years ago on Feb. 24.
Many of those who went over to fight were wounded. Others will never return. At least 20 combatants from this country have been killed in action on the front lines of the brutal war, says Jean-Francois Ratelle, a University of Ottawa adjunct professor who is tracking the foreign-fighter experience.
His estimates point to a shockingly high, 15-per-cent death rate for those Canadians, even as their sacrifice receives scant attention here. During heavy fighting in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province in 2006, by contrast, the Department of National Defence estimated that 1.6 per cent of Canadian soldiers serving there lost their lives.
The total number of Canadians killed in action in Ukraine actually equals or exceeds the death toll among French and German volunteers, says Ratelle, though Germany and France are much more populous, lie closer to Ukraine and as European nations arguably have a greater stake in the war’s outcome.
Global Affairs Canada spokeswoman Thida Ith said the department does not track Canadians who travel to Ukraine to fight or those killed in combat but is aware of 27 Canadian citizens who have died in Ukraine from all causes since the war started.
Foreigners who came to Ukraine’s defence were hailed at the start of the conflict as a major boost to forces that continue to be outnumbered and out-gunned by their Russian foe. The country actively called for international recruits with military experience. But Ratelle said the number of Canadians who did join the fight has been relatively modest, perhaps as little as 130, according to his admittedly rough estimate.
His research indicates that most were former soldiers drawn by the chance to confront an unprovoked, bloody assault by an authoritarian country, sometimes feeling the Canadian government had not done enough to help Ukraine. Though he admires the fighters’ bravery, Ratelle said their contribution in many cases may not have made a significant difference “in the meat grinder of that war.”
But those fighters could still present a challenge — to Canada, said the academic. Surviving trench warfare that’s been made all the more terrifying by the widespread use of killer drones, some will undoubtedly return with psychological, if not physical, scars, he said. For that reason, Ratelle believes Global Affairs should have been keeping track of Canadian fighters, at least so they could receive whatever mental-health help they needed when they got back home. “I believe we are making a mistake as a country not to have a better idea of what’s going on,” he said. “It could become a security issue, it could become a human problem in a way when veterans come back from a front where they are not recognized as such. After the war, most of those people will fall into a grey zone. They will not be really welcomed in Ukraine, and we won’t have the resources to help them in Canada.”
Ratelle argued in a 2024 paper that post-traumatic stress disorder, if left untreated, could even make some repatriated fighters vulnerable to recruitment by extremist groups. In the videotaped interview posted online by his regiment, Cooper says he travelled to Ukraine a year ago for what he insists were personal reasons, not necessarily in pursuit of a noble cause. “I just wanted more with my life — that’s all really,” said the Canadian, whose shock of curly hair, full beard and wire-rimmed glasses make him look more like a university graduate student than an infantry grunt. “I like to spare people the moral platitudes of ‘Oh, I’m here to save Ukraine.’ Every foreigner says that. The truth is I just wanted something more. And if I help people on the way, that’s great too and I think that’s my duty.”
He does not appear to have any prior military experience and said he probably wouldn’t have chosen to be a medic but was directed into that occupation after arriving in Ukraine. His last mission was near the town of Kupyansk, a rare bright spot these days for the Ukrainians. In recent months, the Khartia Corps and others have repulsed a Russian offensive to take the railway hub, located on a key supply route in the country’s northeast.
On the day Cooper was wounded, he and comrades — at least one a fellow foreign fighter with an English accent — were tasked with clearing a forest that lay between Russian and Ukrainian positions. Much of the operation was recorded on his camera.
Moving quietly through the dense woods, they came across Russian fighting holes, shooting or tossing grenades into them in case they were still occupied. But mostly they encountered dead enemy soldiers, likely killed by Ukrainian bomb drones. At one point, the group found a badly wounded fighter from their side, carrying him back to a bunker slung from a thick tree branch.
They returned to the forest to hunt some more, ending up “a bit disappointed” at their lack of contact with live enemy, Cooper says in the interview. As the squad headed back at the end of the afternoon, he was last in the group — and had the terrible luck to step on the mine that no one spotted. “I quite vividly remember my feet being thrown up and I was thrown on my back. I knew instantly I must have stepped on a mine because as I was thrown up, I saw my boot torn apart.”
Cooper affixed the tourniquet and sought cover, before turning on his Go-Pro, figuring “if I’m going to die here, I might as well record it.” His fellow soldiers apparently heard nothing, leaving him alone in the looming darkness. The soldiers who rescued him kept him overnight in their bunker, before he was rushed to a field hospital on the back of an all-terrain vehicle. “There was blood everywhere by the time I was leaving. I felt really bad because the Ukrainians had to clean it up after I was gone.”
The interviewer asks later if it is a “viable option” for him to return to military service. Absolutely, Cooper replies in the same understated way he described the whole, harrowing experience. “At some point, people have a mental stoppage and I just don’t really accept that,” he says. “I’ll be in a prosthetic soon. There’s plenty of other people who do it, so why can’t I? There’s no excuse not to. No excuse.”
Tom Blackwell is a seasoned enterprise reporter, most recently employed by the National Post. Lately I’ve focused on Canada’s relations with China and other countries, but have also covered health, politics, the law & more. I’m a veteran print journalist and communicator who most recently has been covering China’s presence in Canada, the Ukraine-Russia war as it affects my country and the politics around immigrant communities. He previously spent 12 years on the health-care beat. His goal is always to produce enterprise stories – the ones other media haven’t discovered yet. He has been a finalist four times for the National Newspaper Award, Canada’s premier print journalism competition. He recently took early retirement from the National Post, but continues to produce freelance material.