A British volunteer hopes to obtain Ukrainian citizenship after being wounded on the front lines
British volunteer Karl Gliz, known by his call sign "Jordi," who fought with the Ukrainian Defense Forces, has expressed his desire to obtain a Ukrainian passport. The soldier, who was wounded and lost a leg during a combat mission in the Sumy region, returned to duty after rehabilitation and continues to support Ukraine.
The 41-year-old fighter with the International Legion of the Main Intelligence Directorate spoke about this in an interview with DW.
Before the full-scale invasion began, Karl was running his own construction business in the UK and knew little about Ukraine. However, with his military experience and having served in the Iraq War, he arrived in Ukraine as a volunteer in early 2025. He fought in the Zaporizhzhia and Sumy regions, where last June he was caught in a fierce six-hour firefight and stepped on a landmine.
“I just looked down and saw the top of my boot and nothing else. So I immediately realized that I had been blown up by either a landmine or an improvised explosive device,” the soldier recalls.
After receiving first aid and being evacuated to Kyiv, Karl was sent for treatment and rehabilitation to Germany under the care of the international charitable R.T. Weatherman Foundation. Although German medicine is considered among the best in the world, after a few months there, the British soldier secretly left the medical facility, packed his things, and returned to Ukraine with a friend. The legion’s command had not granted such permission, but the soldier longed to be with Olga, a woman from Kyiv whom he had met a few months before his injury, and could not stand idly by while the war raged on—a war in which his close comrades, Grizzly and Stall, had perished. The girl recalls that Karl reacted to the amputation with extraordinary optimism, saying, “It’s just a leg; everything else is fine—life goes on.”
In March of this year, the foreigner officially returned to the army on a prosthetic leg. He is currently undergoing the final stage of training in Kyiv and will soon head to Zaporizhzhia, where he will work as a military instructor and conduct training for new recruits.
Karl Gliz emphasizes that he has no plans to return to the UK and sees his future exclusively in Ukraine. He wears a gifted embroidered shirt, dreams of learning Ukrainian, obtaining citizenship, and marrying Olga. The volunteer is convinced that once the war ends, Ukraine will flourish thanks to reconstruction, and Russia must be driven out of all territories for good. Even in the event of a potential new Russian offensive in the future, the Briton assured that he would pick up a rifle again without hesitation.
Read also: A Colombian volunteer from the 47th Brigade held his position in the Sumy region for over 110 days.
As a reminder, the “RUG” unit, part of the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade “Magura,” consists of about 2,000 Colombian citizens.
A volunteer from Colombia, who had been fighting Russian aggression in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine since December 2022, was killed in the war in Ukraine.
