Amie Ferris-Rotman, a former Reuters correspondent in Afghanistan and Russia, is a journalist based in London. Follow her @Amie_FR.

The sleeve of rebel fighter Yuri Protsenko shows his allegiance in the ongoing conflict in his native Ukraine: He wears the patch of the largest Russia-backed separatist militia in the country, the Vostok Battalion, which he joined in February of last year.

In Kyiv, Igor Panasyuk is readying himself for combat against rebels like Protsenko. Stout with a silver moustache, the 49-year-old joined the Ukrainian army to protect eastern Ukraine “from becoming another Chechnya,” where Russians and separatists waged two bloody post-Soviet wars.


But while Protsenko and Panasyuk are adversaries today, they are erstwhile brothers-in-arms: Both fought for the Soviets during the war in Afghanistan, where their time overlapped for one year in 1988. In the Red Army, Protsenko battled mujahideen in Kabul and Kandahar, where an injury to his right eye gave it a slight tendency to wander. Panasyuk served as a fighter pilot stationed in the northern Afghan province of Mazar-e-Sharif, and flew out of Afghanistan on the February day that the Soviet Union withdrew its troops in 1989. Although the two never met, they may face each other today across the front line of an entirely different war in their home country.

The two men are not alone. Once participants on a key battleground of the Cold War, where U.S.-backed guerrilla fighters dealt a humiliating blow to the Soviet Union and the Afghan military it trained, Afghan war vets are again taking up arms in Ukraine by the thousands—whether on the side of the separatists or for the Ukrainian government. For these men, called “Afgantsy” in Russian, the impulse to fight is almost innate—a response to what they view as another proxy war between the West, which backs Ukraine, and Russia, which openly supports the separatists.

Despite their age, for many Afgantsy, the nearly 2-year-old Ukraine conflict, which has killed almost 9,000 people and displaced at least 1.4 million, is a natural next step. It is their third war in at least 25 years, with the 1990s Chechen wars sandwiched in between. The middle-aged fighters’ hardened reserve, combined with much-needed combat experience, makes them desirable in a conflict defined by poverty and incompetence, in which recruits on both sides have been accused of robbery, drug-dealing and hard drinking.

“Afgantsy don’t sit about at home, twiddling our thumbs,” Protsenko told me at café in Donetsk, the capital of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which pro-Russian rebels seized last year. Garbed in camouflage and a teal-colored beret, he puffed on a cigarette, making his chest, festooned with Afghan war medals, heave up and down as he told me, “We know how to deal with blood, with wounds, with artillery.” Panasyuk, who, like Protsenko, was en route to Gorlovka, one of a string of bullet-riddled towns near the de-facto border separating the Donetsk statelet from the rest of Ukraine, echoed Protsenko’s claims to Afgantsy battle-readiness—“we know what war is, and what it isn’t”—but he doesn’t see his “brothers” from Afghanistan as his enemy; instead it is Russian President Vladimir Putin, Panasyuk told me, reaching up every now and then to touch the Soviet dog tag still on his neck, as if it were an amulet.

The presence of the Afgantsy is certainly felt. Hundreds of pro-Ukraine Afgantsy took part in Kyiv’s 2014 Maidan revolution, which drove out the Moscow-backed government. Now, according to the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, there are thousands of Afgantsy fighting as part of the 232,000-strong Ukrainian Armed Forces. Representatives from the Ukrainian Union of Afghan War Veterans, a non-governmental volunteer group, say there are at least hundreds taking part on the Russian-backed side of the conflict, though some rebels estimate the number to be in the thousands. It is widely rumored that even rebel commander Igor Bezler (whose nom de guerre is “Demon”)—the man the SBU blames for the downing of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine a year ago—served in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, though he will neither confirm nor deny this.

Vladimir Mirutenko, another Afghanistan veteran, has been battling Ukrainian forces in the city of Mariupol, but his 23-year-old son has taken up arms on the Ukrainian side of the conflict. | Joel van Houdt

The Soviet war in Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 and ended a little more than nine years later, remains a painful chapter in former Soviets’ collective memory. It hastened the bankruptcy and 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. After Russia, Ukraine suffered the second-largest losses from the war, with at least 2,500 dead soldiers and thousands more wounded. The toll on Afghanistan, meanwhile, was horrific: One million people were killed, the country’s agriculture was destroyed and a third of its population fled, creating the largest single-country refugee crisis the world had then known—not to mention that Moscow’s invasion sparked a cycle of violence that continues today.

For many of the 90,000 Afgantsy who returned home (at least 15,000 did not), a hero’s welcome was rare. As in other conflicts—there is a strong likeness to the American experience in Vietnam—what Afgantsy saw as an increasingly pointless war made returning to normal life extremely difficult. “In Afghanistan, we bombed not only the detachments of rebels and their caravans, but our own ideals as well,” the prominent Russian journalist Artyom Borovik, who embedded multiple times with Soviet troops, wrote in his book The Hidden War. This mix of disillusionment with the Soviet leadership and the scorn heaped on returning soldiers led many Afgantsy to form tight-knit support communities at home. In Ukraine, these communities, mostly set up as branches of the veterans’ union, were instrumental in organizing fighters for the current war.

Nostalgic for Soviet times, some Afgantsy have clung to their Moscow ties, while others are loyal to Ukraine and want to protect its sovereignty. In a dappled communal garden in Donetsk, I met Vladimir Mirutenko, an Afghan veteran with watery green eyes. He has been battling Ukrainian forces in the city of Mariupol, where fresh fighting on August 17 killed nine people, including two Ukrainian soldiers. Fighting might seem an odd occupation for Mirutenko, who has a prosthetic leg from a mining accident after his return from Afghanistan. But the 48-year-old—who was awarded the Soviet Union’s highest military honor of its time, the Order of the Red Star, for his bravery in liquidating opium-carrying caravans in northern Afghanistan—is fuelled by a pro-Russian, anti-American ideology.

“If we hadn’t gone into Afghanistan when we did, the Americans would have taken it. Now they have it, and look at the mess they made,” Mirutenko told me, referring to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “If we hadn’t fought for Donetsk, then NATO, the Americans and [Senator John] McCain would have grabbed it,” he continued. (An official aide to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, McCain has said he is “ashamed” of the United States for refusing to provide lethal aid to Kyiv, though the Obama administration has given hundreds of millions of dollars in non-lethal equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces, including drones and Humvees.) In Mariupol, Ukrainian forces captured and detained Mirutenko for several days, he says, and tortured him by stringing him upside down from the ceiling. But he says he was prepared for the ordeal. “Going back to war is like getting into a car after a break of 10 years,” he says. “You just drive as if nothing has changed.”

The divide among the Afgantsy—pro-Russia vs. Ukraine—replicates a familiar split across the former Soviet Union, one that is usually generational, with some hungering for a policy shift to the West while others prefer familiar footing under Moscow’s watch. To wit, Mirutenko’s 23-year-old son, impressed by his father’s heroism, has also taken up arms—though he fights on the Ukrainian side, meaning Mirutenko could potentially face him in combat. “I fed and clothed my boy. He’ll always be my son and will always respect me, but we believe in different things,” Mirutenko says, matter-of-factly.

Divided loyalties among Afgantsy are common, says Lilia Radionova, the representative of the Donetsk People’s Republic who helped secure Mirutenko’s release. “Afgantsy have strong beliefs about what is right and wrong, and they often end up fighting each other,” she told me in a Donetsk hotel that houses the republic’s so-called Defence Ministry staff and their families. Its lobby is unlit but is a flurry of activity; men in camouflage with Kalashnikovs over their shoulders filter in and out, as do the made-up women who service them. Like on Donetsk’s wide, leafy boulevards, the striped black, blue and red flags of the Donetsk People’s Republic adorn the walls.

What Afgantsy on both sides seem to agree on are the strong parallels between the conflict in Ukraine and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Moscow trained Afghan servicemen to battle U.S.-funded mujahideen; for years, the United States denied arming the fighters, but by 1986, Washington was openly aiding them. Today, Moscow backs rebels in eastern Ukraine, but it consistently denies supplying soldiers in the conflict despite accusations from Kyiv and from Washington, which is supporting the Ukrainian army.

“In Afghanistan, we built bridges and schools; we gave medicine. Russia is trying to do the same here, but the Americans are bent on ruining everything,” a senior rebel who identified himself only as Vladislav told me in Donetsk, not far from the hotly contested airport, where he commands the Vostok militia. Tall and hefty with a thick black beard, Vladislav was injured in his shoulder in Herat in western Afghanistan, where he was stationed from 1983 to 1985. Protsenko offers another comparison: “Both [Afghanistan and Ukraine] have savages, and neither has what you could call a history,” he told me.

Oleksandr Yankivsky, deputy head of the Kyiv branch of the Ukrainian Union of Afghan War Veterans, lights a candle in the Church of the Resurrection, in Kyiv. | Amie Ferris-Rotman

According to Alexander Khodakovsky, the commander of the Vostok Battalion and now the security minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Afgantsy are similarly sculpted, and motivated, by Soviet memories. “In Afghanistan, they defended the interests of the Soviet Union. When fighting for us, they imitate certain attributes of that time. They are fiercely patriotic,” Khodakovsky told me in his office in Donetsk, housed in a Soviet-era tower block. “Of course, they’re older than most and they’ve suffered illnesses and concussions and the like. But their experience is a very valuable asset.”

The drive to fight, whether on the side of Kyiv or Moscow-backed rebels, is intrinsically tied up with valor. But there is also a sentimentality that feels bound by a duty to preserve the memory of a war that most Ukrainians would rather forget. When the bodies of Afgantsy returned to Ukraine, in the hermetically sealed zinc coffins that became emblematic of the war, they often passed through Kyiv’s Church of the Resurrection, which I visited in July. Here, between walls laden with the icons of saints, funerals were held, and in 1992, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gifted it to the veterans’ union. Today, despite the baptisms and marriages the church provides for the relatives of Afgantsy, it is a sobering place. The bell tower faces a circular memorial of granite blocks with the names of the dead; in its center are statues of three Afgantsy on a pedestal, one with his face buried in his arms. Flowering black tulips, cast in metal, surround them, in reference to the nickname given to the planes that brought home the dead.

Crossing himself as he entered the church, Oleksandr Yankivsky, deputy head of the union’s Kyiv branch, said the similarities of the two wars continue to haunt him. “The biggest resemblance to Afghanistan—and this is the most shameful part—is that we are losing our country again,” the former sniper told me, comparing the collapse of the Soviet Union to the breaking up of Ukraine today. “But Ukraine is our motherland, and we will defend her.”