British volunteer fighting for Ukraine posts poignant Armistice Day message

A British volunteer fighting for Ukraine has filmed the moment he marked 11am on Armistice Day holed up in a trench just a short distance from Russian forces.

Poignantly comparing his situation to that of soldiers from the First World War, Macer Gifford said once again a “British man finds himself in a trench on the frontline battling in Europe”.

Speaking to camera Mr Gifford said it was 11am in Ukraine on the 11th day of the 11th month and that it was a “day that we remember all the people, men and women, that have died fighting for us”.

He said: “After all those years, since the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, once again a British man finds himself in a trench on the frontline battling in Europe.

“It’s incredible sad that we find ourselves here in Ukraine, a beautiful country on the edge of Europe that is being attacked by a dictatorship, by Russia, by a country that has destroyed any semblance of Democracy in their home country.”

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Mr Gifford added that Russian forces were “wreaking havoc and creating misery in Ukraine” before he said the Russian army were just a short distance from the trench where he was filming the video.

With trees just visible in the background, Mr Gifford said he could not share his exact location for security reasons and said he was on the “frontline against fascism”.

As he spoke in the background the sound of artillery could be heard and he told the camera “that’s a mortar going over my head, just landed”.

He added: “The fight goes on, up and down this long frontline, thousand mile frontline, Ukrainian men and women are dying and they’re fighting for their liberty and they are showing the rest of the world what Ukraine is capable of.”

Mr Gifford is a former banker and councillor who also volunteered to fight with Kurdish forces against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, before heading to Ukraine.

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Elsewhere in Ukraine Russian forces targeted the capital, Kyiv, as part of an overnight bombardment felt across the country, local officials said.

In Russia officials blamed attacks on drones from the Ukrainian military that targeted areas around Moscow and the region of Smolensk.

A ballistic missile was shot down as it approached the Ukrainian capital, said Serhii Popko, head of the Kyiv City Military Administration. He said that no one was injured.

The Ukrainian air force later confirmed an Iskander-M ballistic missile was used in the attack, the first attempted missile strike on Kyiv in almost two months.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, the strikes killed four people in three regions: two in Kherson, one in Dnipropetrovsk and another in Zaporizhzhia, local officials reported.

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