Iranian Kourosh Sehati was working for the British TV channel Iran International when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, the journalist has joined the Foreign Legion of Ukraine.

Radio Liberty reports on his story.

According to the media, Sehati is the first known Iranian to join the Foreign Legion of Ukraine.

In Iran, he was a human rights activist who was arrested several times for his political activities. He fled Iran for Turkey in 2004. There, he was granted political refugee status and later moved to the United States, where he worked for the Voice of America’s Persian Service and became a citizen.

According to Sekhati, he is defending Ukraine from what he calls “the club of dictators and invaders” – Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies, including Iranian clerical rulers, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, and the regimes of North Korea and China.

His decision to fight was influenced not only by his political beliefs but also by personal motives.

“I feel a connection to Ukraine because my wife is Ukrainian, and our children are half Ukrainian,” he explains, adding that his family lives in London.

In addition to his family ties, his position has deeper historical roots in the long-standing Iranian-Russian controversy.

In the nineteenth century, Persia and the Russian Empire fought a series of wars that ended with Moscow ceding most of the Caucasus. Subsequently, the Russian Empire sought to control Iran’s natural resources and repeatedly occupied its territories.

In the 1940s, the Soviet Union supported short-lived Kurdish and Azerbaijani republics in northwestern Iran. Despite their quick suppression, these events caused ethnic tensions that continue to this day.

Sehati also explains that one of the motivations for joining the military was to change the perception of Iranians.

“I am trying to send a signal of solidarity between Iranians and Ukrainians so that Ukrainians do not associate Iranians with the actions of the Islamic Republic,” he said.

The massive surge of foreign volunteers willing to help Ukraine and signing contracts follows a series of loud statements by Trump and the scandal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi.

According to the recruiter of one of the most elite units of the Defense Forces that accepts foreign volunteers, the number of applications has increased by several thousand after the Oval Office controversy.