An 18-year-old British volunteer who enlisted to help defend Ukraine was killed by a Russian drone just minutes into his first mission, according to a report.
James Wilton, from Huddersfield, travelled to Ukraine aged 17 and with no prior military experience, where he was reportedly given a crash training course by Ukrainian instructors.
But his first mission on Ukraine’s eastern front on 23 July 2024 was also to be his last, after James and his comrade found themselves being hunted by multiple Russian drones in an open field with no cover to run for.
“I’ll never get over this. I didn’t want him to go but his heart was set on it. He wanted to help Ukraine,” his father Graham told The Sun.
“I’ve been told bits of the story of how he died, but have struggled to deal with it and wish we could have swapped places because he had his whole life in front of him.”
A US volunteer, named only as Jason, who risked his life to retrieve James’s body and lost his foot after stepping on a landmine four days later, said that his friend “never stood a chance” in the face of the Russian drone.
“It was James’s first and last mission,” he told the outlet, describing his team of six’s task of crossing an open field in groups of two, each 20 metres apart, to resupply other soldiers.
“Myself and James were the last two. I was the last man in the group. I was telling him to stay 20 metres ahead of me. I could see he was scared and I was scared too, but I told him he was going to be okay,” he said.
But Jason recalled his surprise when he suddenly saw his friend stop halfway across the field.
He said: “Then I heard it – a buzz in the air above us – and thought: ‘Oh f***.’ It took me two or three seconds to spot it, then I saw it and realised we were in the worst possible situation we could be in – in an open field with nowhere to run.
“I could tell it was a ‘drop drone’ armed with a bomb and its pilot was trying to decide who to kill – me or James,” he added. “He wanted us closer together so he could kill both of us with one bomb.”
Jason added: “We both started sprinting with two drones on top of us – then a third one appeared. Once the drone was on him, James never stood a chance. He was only about 30 metres from the trench line when I saw the drone explode.
“As I bent down to grab him, one of the other drones appeared 10 metres above my head and I closed my eyes and thought: ‘Oh s***! Now I’m going to die.’ I felt a calm moment when I resigned myself to it and held on to my friend waiting for it to happen.
“But after five seconds it just zipped away and left me there – I still have no idea why.”
It is the first time that James’s death has been reported, with Jason speaking to the publication from the Superhumans Centre in Lviv, a charity-backed facility helping those wounded in Russia’s war.
His father said it had taken a while to process his son’s death, adding: “But I think it’s time that some kind of public tribute was paid and it’s good to be finally talking about what happened.”
Describing his son – who had completed a two-year course in animal welfare and land care before deciding to travel to Ukraine – as “such a laid back, polite, easy-going and likeable young man”, Graham said: “I’ll always be proud of him.
“I brought his ashes back home, but might go back to scatter them there [in Ukraine]. I think that might be what he would have wanted.”
In a rare update on the human cost of Vladimir Putin’s war, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in December that Kyiv had lost 43,000 soldiers killed on the battlefield since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“There have been 370,000 cases of medical assistance for the wounded. It also needs to be mentioned that in our army approximately half of the soldiers wounded in action are later returning to the battlefield, and that our data also includes light or repeat injuries,” Mr Zelensky said.
Additionally, he said around 198,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and a further 550,000 wounded.
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