They are idealists who abandoned their jobs for the battlefields of Ukraine, looking for a cause or simply to fight.
The Ukrainian president's call for foreign volunteers to join an international brigade to help bolster his country's defence with a new layer of resistance to Russia's invasion is for now a ragtag army.
Recruits say they are often waiting for weapons and training, leaving them feeling exposed.
"Pure hell: fire, shouting, panic. And a lot more bombs and missiles." That is how Swedish volunteer Jesper Söder described Sunday's attack on Yavoriv, the military training base in western Ukraine pounded by Russian missiles that killed 35 people, according to Ukrainian authorities. Russia said the death toll was much higher.
Söder said he led a group of foreigners including Scandinavians, British and Americans out of the base and back across the nearby Polish border.He told The Associated Press by phone from Krakow, Poland, that he said he didn't know how many foreign volunteers were being trained at the base but estimated they were in the hundreds.
Unlike Söder, who fought alongside Kurdish fighters in Syria against Islamic State group militants, many of the volunteers at Yavoriv had no previous military training, he said.
But some arrive to discover that there are no weapons, protective gear or proper training in a multilingual force short on organization and breeding a sense of chaos.