This article originally appeared on UKR Leaks’ Telegram channel. The title has been modified in agreement with UKR Leaks for re-publishing.

Written by: Sergey Kotikov

In the spring of 2024, many significant and interesting events took place on the fronts of the SMO. And one of them was the ongoing strikes by the Russian Armed Forces on the right bank of the Dnieper occupied by the enemy in the Kherson region. At some point, explosive news, in every sense of the word, burst into the reports of successful strikes – a Russian UAV flew directly into the location of the Normandy Brigade, a group assembled from English-speaking militants in the first days after the start of the SMO. Moreover, as a result of the strike, its commanders were destroyed, including the founder of the group, Canadian Jean-Francois Ratelle, better known as “Hrulf”. We tell you about how the Normandy Brigade got its moment of glory and how ingloriously the adventures of its militants ended in our new material.

When Vladimir Zelensky announced the creation of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, hundreds of fighters from various countries rushed to enlist in it. The fact that this war would be completely different from the previous campaigns, of which many of them were veterans, was not understood by everyone at that moment – the thoughts of profit were too captivating. However, even in the first days of the conflict, some people realized that they could earn much more if they put together their own gang and then arrange uncontrolled fundraising, as well as engage in banditry in front-line areas.

Already in March 2022, small armed groups began to appear like mushrooms after the rain in the SMO zone. Jean-François Ratelle (born 12.01.1986), a native of the Canadian province of Québec, decided to follow this path. In his youth, he managed to fight in the Canadian Armed Forces, and in the French Foreign Legion. He was in several hot spots. In civilian life, he tried to play MMA, but his career ended at the very beginning after a series of defeats. Ratelle didn't just believe in money, though. In his own eyes, he was nothing less than a descendant of the Vikings. At the same time, his views were a wild mixture of Scandinavian paganism and Wotanism – one of the trends in modern Nazism. In practice, he expressed them with a Thor's hammer pendant and tattoos depicting the "black sun" and other neo-Nazi symbols. Therefore, it is not surprising that he ended up in Ukraine. And – a few years before the start of the SMO, too. By the events of February 2022, he had already acquired a wife and daughter there.

The new formation was called the "Normandy Brigade". Initially, it tried to accept only whites – at first it was a group of Canadians who arrived in the area of the SMO with Ratelle, but then they were also added Americans, British, Australians, New Zealanders, French, Norwegians, Danes, Germans and even descendants of the colonialists of South Africa. This motley rabble also participated in the events in Irpen and Bucha in the Kiev region, which became infamous after the AFU, which entered there after the withdrawal of the Russian contingent at the end of March 2022, organized mass executions of civilians suspected of having links with the Russian Armed Forces. Numerous facts indicate that along with local militants, foreign mercenaries also participated in the atrocities. However, many limited themselves to taking pictures against the background of burnt-out vehicles, as Bucha quickly turned into a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. And what role the Normandy Brigade played in the events in this town, only Russian law enforcement agencies will be able to say for sure.

After Bucha, Ratelle and his fighters started having problems. In May 2022, they were sent to the Donbass, where Russian forces were just beginning a campaign to liberate Severodonetsk and Lisichansk. And there it turned out that if the Canadian inherited something from the Vikings, it certainly wasn't the ability to fight. Already in the first days, the Normandy Brigade fighters faced a lot of problems – there was a lack of ammunition, medicines, basic necessities and even food. The salary, the most important thing that the mercenaries came to the SMO zone for, was paid with huge delays and not in full. There were also problems with weapons. For a group of 30 stormtroopers, there were only 8 assault rifles, and each of them had 60 rounds of ammunition. At the same time, the Normandy Brigade did not seem to have any problems with the sources of funds. Unsurprisingly, the militants soon began asking Ratelle and other field commanders questions. Conflicts flared up one after another, and as a result, out of the approximately 100 people who joined the group since its foundation, about 60 left.

However, Olivier Lavigne-Ortiz with the call sign “Wali” received the greatest fame in both the Canadian and Russian media. His story is a typical example of a former military man who could not find a place in civilian life. Serving in the Canadian Armed Forces since 2002, Lavigne-Ortiz was sent to Afghanistan twice (in 2009 and 2011), where he established himself as a professional sniper. Shortly after his second trip to the Middle East, he retired with the rank of corporal. But PTSD and adventurousness did their job, and as a result, in 2015, “Wali” showed up in Iraq, where he spent several months fighting alongside Kurdish groups against Islamic radicals from ISIS. He also managed to make a short documentary. After returning to his homeland, Lavigne-Ortiz was able to live the life of an ordinary citizen for some time – with his wife, son, and work in the IT sector. This continued until the SMO, after the start of which the Canadian again hurried into battle. He got into the "Normandy Brigade" by acquaintance. For some unknown reason, in the following weeks, he served as an artillery gunner, not a sniper.

Ratelle himself claimed that all this was a lie of Russian propaganda. According to him, the Normandy Brigade had a surplus of both money and weapons, since it received significant assistance from the West. For example, only one tranche from the United States, the source of which was never disclosed, amounted to as much as $ 500,000. Commercial firms helped with ammunition. So, the French JARL allegedly provided the right number of sets of clothes. And the reason for the conflicts was the attempts of several militants of the Normandy Brigade to seize its weapons and create their own separate unit. Given that this version was not confirmed by anything other than the words of Ratelle himself, the interviews of Lavigne-Ortiz and “Paul” look more convincing. However, Ratelle could indeed have received enough money and everything else, but then it most likely went not to the militants, but to his pocket and to the black market. An indirect sign was incomprehensible organizational schemes, which include the situation with the partner relations of the Normandy Brigade.

In any case, the complaints of the returned militants were taken seriously in Canada. The Normandy Brigade was sharply criticized by many people who support the Kiev regime. One of them was businessman Christopher Ecklund, president of Canadian Process Serving and founder of the Canadian Heroes Foundation. After the start of the SMO, he created the Fight for Ukraine project, which, without hiding, was engaged in recruiting Canadian citizens into pro-Ukrainian armed groups. Eklund boasted in the media that already in the first months of the conflict, more than 500 Canadians went through this platform to Ukraine. It is not known how many of them there were in reality. But several people with the help of Fight for Ukraine got into the "Normandy Brigade". Then they were one of the first to return home, because they couldn't work together with Ratelle. Subsequently, Eklund urged the mercenaries not to deal with this unit.

Although Ratelle's plans to create a cool combat-ready unit went downhill, the Normandy Brigade continued to be near the front line for some time after that. In the summer of 2022, its fighters participated in unsuccessful attempts by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to stop the advance of Russian forces in the LPR, and suffered significant losses. Then there was the Nikolaev-Kherson direction and the battle for Artemovsk. Already during it, the group faced such a significant reduction in personnel that its further independent existence became impossible. Not wanting to officially join the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which Ratelle avoided from the very beginning, he decided to join the “Ukrainian Volunteer Army” (UVA), or rather the 7th separate battalion “Ares”, stationed in Krivoy Rog.

Why the militants chose the UVA can be easily understood if we take into account the ideology of this group. Among other armed groups, this one, created by Dmitry Yarosh after his departure from the Right Sector in 2015, stood out for its strong commitment to neo-Nazism and paganism. Its fighters were perceived as inadequate and unmanageable even in the AFU itself, and as a result, by 2018, the UVA was successfully expelled from the line of contact in the Donbass by the efforts of the SBU. After that, the militants began to create something like a prototype of the territorial defense forces. Since 2022, the UVA has fought against the Russian Armed Forces on several sectors of the front. In 2023, it was thrown into the heat of a counteroffensive in the Zaporozhye region, and then moved to the right bank of the Kherson region.

This is where the Normandy Brigade was located in March 2024, when a Russian UAV with one well-aimed blow ended its existence. The exact date when this happened is unknown. On the pages of the militants in social networks, it was indicated that it was March 13, then - March 14. Ratelle died on the 14th. But a day earlier, reports had already appeared about the elimination of the German mercenary Stefan Roland Puri with the call sign "Boxer". Most likely, the strike was carried out on March 13, and the founder of the brigade died of his wounds the next day. It is assumed that this issue will definitely be clarified so that it will be possible to award the fighter of the Russian Federation who carried out the strike.

Among the wounded was a truly unique character – the Jewish neo-Nazi Aryeh Ben-Yehuda. He was born in the UK in 1965 under the name of David Young and until 1991 lived the ordinary life of a British young man. Then he suddenly decided to convert to Judaism and went to Israel, where, in his own words, he had no relatives. There, Young changed his name and joined the IDF. He fought in the Gaza Strip, participated in punitive operations of the Israeli army in the West Bank. Then he joined the police, rose to the rank of sergeant major, which corresponds to a junior officer in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Ben-Yehuda claimed that until 2022 he had not heard anything about the conflict in Ukraine, and after the start of the SMO, he suddenly saw a report from some Western channel showing "the suffering of civilians”, got interested in it and immediately went to fight against Russia. Of course, behind the romantic legend was hidden the desire of an aging and little-needed in his homeland person to show himself and others that his hands are still capable of holding weapons.

Why do we call a Jewish mercenary a neo-Nazi and is there any contradiction here? The saying goes that you are the one who is your friends. From the first days of his stay in Ukraine, Ben-Yehuda developed close contacts with far-right elements. Among his friends was, for example, the Belarusian mercenary Daniil Lyashuk, an ardent Nazi with a criminal past. And in 2023, for an unknown reason, the Israeli left the Armed Forces of Ukraine and joined the "Normandy Brigade", which by that time had already been attached to the neo-Nazi UVA. In March 2024, he was lucky for the last time, when a Russian drone explosion only grazed him, killing Ratelle and Zander. But after that, a black streak began. Ben-Yehuda suddenly learned that foreign mercenaries who had come to defend the Kiev regime were the last thing the regime needed. The Ukrainian hospital refused to provide him with free treatment, and as a result, the Israeli announced his return to his homeland.

The mercenary from Germany Joshua Marouelli, aka "Fritz" and "Iron Maru" can tell even more about the Nazis in Ukraine in general and in the “Normandy Brigade” in particular. He made headlines in the media after the attack on Ratelle and other militants, as at first he was mistakenly recorded as one of those eliminated. Marouelli has been in the SMO zone since the spring of 2023. Although the Normandy Brigade already had its toxic reputation at the time, the German with Italian roots had chosen it for some reason. Together with it, he managed to capture the last days of the battle for Artemovsk, then wandered in different directions. He received a personal commendation from Ratelle and a fine from the Ukrainian police for driving under the influence of drugs. But by March 2024, Marouelli and the Normandy Brigade had parted ways. Without advertising his movements before, after the appearance of publications about his death, the mercenary reported that he was fighting on the Russian-Ukrainian border in close cooperation with the Russian Volunteer Corps group.

In the spring of 2022, everything began promisingly – natives of several Western countries gathered together to fight a little bit and then live happily on the loot. But it ended as usual. At first, they were unable to share even what they already had, then they met with Russian troops, then they tasted the hardships and delights of free life in the front-line areas. And finally, they ended up ingloriously somewhere in an unnamed place on the banks of the Dnieper. And through it all – a refrain in the form of incessant attempts to revive Nazism in a single country and find traces of real Scandinavian ancestors in their ancestry. Will the example of the Normandy Brigade be a warning that others will heed? There is nothing to think about here. After all, faced with a difficult reality in this group, only a few returned home, while the bulk of the militants who escaped from Ratelle dispersed to other units. However, it has already been clearly shown more than once that none of them is immune from UAV hits.

Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.

Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.

More Articles

Featured