As the war intensifies in Ukraine, we thought it was time to revisit what’s going on there. Although the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson was recently liberated, the battle for freedom continues in other regions. Harry Rowe, known as Macer Gifford, is a British volunteer soldier fighting in Ukraine. Gifford assumed the pseudonym Macer Gifford after needing a new identify while fighting in Syria from 2015 to 2017. The former currency trader arrived on the ground in Ukraine 10 days before the war began. Gifford joins WITHpod to discuss the trajectory of the war since June, what he’s hearing from folks there versus what he’s heard from the West, his thoughts on how long the conflict could go on and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Macer Gifford: Good governance in Ukraine where people have a chance for a better life is worth me risking my life on these missions, it’s worth the higher gas prices. It’s worth the money involved in sending HIMARS and rockets to the Ukrainian people. That alone is worth fighting for. So there’s many reasons why we should continue on.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Some of you probably have seen images that have been coming out of the Ukrainian City of Kherson. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly. Kherson, K-H-E-R-S-O-N, is how we transliterate that. It was a city that was on the Dnipro River in the sort of southern part of Ukraine, not that far from Crimea. And it had been taken by the Russians and under Russian occupation.
And recently, Ukrainian forces pushed the Russians out of the city and the Russians evacuated. And there’s all these really inspiring images of crowds amassing on the street, you know, crying and singing and playing the Ukrainian national anthem. And it, you know, I think it’s very evocative of images of liberation that we’ve seen in previous conflicts, I mean, people under the boot of an occupying army and that occupying army then being kicked out.
And the, you know, liberation of the city marks yet another military victory for the Ukrainian forces who have shown a tremendous degree of aptitude and skill and bravery and pushing back the Russian occupiers. I think, I read somewhere that about 50 percent of the territory that Russia had at its peak, in terms of Ukrainian territory that was occupied, has been taken back by the Ukrainians. And we’re about to enter this very difficult winter in which Russia has, A, mobilized many more fighting men through essentially a draft, though they don’t call it that. They’re throwing a lot more manpower at the invasion and trying to hold the territory they have.
There’s also been these sustained targeted attacks at critical civilian infrastructure, particularly the electricity grid. And as Ukraine enters winter, that becomes more and more terrifying in terms of what it means for the civilian population.
And amidst all this, I had just really been wanting to talk to someone who’s actually fighting in Ukraine. Obviously, that’s difficult for a lot of reasons. Both just being able to locate someone, you know, amidst a warzone, can connect on the Starlink satellite Internet system they’ve been using, but also someone who speaks fluent English. And we found someone. He’s a really fascinating dude.
So he goes by the name Macer Gifford, that is his, essentially, nom de guerre. That’s what he fights under, his birth name is Harry Rowe. He’s a British national from Cambridge, as you’ll hear him describe, a guy with strong internationalist commitments and maybe you wanted to go into the foreign service and ended up in 2015 actually going to fight with the Kurdish YPG forces that were fighting ISIS at the time. He then joined a sort of broader coalition of fighters there. He came back. He was the subject of a fair amount of press. He wrote a book actually about his time as a volunteer fighter in Syria.
And now, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has gotten to fight with the Ukrainian defense forces, as you’ll hear he’s not in one of the international battalions that have been constituted, but it’s actually directly under the Ukrainian defense forces.
He joined us from, we’ll you’ll hear he made time to join us, he works on reconnaissance and discuss what the fight has been like, why he’s gone to fight in a country that’s not his own, and why he thinks the stakes are so high and also a bit of on-the-ground eyewitness of what the actual day-to-day of the war has been. How the Ukrainians have succeeded in pushing the Russians back, why it’s been so brutal.
I learned just a huge amount from this conversation. I was very grateful that Macer took the time to speak to us. I think you’ll get a lot out of it as well. It’s really good to have him on WITHpod.
Your name is Harry Rowe. That’s your given name, your nom de guerre, I guess is Macer Gifford. Which do you prefer?
Macer Gifford: Either, it doesn’t matter to me. Macer is what I wrote my book under, it’s what I’ve been known under for years now. But obviously, my birth name is Harry. So it doesn’t matter to me.
Chris Hayes: All right, I’ll call you Macer since that’s what you wrote your book under. And first, let’s just start, I’m talking to you right now, I can see a picture of you. You’re in what looks like an apartment. Where are you right now?
Macer Gifford: So I’m actually in a building in a village about an hour outside of Mykolaiv, which is a city in the southern part of Ukraine, where has sort of halfway between Mykolaiv and Kherson. And we’ve been beta for about two months. And in the last week, we’ve done a massive push towards Kherson city. And we push right up to the Dnipro River and forced the Russians back. So this building, we’re actually in the process of leaving. There’s a rocket behind me and a few medical supplies that need to be removed, but we’re on our way out of this building.
Chris Hayes: And Kherson was just liberated. We saw the images of that. Have you been able to set foot in that city?
Macer Gifford: So we got held up. So the liberation of Kherson started on Wednesday. Obviously, the Russian troops began pulling out long before then, they actually disguised their pullout as a civilian evacuation. And in reality, it was a humiliating sort of retreat. The Ukrainians on Wednesday sort of pushed forward into tree lines (ph) which, just a week ago or the week before, we had taken heavy contact from.
Just a week before then, we’d also received a huge amount of shellfire. And then all of a sudden, it became eerily quiet in the frontline, and we just pushed them over sort of a three-day, four-day period, we pushed right up to Dnipro River.
My squad was supposed to go to Kherson, but we were delayed by a huge amount of anti-personnel mines over minefields and stuff. So in the end, we didn’t actually make it to the city. We were ordered to pull back once the city had been declared free, so not quite, nearly.
Chris Hayes: Obviously, anyone that’s listening to this can hear your British accent, you’re a British national. Who are you fighting with? What’s the command structure that you’re a part of when you say your squad?
Macer Gifford: So I’m an international volunteer with the Ukrainian military. I’m part of the 131 Separate Reconnaissance Battalion, which is a battalion of the Ukrainian army. What people may have heard of over the last eight months, nine months is that the Ukrainian government has allowed individuals from all around the world, from America, from Britain, from France, everywhere, to come over and join the Ukrainian army since the beginning of Russia’s so-called special operation.
And most of those international volunteers have joined what’s known as the International Legion. I haven’t done that. I’ve done something slightly different. I actually directly joined the Ukrainian army alongside eight other people, three Americans, and several others from other places around the world. And we’ve directly joined the Ukrainian army and joined the Reconnaissance Battalion in the south. So this is our A.O., this is our area of operations.
Chris Hayes: How is your Ukrainian?
Macer Gifford: My Ukrainian is incredibly bad. I can just about say hello. But that’s it. So how it works really is, I’ve got a friend of mine, a guy called Damien. Him and I served together in Syria many years ago, fighting the so-called Islamic State alongside the Kurds there. After the war, he went to Ukraine to join the Ukrainian army in 2018.
I went home, did my master’s, started to build a business, started to move on with my life. And then obviously, when the Ukrainian war kicked off, because he had been serving in here for so long, he had so many contacts. Him and I started working together and eventually I decided to join his units. So we’ve been fighting here, well, I’ve been in his unit since September, basically.
Chris Hayes: Is that when you got to Ukraine to join this fight?
Macer Gifford: Well, not really. So I’ve actually been here for almost from the very beginning, in fact, before the very beginning. So about 10 days before the war started, the whole of the mainstream media were talking about how a war is imminent, how Russia was about to invade Ukraine and the injustice of it. The horror that Russia was about to tear up the international rulebook and invade a sovereign country on the edge of Europe. The scope and the size of the conflict as well was horrifying, the fact that Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, it’s a peaceful country, and it’s just about to be invaded by the Russian state.
It just horrified me. And I wanted to come out. I was going to volunteer my time teaching TCCC, Tactical Combat Casualty Care, a battlefield medicine to people in Kyiv before the war. I came out to do that. I also came out to interview people to perhaps write about the conflict.
And then obviously, the war kicked off, my plans are ruined a little bit. I came home, teamed up with a friend of mine, we raised about $150,000, from charities in the U.S. and Europe. And we bought thousands of IFAK kits, individual first aid kits. And we came back about a month into the war and spent several months together just training the Ukrainian army, giving out these medical packs and making sure that they had the skills they needed to save their lives.
And then at around June time, that’s when I noticed that a lot of my friends who had joined the army were making considerable successes, and they were telling me all about what they were doing. And if I’m honest, it may sound a bit self-centered, but I decided to give up on the charity side of things and actually join the army and fights because I felt like it would, I don’t know, maybe it was a selfish reason that I wanted to do it for myself more than anything else to sort of prove that I could do so much more for Ukrainian people. So I just joined the Ukrainian army and haven’t looked back since.
Chris Hayes: You’ve been a reconnaissance. Obviously, it’s always hard to describe what the daily experience of war is because there’s so much tedium punctuated by so much intense, frenetic, adrenaline and violence. But what has been your experience of being a fighter in this war?
Macer Gifford: So all happens do is compare it to what I’ve done in the past. So I was many years ago, way back in 2015, I went to join the Kurds in Syria who were battling against ISIS. Very similar reasons, like, I was horrified at what ISIS was, what they were doing the Middle East. I think a lot of people can remember where they were when Mosul fell, and when Sinjar was surrounded, where all those Yazidi women and children were. And there’s horrible images of the Yazidi girls trapped in cages.
I went out there to fight and I spent three years there. And as you said, the (sp?) conflict is, what is it, 80 percent boredom, 20 percent pure adrenaline as the old saying goes. This is slightly different, because as part of the Reconnaissance Battalion, I’m not on the frontline all the time. My existence is based on tasking, sort of, sets by the commanders in the base in Mykolaiv. So we’re just told as a unit to do things, where, for example, a typical mission is to go to the frontline, find the missing patrol that’s pushed forwards and they’ve lost contact with us. Or maybe we should go and push forward and throw up a few drones, scout some tree lines, find out where the Russian positions are, so we can pull in airstrikes and artillery bombardments.
Basically its intelligence gathering, for us, as I said, it’s a tasking. And those taskings never last, it’s minimum one day, maximum three to five days, never any longer than that. And they’re consistent. Typically, our breaks between taskings are sometimes 24 hours, if we’re rushing, if there’s an operation on, or we’ve had a break of 10 days before. But typically, it’s sort of five days on, three days off, five days on, three days off. So it’s very strange in that respect.
Chris Hayes: There’s a scene in “Saving Private Ryan,” where the members of the company are in a church, I think they’re sleeping for the night. And it’s sort of the first time where they all talk to each other about, like, what they were, you know, before the war. And they sort of reveal what their backgrounds are. And Tom Hanks, I think he was a teacher. And obviously, this is a, you know, the entirety of Ukrainian society has mobilized to defend the country from this invasion.
And I’m just curious about the glimpses of the lives of the people you’re serving with what you see about them, and what their lives were before this sudden rupture?
Macer Gifford: Well, it’s, it’s crazy, because I was speaking to a historian a couple of years ago now about Syria. And it’s true for Syria as for Ukraine that he writes a lot about the Second World II. And he turned to me and he said, what’s fascinating about international volunteers, people who have come from around the world, is that they come from such diverse backgrounds, the fact that you in our units here in Ukraine, you’ve got a British guy from Cambridge, you’ve got a couple of Marines, both combat veterans that have served in Iraq, and you’ve got another guy from France, who used to be a truck driver, and ended up also in Syria fighting.
We are as diverse, and as unique, as you could possibly imagine. And how it relates to what that historian was telling me is, in the modern-day militaries, you’ve got professional armies, and these people have joined up. And they’re not as like the construct armies of the Second World War had a huge breadth of characters within the units. And that’s very much something that you’ve lost in subsequent wars because of the professionalism and because of the smaller armies and all the rest of it. And what’s unique is that for international volunteers, that diverse characterization is definitely there. That’s unique in that respect.
Chris Hayes: I want to talk more about the sort of trajectory of this war and the status of Ukraine. But since you’ve talked about it, I think it’s probably worth just going into your bio right now for people that are listening and saying, like, what is this dude from Cambridge, where in the U.K. are you from?
Macer Gifford: So I’m from Cambridge. My background is that I grew up in rural Cambridgeshire middle class, English, British family. I went to university. I studied politics and international relations. I was going to go for a career in the Foreign Office and worked very briefly with the British Council in Ethiopia. And I traveled quite extensively in Africa, actually working for humanitarian charity groups.
And in 2008, I almost sort of fell into the city of London and ended up working first as shipbroker. And then, more recently, my last job was in the foreign exchange markets. So a lot was made of that when I finally left the city, and went to Syria, you can imagine, like chalk and cheese, very different environments, to say the least. I was typecast.
Chris Hayes: Right. You were in finance. And this when people call the city they’re talking about the world of finance in London, so you were a trader, and you go from being a finance guy in London to being a fighter in Syria?
Macer Gifford: Yes, which is a lot was made of that, that’s what I was trying to say, that’s a bit of a different career change, but unique in that respect. And I spent three years there. I’m trying to see, to me, the battle in Syria. And actually, there’s a lot of comparisons here with the fight against Russia and Ukraine. For me, it was an ideological battle because in Syria you’ve had the Islamic States, as far as I’m concerned, the epitome of pure evil. This is an organization that wants to destroy all sort of culture and history in the Middle East and make it one sort of blank, evil dictatorship of nothingness, a death cult that was going to destroy everything.
And for me, good people had to unite together, support local people on the grounds, the real heroes, the people who were fighting back and defending their homes and recapture that sense of internationalism, that I swear that I think that the world has lost a little bit. The same internationalism that drove George Orwell to Spain to fight against Franco’s fascists or the American Eagles, the young American man who joined the RAF long before America entered the Second World War. These men came from America to join Britain in our hour of need.
And I think the world is changing. So you’ve got the war in Syria against ISIS, and you’ve now got the war in Ukraine. And in both conflicts, you’ve seen thousands of volunteers from all around the world flood to these conflicts. And I’m just part of that story. And I think it’s a unique twist in history.
Chris Hayes: Do you fought with the Kurdish the YPG in the Kurdish army?
Macer Gifford: Yes. So in Syria, you almost had two conflicts going on at the same time. So obviously, we know the Islamic State rises up. But they rose up after a terrible civil war between the rebels and Assad. That battle between the FSA, the Free Syrian Army and Assad, it rumbled on and still rumbles on to this day.
But one of those rebel groups was known as ISIS. And as it grew, it grew into the territory of the Kurds. The Kurds then called for international volunteers to come and help them. And I joined that conflict. I went over, I joined first the YPG. So that was purely a Kurdish force. And the Kurds then began to unite with Christians, with Arabs and Yazidis, and they created the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the group that I was with. The SDF, incidentally, is also a partner of the United States and Britain.
Chris Hayes: You had no combat experience when you went, right? You had not served in the British military. I don’t want to gloss over this. I mean, to people that are listening to this and say this sounds deranged, I mean, you know, it’s whatever I guess suppose admirable or it’s or it’s noble.
But can you just take us through your decision process that first time that you left your home country and your life and everything to go take up arms in a foreign conflict?
Macer Gifford: Yes, well, maybe I just should have told you more about my early life, because maybe, me coming across that I went into finance and I was a banker, and I went straight off to fight in a war, I think that’s only half the story. Because that was just my occupation, who I am as a person is someone who I’m an internationalist, I’m a humanist, as I said, fell into this city, my true love, and my true passion was working abroad.
From the very moment as an 18-year-old kid, pretty much as I step first in Zimbabwe for the first time to work for the MDC, the Movement for Democratic Change, that was quite a important moment for me, because I was leaving my university or took a gap year and went to this country that was in the middle of, in 2008, people can remember that far back as Zimbabwe was in a terrible place, inflation was rampant, and the country was falling to pieces.
And I spent several months working with politicians there, humanism, internationalism, that’s what drives me. So this didn’t come out of the clear blue sky. So when ISIS the very epitome of evil rises up, for me, I saw this as an ideological battle, I considered this as something that I could do, I could go to Syria, I could raise awareness for the Kurdish people there, I could fight alongside them, and show that they weren’t alone in the battle against pure evil.
And over the three years, that’s exactly what I did. I fought every single battle, every single major battle, including the battle for Raqqa. When I returned home, I wrote articles, I did documentaries, I wrote a book, I connected the Kurdish cause with millions of people around the world. And that, if I’m honest, was almost as important if not more important than me fighting on the front line. Because 12,000 Kurds died fighting ISIS, one more British guy fighting alongside them is not going to really help.
But what they really struggled with at the time was a public relations problem, no one in America and Britain had really heard of the Kurds. And instead, we were having these lazy discussions about, oh, are we going to have to militarily intervene, or should we negotiate with ISIS, all this was circulating before we actually found that the Kurds and local people were the ones who were capable of fighting back and doing great work there.
So as far as I’m concerned, the same goes for Ukraine. Ukraine by coming out here, standing in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, hopefully shows them that they’re not alone. And it raises awareness for an amazing cause back home and Britain in America.
Chris Hayes: What surprised you most about the experience of combat?
Macer Gifford: I think it was, how comfortable I was in it. Combat is it’s a very broad, there’s so much I could say about that, the word means different things, in different scenarios, in different places. The first time I received contact from the Islamic State, for example, I laughed, we were on an operation to free to Hamas, we just liberated the city. A few days after we liberated the city, the first proper gunfight I got into, we were fighting in a Christian village.
And the adrenaline and everything else, and it’s a very strange reaction, yet at the same time, and maybe that was because I was in the fixed position and the enemy were 500 meters away, and we’re just shooting each other at distance. I’ve been in contact since then, across the street. I’ve been hit by suicide bombs. I’ve been shots myself. I’ve been blown up, just about everything has happened to me. And believe me, you’re not laughing then.
So it’s, I think it also reminds you that if you are not motivated by it for the right reasons, you’ll just go home. So also, it sort of separates people. It separates the wheat from the chaff as the old expression goes, that if you’re there just for an adventure, just for the thrill of it, getting shot down or blown up, will bring you back to reality pretty quickly. But if you genuinely care, and you want to continue on, and you’re there for a reason, then you find a way to put up with the madness and the horribleness of the situation. And you move on, you carry on.
Chris Hayes: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the trajectory of the war since June, it seems that there was of course, the initial invasion in February, there was widespread, I think, expectation among many Western security services and intelligence apparatuses that they would push into Kyiv, that the government would fall, that Zelenskyy’s days were numbered, and it was a remarkable and improbable victory for the Ukrainian forces that they successfully repelled the Russian invasion.
The next phase of the war was that Russia captured a swath of territory that basically connects its western border with Ukraine, in the Donbas all the way down to Crimea, the peninsula they had seized in in 2014, creating this kind of bridge, basically a land bridge between the, you know, western border, the area that had been contested all the way down to Crimea.
As of now, it appears that about 50 percent of the land Russia had taken at the high point of its conquest or invasion has been retaken by Ukraine. Tell me what your experience of the trajectory of the conflict. Has been since June, and the morale or the expectation at the ground level of how the war efforts going?
Macer Gifford: Yes, well, that say, it’s almost been intense privileged to have a front row seat in this conference, considering the fact that I came here 10 days before the war started, I saw the buildup, I saw the media, talking candidly about how this was definitely going to happen. And that Ukraine, perhaps was in a bit of denial in the early days about whether or not they were going to be attacked. And then the fear and panic in the city of Kyiv.
I mean, when I went to the train station, when I was preparing to leave, it was a scene of chaos, there were thousands of people there cramming onto the running at the trains, forcing their children on board, police were there, they were shooting their rifles in the air, they were forcing people back, almost beating people back and it kind of felt like a scene from the Titanic.
And it was quite a hopeless situation to be in because as I said Russia was sweeping down on Kyiv at that time. Yet at the same time, there was a lot of defiance in the air because I’d gone there to meet people. And I’d met a lot of young people who were human rights activists and other sort of backgrounds. And all those people flooded into the recruitment centers. And I went down to visit one and there were thousands of young men in their civilian clothes, they’d come — some had walked for miles to get there.
And what the military was doing was those big military trucks. And they were pulling off boxes of weapons, ripping them open full of AK-47s and rockets and all the rest, and these people were grabbing them, and then heading to the frontline, no training civilians fighting for their country, stuffing their pockets full of bullets. There was just sort of defiance. And that defiance is something that I think is carried the day, has won the day because you can have all the gear, but no idea.
You can have plenty of defiance, but no equipment to battle against a superior enemy. But what we’ve got in Ukraine is you’ve got the defiance, and you’ve got the support of the West at the right moments. Then they made that decisive decision to supply Ukraine with weapons particularly NLAWs and Javelins and stuff to battle the tanks.
So it’s very much the spirits of Ukrainian people that’s defended them. And also, of course, the failure of the Russians, the Russians has got have got a sort of a Soviet mentality. They genuinely thought that they underestimated the Ukrainians and that the strength of the Ukrainian mindset and their independence and their fierce independence, and it made them make ridiculous and absurd decisions early on in the conflict, everything like going for Kyiv, so that the scope of the operation was utterly vast.
And the fact that only sort of 300,000 Russian troops were deployed in the early stages of the war, and this was the cream of the Russian army was deployed, there just wasn’t enough of them. And the cream of the Army, when they came down in their huge, armored convoys, they were then targeted and ambushed by these, sort of, Ukrainian partisans with these American and British rockets. And they decimated these regiments. These are the best regiments that Russia has got.
So what we’re now facing, we fast forward seven months, eight months, who I’m fighting now, are still regular Russian troops. But a lot of them are raw recruits, conscripts who are being forced to fill in the gaps where they because of the horrendous losses early on. So there’s so much to say, but it’s the scope of this concept is just absolutely vast.
Chris Hayes: Let me ask a follow up on that. And maybe this is a naive question, but I’ll ask it. Can you tell based on the sort of tactical acumen or the performance of units that you’re making contact with, are these people that just got Russia to the front three weeks ago, or the season fighters like, does it manifest in a way that’s palpable?
Macer Gifford: It is. It can be little things. One is their willingness to fight. I’ve seen footage, and I’ve heard stories of Ukrainian units, who have pushed forwards and then defeated overwhelmingly larger Russian forces, primarily because the Ukrainians are feisty. I’m trying to think of a better word. They’re willing to push themselves and go above and beyond the call of duty, assaulting positions, and driving the Russians out. That doesn’t always work. There are very competent Russian soldiers.
There have been appalling cases where Ukrainian troops have been lured into traps. There’s one particular case where Internet and international units actually of my fellow internationals, no one there I know but I heard this, that they assaulted a position, and they were the Russians allowed them to seize a trench. So they got inside a trench. And the Russians had planned this the whole time.
They then laid huge amounts of fire above the trench, so they couldn’t go forward. They couldn’t get back. They’re stuck in the trench. And then they began to lob hand grenades into the trench, killing all of them. So yes, there are much worse stories in that that I’ve heard. I could relay them, but some appalling stories of Russian violence method out by competent but incredibly evil and savage soldiers.
But then again, that savagery is born from desperation, as well, because the average Ukrainian soldier is a better fighter, and one that is highly motivated. And actually, even the international volunteers as well. There are some clownish and foolish international volunteers. But international volunteers, also, are here for a reason. And that’s top fight. So if an international volunteer has a good background, they’ve got a good CV, whereby they’re either a combat veteran or they’ve got a particular skill that the Ukrainians lack. If they’re put in the right place, they can become a very good asset to the Ukrainians around them.
Chris Hayes: I think I know what your answer to this question will be. But I’m going to ask it. Do you think a total and conventional military victory by the Ukrainian forces is achievable, meaning the reclaiming of all Ukrainian land? Let’s put Crimea to the side for a second. All the land controlled by the Ukrainian government up to and including the Donbas which contested, is a conventional military victory along those lines a possibility for the forces you’re fighting with?
Macer Gifford: Not only do I think it’s a possibility, I think it’s inevitable if we go the current progress of the Ukrainian military. Intelligence that I heard today is that the Russians are down to a month or two of artillery shells. Also their ballistic missile stocks have been depleted enormously. Just yesterday, they fired 100 at the Ukrainians again, an act of desperation. The utility of doing that is quite small. The real reason why they did it was actually for the internal market to boost morale amongst Russian people.
So because of the humiliating defeat in Kherson, it’s almost like we were baring our teeth. We’re still fierce. We’re still in this fight. But in reality, all they’re doing is lobbying ordinance that they’ve got limited stocks off. Even the artillery pieces themselves are burning themselves out. You’re burning through people, you’re burning through the stalks of ammunition, you’re burning through money as well is costing them a huge amount.
And also the energy, the sort of enthusiasm of the Russian people is being severely strained by this because of sanctions and because of the diplomatic isolation that this war has provided to Russia. And of course, you’ve got an ever-growing Ukrainian army, the target for the Ukrainian military is a million strong. They’ve got a huge amount of really sophisticated weapons from the West, thinking high mass, for example, the ability to precision-strike the Russians, and you’re seeing it on the battlefield.
So in terms of what I physically see, if you take operations from a few weeks ago, we were under significant Russian bombardments, were talking, it was sort of 80 percent, the Russians hitting us and 20 percent of us hitting them. But it was kind of like the First World War, the entire sort of scene around you as you walked through Ukraine is devastated. Trees chopped down, burnt down, crops burning, houses burning, body parts of both animals and humans around you, shell scrapes, the sort of holes in the ground from the shells, you could fall into them and not get out there that big.
And the noise was just constant. So you’re constantly avoiding, as pure luck, whether or not you will get hit. But that’s the point is that the Russians were throwing everything at the Ukrainian lines. And there were explosions just everywhere. But it didn’t — there was no real sense to it, they would shell a village, but then there’s also a shell of the tree lines and the farm buildings and all the rest of it. Whereas the Ukrainians, when they fired, they were firing at something. Whereas the Russians, they just find everything. And they find hundreds of shells.
And that’s not something that they can possibly sustain. And if I must say, in the last operation I did that was a couple of weeks ago, this last week, I barely had any Russian shells. To be fair, they were too busy running in the opposite direction. But we only got hit once by artillery fire. So the difference between a couple of weeks ago when they’re firing hundreds of shells a day, to just half a dozen, shows you even in my experience, that they can’t sustain this.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
Something that can happen in environments of war, particularly prolonged war, is that really bad actors can get very empowered even in causes that are noble or righteous. I mean, a great example of this is the last conflict you’re in right this Syrian Democratic Forces, the uprising against Assad, a very beautiful, sort of non-sectarian uprising across all sorts of lines of the country. As time went on, become more and more taken over and infiltrated by jihadists and, you know, gave rise to ISIS. What is the experience of prolonged intense war in combat meant for Ukrainian society for who isn’t empowered? Do you worry about similar tendencies, the most militaristic, the most vicious fighters becoming more empowered in a society that is in the midst of prolonged war?
Macer Gifford: I don’t know. I’d say when it comes to the effects of war on society, one of the most horrifying things that I saw, it may sound strange, but it was affected me at the time, was I went back a few months ago to visit my family. And I was on a bus between Ukraine and Poland. And there’s a lot of refugees on there. And there was a little girl, the sweetest little girl you could possibly imagine, a little angel, blond hair, blue eyes, two rows ahead of me, maybe because she had heard me speak English or whatever. She was looking at me from the back of the chair just staring at me.
And she was sort of daydreaming and humming to herself. And then all of a sudden, she started making this horrible noise, this droning noise. And then I realized that what she was doing was she was mimicking the sounds of the air raid sirens, sort of Second World War, high pitched wail of the sirens that you hear all over Ukraine. And she started (ph) making this noise. And the biggest effect is on children who aren’t in school, who are seeing the infrastructure and their parents’ livelihoods destroyed. It’s absolutely harrowing.
It’s soul destroying to see a country brought to its knees. And I can remember actually being moved almost to tears. Not recently, but particularly right at the beginning of the war. Because when I arrived, I felt because I heard from the British media and from the American media that a war was imminent. And I arrived in Ukraine, and some no one was taking it seriously. I even met a politician, a member of parliament of Ukraine 24 hours before the war started.
And he said to me, oh, there’s going to be no war. It’s going to be a limited operation, possibly the Donbas. We’re already preparing for it. The West is exactly racing, he said.
That was a joke, because 24 hours later, he had 300,000 Russians pouring across his borders. But I remember walking through the streets, and looking through windows and restaurants, and then coffee shops and everything else. And seeing mothers and daughters and husbands and people enjoying their life.
And two things struck me. One was that this was so unfair, these people don’t deserve this. These people deserve to keep eating at restaurants and living the life that we have in the West. But also I felt, like, wake up, people. I’ve seen what war is done to countries. I saw what it did to Syria. I saw utterly gut their society. And I remember almost thinking screaming in my head, like, wake up people get your kids out of here, because if the Russians do invade, it’s going to be horrendous.
And then I actually got emotional again, a few days after that when the war did begin. And I went into the underground for the first time. And I can remember being shocked by it (ph). I then knew there are refugees down there. The moment that I was on the escalator and the escalator gets me to the bottom, and I look up, and I just see just rows of people sheltering in the underground, while the cities are being bombed above, it’s like a scene from the blitz from the Second World War.
It’s incredibly sad, because the longer this war goes on, the more of the soul and the hearts will be ripped out of the country, and the harder it will be to rebuild.
Chris Hayes: You know, it’s for that reason. So there has been a debate, a rising debate in the U.S. in the West about negotiation. There’s been more and more op-eds, there was news leaked that President’s Chief National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had a back channel to the Russian counterpart, there was a meeting between the head of the CIA and his counterpart recently face to face. Obviously, there’s a back channel that’s necessary for de-escalation to particularly concerns about nuclear war, which Putin has made lots of noises, very worrying ones about that terrifying, frankly.
As someone on the frontlines, what do you make of the debate about negotiation about a negotiated settlement, about the possibility of diplomacy or diplomatic talks in some formal sense starting soon?
Macer Gifford: So my perspective on this is that there are two perspectives we had. One is the Ukrainian perspective, and one is the international perspective or the western perspective, when it comes to the Ukrainian perspective, this is their country. And at the end of the day, this is the perspective that really, truly counts, because Russia is the one that’s invaded them. They are the innocent party in all of this.
And the idea that we should be pressuring them to seek an arrangement that is not satisfying to them, considering they’re the ones who have also been barbarically invaded, and they’ve lost tens of thousands of people and seen entire communities destroyed, it’s pretty hard on us to expect them to negotiate anything, the very least a return to the pre-war borders, if not something greater than that, I.E., going back before sort of 2014.
The real stakes here, though, is the international perspective. So when it comes to America and Britain, or how we view this conflict, what Russia has effectively done, is rip up the rules based international order, in order that’s existed since the end of the Second World War. And if we allow Russia to do that, invade sovereign country because of the imperial ambitions of their dictator, leader, who lives in, quite frankly, a fantasy world where he sort of regrets the fall of the Soviet Union, he sees that as he’s described in the past as sort of the one of the greatest tragedies to ever hit the world.
If we allow Russia to do this, then as I said, it destroys the world space international order. What’s going to be next? Is it going to be Turkey invading Syria, or China invading Taiwan, or Russia invading another country, one of the Baltic countries? It just highlights a weakness in the West to stand up for their values if we allow countries like Russia and China et cetera, to steamroll over smaller democratic states.
And Russia already has said that it wants a multipolar world. It wants a world where there is not one superpower, but regional powers. And what it (ph) essentially is asking for is a more chaotic world, a world kind of like a First World War world where you had the great powers vying for power. To me, that promotes and provokes more conflicts, it is not less conflict.
Chris Hayes: I mean, just to give a response to that, because I think probably some of the listeners, you know, there are many people will feel that the rules based international order is essentially, you know, a fiction right that it’s a bunch of words that have been draped around the true power players, the five members of U.N. Security Council, of whom Russia is one or just the powers that the nuclear weapons that sort of divided the world in sort of its fears after World War II that the U.S. invade sovereign countries like Iraq, and you know, nothing happens so that order is built upon such hypocrisy that it’s an abstraction to be fighting for, although you right now are actually physically fighting for it. So I’d like to hear your response to that.
Macer Gifford: Just because its rules have been broken in the past doesn’t mean the rules don’t exist. And also there are standards and rules and laws based around the principles of the United Nations and other things that do exist that are worth fighting for. There is a distinction between, let’s say, the American war on terror over the last 20 years, the attack on Iraq, and Saddam’s Iraq, the dictatorship, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example. There are different conflicts, fundamentally different conflicts.
So what you have in Eastern Europe, which is a sovereign country, a democratic country, that’s got a different culture, a different language, different history, to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And this is the first major conflict in Europe of this scope and this size since the Second World War. And as I said, we live now in a world that’s very divided, and a little bit more chaotic.
You’ve got the rise of countries like China, which is becoming much wealthier and a lot more powerful. As I said, what I want to see from America personally, what I want to see from Britain, is to try and promote democratic values, and to sort of distinguish ourselves from the dictatorships of the world. Because I don’t believe American power is based purely on military power or economic power. It’s also the soft power of its diplomacy and its engagement with the world.
And yes, there have been mistakes in the past with Iraq, Afghanistan, et cetera. But when it comes to Ukraine, we do have a chance to do something really good here and defend a sovereign country against dictatorship.
Chris Hayes: Obviously, it gets very cold there, and there is —
Macer Gifford: I’m cold now, by the way.
Chris Hayes: But there’s an expectation, it’s cold now, you know, I can see you sort of shivering. What is your expectation for this winter in terms of combat activity?
Macer Gifford: Well, it can go two ways, really, there has been a lot of talk that it may stagnate the conflict or pause the conflict almost as they dig in. At the same time, I wouldn’t underestimate the ability of the Ukrainians to be supplied with proper equipment. And with the ambition and the aggressiveness that they’ve shown over the last few months, as he made some quite good progress over the next few months, and particularly as you’re seeing a lot of conscripts digging in, with incredibly poor equipment from the Russian side.
I even heard one rumor today amongst several Ukrainian soldiers that they think the war could be over in a matter of months. It may not even last the winter. One of the things that people have been saying is, for example, is that Russia is making a big deal out of the fact that it’s not fighting Ukraine anymore. It’s fighting NATO. It’s fighting the whole Western world. We weren’t expecting this, they said, they say on T.V. and stuff. And it’s almost, this may sound bizarre, but it may be like a face-saving exercise for Russia, it’s kind of like they won’t admit that they’re losing to Ukraine, but they’re happy to admit that they might lose the whole Western world.
And dictatorships are more afraid of their own people than anything else. And what Vladimir Putin needs right now is a way out of this conflict, and in a way out, that makes them look good, or at least justifies the conflict and maybe terrible costs of it. And one of those justifications could be the fact that they’re losing to the west, and not just to drain because at least that he can create some sort of credibility and some success from that.
Chris Hayes: That’s a really interesting point I hadn’t considered, let me ask you just a personal question, like, where are you going to sleep tonight?
Macer Gifford: I’m going to sleep on a bed in there, I think, and I’ve got barely any things, I’m absolutely freezing, it is getting a lot colder in the villages. And there’s no power, there’s power here, but there’s no power where we’re going. And the only heat we’ll get is from the wood. The weather is definitely turning, it’s getting colder and colder, I think, snows on the way in next couple of days.
Chris Hayes: What time do you get up in the morning?
Macer Gifford: Depends if we’re on operation, if we’re on operation, but if I was going to leave here and go on an operation, a typical scenario is, be at the commander’s base at 5:00 A.M., we’ll then get into armored vehicles that will drive to the frontline. So Oates (ph) was from the points. And then depending on the task, we’ll then go out and then conduct a mission. And as I said, the bread and butter of that mission would be to go to a tree line to push forward, to move to contact, perhaps find a Russian position and utilizing drones as well. Looking for mines, that sort of stuff, and feeding that information back to the commanders.
Chris Hayes: Did you smartphones for that, is there like do you have a GPS system for marking precisely where you’re making contact or where the lines are?
Macer Gifford: So our phones we put on to anything that transmits data, receives data is OK, transmitting is not good, because it can be targeted by the Russians. So take your phone on the frontline, but you have to have it in airplane mode, for example. If not, the Russians could start bombing you. I wouldn’t be using my phones. You can use a GPS device for example. What we tend to do is memorize maps. So it’s all in our heads. So I don’t particularly like to bring any unit patches, mobile phones, cameras, I don’t typically take them, sometimes I’ll bring a GoPro but the data will be wiped from it. And I’m only solving what I’m seeing there and then to take back. So if you are captured or if you’re killed and they look at your body, there’s no way to identify you or to glean information from you.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
How long do you think you’ll be part of this effort?
Macer Gifford: Well, as I said, I’ve been from the very beginning. So I started out wanting to help and not knowing exactly how, then I started going through the fundraising and with the IFAK kits and doing the training over the months, and then realizing that I wanted to fight and joining up and then finally going on my first up in September. I said to myself, maybe I’d return home once we liberated Kherson. We’ve got up to the border with Crimea, maybe I have to have a target.
But it’s increasingly likely I’ll stay here until the war ends really, that can’t be indefinitely if the war in a year’s time is paused. And it seems like it could drag on for years, maybe I’d have to then return home and perhaps just donate money and donate my time in a different way and my energies in a different way. But at the current rates, I see with my own eyes the good that we’re doing here. So while I’m doing good, I will keep pushing until the situation changes. So it’s open ended?
Chris Hayes: What would the implications be for all the things you talked about the sort of international order, the West democracy versus authoritarianism, should Ukraine emerge victorious or should they successfully beat back this attack?
Macer Gifford: I think it would be a boost to the West. I think it would remind China that the West does have a backbone, that they’re not as polarized and as divided as we have been over the last few years, because bearing in mind, Russia and China, particularly Russia, have played on our fears. There has been a lot of talk of Russia funding and interfering in elections and that sort of stuff in the West. What, effectively, they do is they take our own institutions and our own values and turn them against us, because they consider democratic institutions as weaknesses, whereas in reality, they are our greatest strengths as far as I’m concerned.
And there are weaknesses involved. And there are ways that our enemy can exploit those weaknesses. But at the same time, it’s the only way we can separate ourselves from them is through these values. And as I said, Russia, China, excuse me, wants to invade Taiwan, it wants, it has aspirations in the South China Sea. It’s increasingly becoming much more assertive and aggressive in its foreign policy actions.
And by reminding the world that actually Europe can come together, even though it’s to the detriment of our economies, our gas prices, and all the rest of it, we are willing to stand for our values, and it actually reinforces that our soft and hard power in that respect. And of course, an entire country will be liberated. Remember Ukraine largest country in in Europe, they’ve suffered years, decades under the Soviet Union, they had liberation or suppose liberation in the ’90s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but still the corruption, the oligarchs, they still remains, and those oligarchs that corruption was exploited by Russia.
Russia wants to force its method of governments, as you could say, on places like Ukraine, because it makes Ukraine easy to control. Now that Ukraine is throwing off those shackles and is turning to the E.U. and has aspirations to join the E.U. Good governance might return to Ukraine that’s worth fighting for. Good governance in Ukraine is worth me risking my life on these missions. It’s worth the higher gas prices. It’s worth the money involved in sending HIMARS and rockets to the Ukrainian people. That alone is worth fighting for. So there’s many reasons why we should continue on.
Chris Hayes: I want to just finish with asking you a personal question if it’s OK with you. Do you have a partner or a spouse or?
Macer Gifford: Yes, I’ve got a girlfriend. I’ve got a loving family. I’ve got two brothers, one is in New York, one is in London. And I’ve taken a lot of time out to be here. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, almost a contradiction to be selfless. You have to be selfish to the people who love you the most. Selfless to strangers, selfish to the people that genuinely care, and it’s something that genuinely weighs very heavily on my mind, because if I were to be, let’s say killed tomorrow and an operation, my problems are over, I’m gone. But the people who will be living with that burden will be my family.
So don’t think of me as a naive person that that’s not on my mind. But also, I hope you take it as an example of actually, that actually, I’m determined to do this, that I know the risks, that I’m risking 50 years of life by being here. So that’s just part of the sacrifice I think international volunteers make.
Chris Hayes: Well, Mr. Gifford, born Harry Rowe, a British volunteer in the Ukrainian army, I’m so thankful for you, the frontlines of a warzone to take the time to talk to us and obviously, sending you all of the best luck and good fortune in the months ahead.
Macer Gifford: Thank you. Thank you so much. And I genuinely think America and Britain are on the right side of this war, and hopefully it will emerge out of this victorious.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Macer Gifford and obviously we’ll be thinking about him he’s in a very dangerous place and our thoughts will be with him. We’ll provide updates I think from time to time, we’re in contact with him.
You can send us your feedback to this episode. We always love to hear it. Tweet us with the hashtag WITHpod email WITHpod@gmail.com. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Tarek Fouda and features music by Edie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.