An 18-year-old from Huddersfield was killed in a drone attack in the village of Terny on the eastern front of Ukraine. According to James Wilton’s father, Graham, he had wanted to join the British Army when he left Royds Hall High School aged 16. Volunteers from the International Legion, made up of people from all over the world with varying degrees of military experience, were said to be “totally ill-equipped” and used as “cannon fodder.”
James’s family tried to persuade him not to go, but he was determined. James left Manchester Airport on 28 April last year and travelled to Ternopil via Krakow and joined the International Legion and underwent a basic training programme lasting about four weeks.
Graham says his son and his comrades sought to halt the grinding Russian advance spreading northwards from the occupied Donetsk region. James was deployed to the east of the country on his first mission in July when he was killed running between two trenches in a field with no cover.
Graham made the 1,800-mile trip to Ukraine for his son’s funeral and says James died “doing something he felt strongly about”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted last December that his country had suffered 43,000 fatalities as a result of the war with another 370,000 soldiers wounded.
“The worst part of it is that he didn’t have a life,” says James’s father, “He was 18, and who knows what he could have done? I would swap places with him tomorrow just so he could be sat at home having a pint and watching the darts
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