Chris ‘Swampy' Garrett, British volunteer who dedicated his life to clearing mines in Ukraine

Yahoo

11-05-2025

Chris 'Swampy' Garrett, who has died in Ukraine aged 40, was a British mine clearance volunteer who in April 2022 was among the first to enter Kyiv's newly liberated north-west suburbs after the failed Russian siege.
The Kremlin's forces had pulled out of Hostomel and Bucha just days before, leaving both suburbs festooned with landmines, unexploded bombs, and booby traps. To make matters worse, residents had tried to start the clear-up task themselves, casually collecting stray ordnance from their homes and piling it up outside their front gates for removal.
The scene – which reminded Garrett of households leaving recycling out for collection – showed the twin challenges that he faced in Ukraine. One was coping with the sheer volume of ordnance deployed by the Russians, who had no qualms about using it in civilian areas. The other was educating Ukrainians about the risks posed by leftover ordnance – no easy task in a country where health-and-safety culture is not second nature.
They were risks that Garrett knew all too well, having cleared mines in Ukraine for the better part of a decade, often in battlefield conditions where optimal safety procedures were not possible. At the time of his death he was working for Prevail Together, an ordnance clearance charity that he had co-founded in Ukraine, which pools the expertise of American, British and European military and humanitarian veterans.
Sporting a huge skull and crossbones with the slogan 'Danger: Mines' tattooed on his back, Garrett saw his job as a vocation. For all its hazards, he regarded defusing high explosive as more straightforward than the messy business of everyday life. As he put it: 'I forget everything around me, as my whole life is now that green box [the landmine] in front of me.'
Garrett himself had only limited formal military credentials, his nickname of 'Swampy' coming from his previous days as a tree surgeon on the Isle of Man. It was a stopgap job after a troubled period in his youth, in which he spent time in prison for robbery after failing to make it into the British Army.
Seeking to build a new life abroad, and still keen to pursue a military career, he then did so by unorthodox means – travelling first to Myanmar in 2008, where he joined the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), and then to Ukraine in 2014, where he fought with the Azov Battalion against pro-Russian separatists.
He returned to the UK in 2017, only to race back to Ukraine four days after Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion in 2022. Rather than active combat, he focused on mine clearance, having already had some harrowing encounters during his time with the Azov. But with thousands of other foreigners now also rallying to Ukraine's defence – many serving with President Zelensky's new International Legion – he soon found himself both a mentor and a mascot.
For many of the newcomers, especially those with limited military experience, his willingness to give advice was much appreciated. And for those, who, like him, were seeking to move on from difficult pasts, he was proof of the front line's redemptive powers.
As he told the Telegraph in November 2022: 'A lot of veterans struggle to fit back into civilian life back home. Here, they get the camaraderie again, the brotherhood thing, or whatever. Call it a twisted form of therapy.'
Christopher Garrett was born on July 29 1984 and raised in Peel, a small port on the west of the Isle of Man, and joined the Army cadets aged 12. After leaving school at 16, he attended the Army Foundation College in Harrogate but failed to complete the course, having suffered a knee injury while rock climbing.
He then fell in with what he would later call a 'bad crowd', receiving an 18-month prison sentence for attempting to rob a petrol station in 2003. He served his time at the Isle of Man's Victoria Road Prison, by then the only British prison to still have slopping out. Garrett later told journalists that he committed the robbery while distraught about his ailing father, who died from cancer while he was incarcerated.
In 2008, after reading a magazine article about the KNLA, Garrett headed for Myanmar where his grandfather had served during the Burma campaign in the Second World War.
His introductions to the KNLA were through the late Dave Everett, a former Australian SAS soldier and convicted bank robber, who became a prominent backer of the group's long-running war against Myanmar's military junta. Garrett made several visits to Myanmar, being smuggled in through the jungle on the Thai border, although rather than fighting, he focused on landmine clearance.
He then moved to Ukraine in 2014, shortly after the outbreak of the Russian separatist war. Kyiv's forces were desperately short of skilled soldiers, and Garrett ended up joining the Azov Battalion, a nationalist volunteer unit that was at the forefront of the fighting.
The combat was ferocious, and as a foreigner in a mainly Ukrainian unit, the language barrier put Garrett at particular risk. In one chaotic battle in Shyrokyne, on the Azov Sea, he got separated from his comrades as they pulled back, and came face-to-face with a separatist fighter as he rounded a street corner. Garrett said he shot the fighter point-blank before fleeing, pretending to be a separatist himself to bluff his way past an enemy position.
The incident ended his appetite for full-on combat, but left him well-placed to advise would-be Legionnaires of the particular hazards they would face when serving on Ukraine's frontlines. Many he urged to think again, sensing that they imagined real-life warfare would be like playing the computer game Call of Duty.
From 2022, Garrett devoted much of his time to training regular Ukrainian soldiers, aiming not for the technical perfection of the Western mine clearance charities, but to pass on basic skills that could save lives. 'If we don't teach them, they will try themselves,' he said.
He also spent time clearing ordnance on the front line, despite the risk of drones and sniper fire. He one narrow escape with a double-booby-trapped grenade: having cut a trip wire to it on one side, he tugged on some remaining wire only to discover a second grenade attached, which luckily did not detonate.
Many booby traps he found were specifically targeted at civilians, with retreating Russian forces stuffing hand-grenades into the soap drawers of washing machines, aiming to kill the occupants when they returned home. 'It serves no purpose, it is just trying to instil fear into the population,' he told an interviewer.
His public profile also made him a target for Moscow, and last month a court in the separatist-controlled Donetsk Peoples' Republic sentenced him absentia to 14 years in jail on 'terrorism' charges. Undeterred, Garrett vowed to carry on with his mission to clear Ukraine of mines – although even had he lived till old age, he never expected to see it completed. Ukraine, he warned, was so riddled with ordnance that he estimated it would take a century or more.
He is survived by his partner, Courtney Pollock, a volunteer paramedic from the US, and their one-year-old daughter, Reed.
Chris Garrett, born July 29 1984, died May 7 2025
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