Two Britons who nearly died fighting in Ukraine reveal why they have returned to war zone – and issue warning about Russia
Two Britons who nearly died fighting in Ukraine have told why they have returned to the war-torn country – and warn urgent help is needed on the frontline in the battle against Russia.
Shareef Amin was seriously wounded by Russian fire after answering President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s call for foreigners to join the Ukrainian military in 2022.
The 41-year-old from Bristol lost part of his hand and his right leg was paralysed from the knee down. He also suffered punctured lungs and severe injuries to his shoulder and forearm.
Recovering in hospital after he was ambushed. Pic: Shareef Amin
Fellow Briton Shaun Pinner was captured and tortured by Russian forces after fighting alongside Ukrainian troops in 2022.
The 50-year-old from Hertfordshire was imprisoned for five months – during which time he said he was “electrocuted, starved, beaten… and stabbed” – before he was released in a prisoner swap.
Speaking just before the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr Amin and Mr Pinner told Sky News there is no prospect of an end to the war anytime soon – and fear Vladimir Putin will be free to invade more of Europe if urgent help isn’t sent.
“We need support – from Britain, America, Europe – whether it’s bombs, helmets, body armour, or medical equipment, there isn’t enough,” Mr Amin says.
“This is a really dangerous situation. If Russia gets the upper hand and they take Ukraine, they’re not going to stop at that.
“The British and the Europeans need to know this is all of our wars.”
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Pic: Shareef Amin (left)
Mr Pinner says Ukraine is “probably a year off being able to produce enough shells to be able to support” itself.
“We’re going to go through a really tough time before then,” he adds.
“I’ve never lost faith that Ukraine can win. But we’ve got ammo shortages on the frontline that are a real worry. How can you fight with one hand tied behind your back?”
Pic: Shaun Pinner
‘Chaotic’ first months in Ukraine
Mr Amin – who spent 13 years in the British military – says he travelled to Ukraine to join the fight against Russia in March 2022 after watching a speech by President Zelenskyy on Instagram.
“I managed to get hold of a group of British guys through WhatsApp and TikTok, and by 11 March we were in Lviv,” he says.
He described his first two months in the country as “chaotic” as he and others felt there wasn’t enough time to go to the British embassy and join the foreign legion through official channels.
“We almost got arrested three times at gunpoint, because we weren’t there under official paperwork – we just had passports, uniforms, and military kit,” he says.
Mr Amin says he initially decided to do some humanitarian work instead, delivering medical supplies around the country, until he was asked to teach one of the territorial units in Western tactics.
By mid-2022, Mr Amin was on the frontline but left after a few months to sign up officially to the Ukrainian military.
He went in search of more specialised work and joined the Main Directorate of Intelligence Unit (GUR) with some fellow Britons.
Pic: Shareef Amin (left)
‘All of a sudden, there was this explosion’
On the frontline in November 2022, Mr Amin’s team was ambushed.
After his team found itself in a line of trees, beyond which there was nothing but flat land, “three or four tanks” emerged and began shooting – followed by artillery, drones and laser-guided missiles, he says.
He and other members of his team were hit. Some of them were killed.
“All of a sudden, there was this explosion,” he recalls.
“The air got sucked out of my lungs and all I could see was a flash of light and it felt like I was pulled underground like an empty can.”
Pic: Shareef Amin
‘He’s not going to make it’
Mr Amin says he was hit by a round of fire that had gone underground before exploding and ricocheting back up through his body armour.
When he eventually got to an ambulance and was taken to hospital, he heard a doctor say “he’s not going to make it” – but he survived despite more than 20 pieces of metal being pulled out of his back.
He spent six weeks in a hospital in Odesa, hoping to recover and quickly return to the frontline.
But he says: “You don’t really come to the realisation your body is destroyed.”
In December 2022, he was flown to the UK for further treatment – but went back to Ukraine in the summer of 2023.
He says he is working with intelligence units there and helping with medical evacuations on the frontline.
“Psychologically, I had to have that purpose again,” Mr Amin says.
“The idea of actually going home and giving up was a no-go.
“I’ve had my ups and downs, but the idea of coming back and still being able to wear the uniform has kept me sane.”
‘You can’t train for pain of torture and starvation’
Mr Pinner was already in Ukraine when Russia invaded on 24 February 2022.
Having spent nine years in the British Army, he had been living with his fiancée in Mariupol since 2018 and was serving in the Ukrainian military.
“I was on a routine deployment when the full-scale invasion happened,” he recalls.
Shaun Pinner (right) and fellow Briton Aiden Aslin (left). Pic: Shaun Pinner
Mr Pinner says he was the first foreigner to become a commander on the frontline as he spoke Russian and had previous military experience.
But in April 2022, he and four other British soldiers were captured and taken prisoner.
He was “electrocuted, starved, beaten, tortured, stabbed in the leg,” he tells Sky News, before being put on a show trial and sentenced to death in Russia’s self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk.
“I wasn’t expecting the brutality of it,” he says.
“You can’t train for pain. The worst torture was starvation… thinking about food – it’s with you every day, it’s still with me now.”
Shaun Pinner in captivity in Donetsk. Pic: Reuters
‘If I got executed, I was dying for a cause’
Mr Pinner says that the Russian he learned as a resident of Mariupol helped him to decipher what was going on during his captivity.
Reflecting on challenges he’d faced outside the military – such as relatives dying, and previous relationship breakdowns – helped keep things in perspective, he adds.
“I was never as low as that when I was in captivity, because I knew if I did get executed, I was dying for a cause,” Mr Pinner says.
He and the other four Britons were unexpectedly freed as part of a prisoner exchange in September 2022.
He was reunited with his family in the UK before returning to Ukraine to live with his wife the following month.
Pictured with his family in the UK in 2022. Pic: Shaun Pinner
‘I don’t talk to Westerners who’ve just turned up’
Mr Pinner admits being “nervous coming across the border” for the first time after he was freed.
But he says: “My life has changed now. I’m not fighting but I’m helping in another capacity.
“I try to talk about what it’s actually like to live here – and what it was like before the invasion.
“I try to dispel Putin’s narratives on social media because I’m now in a position where I can say, ‘actually that’s not correct, because I’m here and I know’.”
Speaking from Dnipro, where he warns an air raid siren might interrupt the call, he says he discourages any foreigners he speaks to who say they want to come and fight.
“There are some good guys here,” he says. “But they’ve either been here a long time or they’re married to Ukrainians.”
He adds: “I don’t talk to Westerners who have just turned up. You don’t want people coming over who just want to update their YouTube.”
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Military analyst Sean Bell agrees with Mr Pinner’s view about Westerners joining the fight.
He stresses the Ukrainians have enough personnel already, and ex-soldiers from NATO countries fighting in a war NATO has refused to enter can cause problems.
Bell says there is even a problem with donating shells, as they encourage attritional warfare, “which generally favours the bigger side” – Russia.
He adds that while the West readily donated precision weapons, as well as long-range missiles and tanks at the start of the conflict, now the UK has “emptied its war chest” of the older, stockpiled equipment, and “it’s got to a stage where we’re not comfortable with giving any more”.
New weapons systems risk falling into the wrong hands and compromising security, he adds, so most focus has now fallen on the US, which is trying to get a $60bn (£47bn) military aid package through Congress.
But Bell warns: “If funding was the only issue, the EU has already promised that much. It’s about converting dollars into weapons. They’re built to order and that all takes years not weeks.”
Mr Amin has written a book about his experience in Ukraine, Freedom At All Costs: A British Veteran’s Experiences Of The War In Ukraine.
Mr Pinner has also written a book, Live. Fight. Survive. He also teaches English and gives talks to Ukrainian soldiers.
Britain’s economy will be among the hardest hit by the global trade war and inflation is set to climb, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned – as it slashed its UK growth forecast by a third.
In a sobering set of projections, the Washington-based organisation said it was grappling with “extremely high levels of policy uncertainty” – and the global economy would slow even if countries manage to negotiate a permanent reduction in tariffs from the US.
Echoing earlier warnings about the risks to the global financial system, the IMF said stock markets could fall even more sharply than they did in the aftermath of Donald Trump‘s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement, when US and UK indices recorded some of their largest one-day falls since the pandemic.
It comes as Chancellor Rachel Reeves prepares to meet her US counterpart Scott Bessent at the IMF’s spring gathering in Washington this week.
She is hoping to negotiate a reduction to the 10% baseline tariff the US president has applied to all UK goods. Steel, aluminium and car exports face an additional 25% tariff.
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HARD TO SEE A WIN FOR REEVES AHEAD
As long as the world’s two largest economies are at war with each other, there will be considerable spillovers. The US and China account for 43% of the global economy.
If demand in either nation slows, that has ripple effects across the world. Tariff or no tariff, exporters to those markets will be hurt.
If China redirects its goods elsewhere, that could hurt domestic industries – jobs could be at stake.
US and Chinese investors might hit pause on global projects and stock market devaluations could hurt consumer confidence. Things could unravel quickly.
Against that backdrop, it is difficult to say with any certainty what would happen to the UK but, even if we find a way to sweet talk our way out of tariffs, the dark clouds of the global economy are moving in every direction.
Britain is an open and highly trade-sensitive economy (we have a trade-to-GDP ratio of around 65%) and global spillovers will rain on us.
Then there are the spillovers from the financial markets. The IMF warned that rising government borrowing costs were weighing on economic growth.
While rising UK bond yields are, in part, a reflection of investor unease over the UK’s growth and inflation outlook, they also reflect anxiety over the US trajectory.
It’s worth bearing all of this in mind if Chancellor Rachel Reeves emerges from her trip to Washington with a deal.
The Treasury would no doubt celebrate the achievement. After all, a reduction in tariffs could make a big difference to some industries, especially our car manufacturers who are currently grappling with a 25% levy on goods to their largest export market. However, it would not solve our problems.
In fact, it would barely make a difference to our overall GDP. Back in 2020, the government estimated that a free trade deal with the US would boost the UK economy by just 0.16% over the next 15 years.
And overall GDP does matter. The chancellor desperately needs economic growth to support the country’s ailing public finances (when the economy grows, so do government tax receipts).
She will know better than most that the prize the US has to offer is comparatively small, so she should weigh up the costs of any deal carefully.
The IMF presented a range of forecasts in its latest World Economic Outlook. Its main case looked at the period up to 4 April, after Mr Trump announced sweeping tariffs on countries across the world, ratcheting up US protectionism to its highest level in a century.
If the president were to revert to this policy framework, global growth would fall from 3.3% last year to 2.8% this year, before recovering to 3% in 2026.
In January, the IMF was predicting a rate of 3.3% for both years.
Nearly all countries were hit with downgrades, with the US expected to grow by just 1.8% this year, a downgrade of 0.9 percentage points.
Mexico was downgraded by 1.7 percentage points, while China and Canada are forecast to slow by 0.6 percentage points and Japan by 0.5 percentage points.
The UK economy is expected to grow by just 1.1% this year, down 0.5 percentage points from the 1.6% the IMF was predicting in January. Growth picks up to 1.4% next year, still 0.1 percentage points lower than the January forecast.
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Will tariffs hit UK growth?
Along with recent tariff announcements, the IMF blamed the UK’s poor performance on a rise in government borrowing costs, which has in part been triggered by growing unease among investors over the fate of the US economy.
When borrowing costs rise, the chancellor has to rein in public spending or raise taxes to meet her fiscal rules. That can weigh on economic growth.
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Trump: Tariffs are making US ‘rich’
It also pointed to problems in the domestic economy, mainly “weaker private consumption amid higher inflation as a result of regulated prices and energy costs”.
In a blow to the chancellor, the IMF warned that the UK would experience one of the largest upticks in inflation because of utility bill increases that took effect in April.
It upgraded its inflation forecast by 0.7 percentage points to 3.1% for 2025, taking it even higher above the Bank of England’s 2% target and deepening the dilemma for central bankers who are also grappling with weak growth.
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Trump’s tariffs to have major global impact
Meanwhile, inflation in the US is likely to jump one percentage point higher than previously forecast to 3% in 2025 on the back of higher tariffs.
The IMF forecast period ended on 4 April. That was before the US president paused his reciprocal tariffs on countries across the world while ratcheting up levies on China.
In a worrying sign for finance ministers across the world, as they attempt to negotiate a deal with the US administration, the IMF said the global economy would slow just the same if Mr Trump were to make his temporary pause on reciprocal tariffs permanent.
That is because higher tariffs between the US and China, which together account for 43% of the global economy, would have spillover effects on the rest of the world that offset the benefits to individual countries.
“The gains from lower effective tariff rates for those countries that were previously subject to higher tariffs would now be offset by poorer growth outcomes in China and the United States – due to the escalating tariff rates – that would propagate through global supply chains,” the IMF said.
In response, Chancellor Rachel Reeves said:
“This forecast shows that the UK is still the fastest-growing European G7 country. The IMF have recognised that this government is delivering reform which will drive up long-term growth in the UK, through our plan for change.
“The report also clearly shows that the world has changed, which is why I will be in Washington this week defending British interests and making the case for free and fair trade.”
Financial markets have priced in a 100% chance of a Bank of England interest rate cut next month, as the effects of Donald Trump’s evolving trade war continue to play out in the global economy.
LSEG data early on Tuesday had shown an 82% likelihood of a reduction from 4.5% to 4.25% on 8 May.
But the doubt disappeared shortly after remarks on inflation by a member of the rate-setting committee.
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Trump: Tariffs are making US ‘rich’
Megan Greene, who voted with the majority for a hold at the last meeting in March, told Bloomberg that US trade tariffs are more likely to push down on UK inflation than raise the pace of price increases.
Her argument is essentially that the UK’s decision not to respond to Trump’s import duties through reciprocal tariffs could make the UK a destination for cheaper goods from Asia and Europe.
“The tariffs represent more of a disinflationary risk than an inflationary risk,” she said, adding: “There’s a ton of uncertainty around this, but there are both inflationary and disinflationary forces.”
Ms Greene also said that a recent surge in the value of the pound against the US dollar could also help ease inflation but cautioned that it was early days to determine the likely currency path.
The Bank is expecting inflation to rise this year despite a greater than expected dip witnessed in March largely due to the impact of rising energy prices but also the effects of tax rises on businesses from April.
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UK will be among ‘hardest hit’ in trade war
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The impact of inflation falling
The trade war is widely tipped to weigh on economic activity globally.
It poses a problem for the Bank as rising inflation curbs policymakers’ ability to help boost growth through interest rate cuts.
The LSEG data further showed that financial markets are expecting three Bank of England rate cuts by the year’s end.
The Bank’s counterpart for the euro area has been cutting rates at a faster pace as inflation has allowed, due to the dire performance of its collective economy.
Like in the UK, the US central bank has also been taking a cautious approach to rate cuts recently due to the spectre of domestic inflation arising from the Trump trade war.
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US trade deal may take ‘some time’
A perceived failure of the Federal Reserve to address an anticipated growth slowdown, largely arising from the imposition of tariffs, has angered the president.
Mr Trump declared last week that the bank’s chair, Jay Powell, should be fired and demanded a rate cut “NOW” in a social media post.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is in Washington this week for a series of meetings but is expected to hold discussions with her US counterpart on a trade agreement to nullify the need for US/UK tariffs.
Any rate cut by the Bank of England would be a welcome boost in her push for economic growth in troubled times for the world trade order.
A woman who claimed to be Madeleine McCann has pleaded not guilty to stalking the missing girl’s parents.
Julia Wandel, 23, is accused of making calls, leaving voicemails, and sending a letter and WhatsApp messages to Kate and Gerry McCann.
Wandel, from southwest Poland, is also accused of turning up at their family home on two occasions last year and sending Instagram messages to Sean and Amelie McCann, Madeleine’s brother and sister.
It is alleged she caused serious alarm or distress to the family between June 2022 and February this year when she was arrested at Bristol Airport.
She claimed to be Madeleine on Instagram in 2023, but a DNA test showed she was Polish.
Karen Spragg, 60, who is alleged to have made calls, sent letters and attended the home address of Mr and Mrs McCann, also denied a charge of stalking at Leicester Magistrates’ Court.
Wandel was remanded back into custody while Spragg, from Caerau in Cardiff, was granted conditional bail.
Both women are due to appear at Leicester Crown Court for trial on 2 October.
Karen Spragg arriving at Leicester Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday. Pic: PA
Madeleine’s disappearance has become one of the world’s most mysterious missing child cases.
She was last seen in Portugal’s Algarve in 2007 while on holiday with her family.
Her parents had left her in bed with her twin siblings while they had dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant in Praia da Luz when the then three-year-old disappeared on 3 May.
A man suspected of kidnapping Madeleine will not face any charges in the foreseeable future, a prosecutor told Sky News earlier this year.
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