The Russian drone exploded. I stood up on bone, looked down and thought: 'Oh... my leg's gone'. The incredible courage of British soldier who, even after losing a limb fighting for Ukraine, has rejoined the war against Putin's invaders

It was only when he tried to stand up that the 27-year-old former British soldier realised something was wrong.

Moments earlier, the platoon commander, who can be identified only by his call sign, Snow, had been making the perilous journey on foot to rotate out of the front line in eastern Ukraine, where he serves Kyiv as a foreign fighter.

As he entered a forest on September 28 last year, he noticed what he thought was a friendly drone flying past him and the two new Ukrainian recruits under his command.

But it wasn't friendly. It was Russian – and it had been monitoring the three soldiers' every move.

The moment they re-emerged from the forest, Snow realised he had walked into a trap.

'We didn't even make it five metres when a fibre optic drone came up off the ground,' he tells me, referring to kamikaze drones linked directly to their pilots by cable, rather than radio signals that can be jammed.

He yelled at his men to turn and run for the forest, in the hope the trees might offer some cover, but it was too late.

'I pushed them in,' he says. 'I went to the right and the drone hit me.'

Snow, 27 from Northamptonshire, a platoon commander with the Rifleman Battalion, 3rd Assault Brigadier, Eastern Ukraine. He undergoes physio and adjustments with his prosthetic limb at a clinic in Kyiv

Snow, from Northamptonshire, training recruits at a military training camp in the Kharkiv region

The blast blew off his left leg below the knee.

'At first I stood up and I stood up on bone,' he tells me from Bez Obmezhen rehabilitation centre in Kyiv, where he is having a new prosthetic leg fitted. 'Then I looked down and thought, 'Oh, it's missing'.'

In shock, his training kicked in. Snow picked up his radio and gave the code '300' to signal he was wounded, calmly adding: 'There has been an amputation.' 'Then I just sat back down and started to look,' he says. 'I lost a pint-and-a-half of blood straight away. My other leg had shrapnel as well, and my back.

'The two Ukrainians put a tourniquet on, but didn't do it correctly. At this point I think I died because I felt like I came out of my body. I looked at myself lying there and I shook my head. I then went back inside my body. I woke up, put the tourniquet on below my knee.

'I just controlled the guys, and said, 'Put me in the forest and give me the radio so I can order CasEvac [casualty evacuation]'.'

Snow made it out to Kharkiv alive in an armoured vehicle. Over three months, as he underwent over 20 surgeries and waited for a prosthetic leg, he considered suicide.

But once the leg was fitted in Kyiv, he taught himself to walk in a week. Then he did something remarkable – after rehabilitation he returned to his men to serve near the front line.

He says he intended to return from the outset.

'Instantly, I was like, OK, I have a leg problem. I'll get a prosthetic and I'll go back,' he tells me.

I first met Snow a year ago at a secret training base in the Kharkiv region, where I was struck by his no-nonsense reflections on the brutal reality of soldiering.

'I expect to die out here,' he calmly told me at the time, adding as long as his recruits accept that too, 'we'll be OK'.

We stayed in touch, and when I inquired about a story last winter he delivered the news of his injury with characteristic bluntness.

'I lost half a leg mate so I couldn't give a f*** about anything else currently.' A second message followed swiftly: 'How are you?'

It was that message that brought me back to see him.

The softly spoken former member of the Royal Anglian Regiment, from Northamptonshire, has already given so much to his Ukrainian cause since 2022.

Snow served in the Royal Anglians for six years where he saw action on a peacekeeping tour of Mali in 2017. On leaving the military he became a livestock haulier for a few years but quickly grew bored and missed army life.

Snow has rejoined the Ukrainian war effort against Russia after losing his leg in the conflict 

Having followed the Ukraine conflict closely since 2014, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he came out to help the cause later that year.

'I have the skills and experience and I wanted to help. They were invaded. Ukraine is beautiful too, I always wanted to come. But to be honest, I also always wanted to be in war since I was a child.'

On coming out to fight, Snow, who has a six-year-old son back in Britain, lost touch with friends and family. 'I ended up cutting everybody out,' he says. 'People back home, they don't really understand what it's like to be here. Plus I'm in the war. I'm doing my job. I don't have time.'

Before joining Third Assault Brigade, where he commands a platoon of English-speaking fighters from a range of countries in the Rifleman Battalion, he served with the special forces of Ukraine's Defence Intelligence, known as the GUR. During that period he learnt to speak Ukrainian fluently.

He has fought in Russian territory in Belgorod and Bryansk and has seen heavy fighting in the Ukrainian cities of Kup'yans'k and Chasiv Yar, as well as the regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, earning him both the Presidential Medal and the Special Operations Medal.

Under his left eye are three teardrop tattoos – two blue, one red – each for ten Russians killed.

Before his injuries, Snow was constantly on assaults – on the front line for weeks at a time before rotating out for days in Kyiv then back in.

It was on one of these breaks that he met his Ukrainian wife, who cannot be named, in a bar in the capital in 2023.

'I had just finished my special forces course and had two weeks' free time. We got talking in a bar and hit it off.

'We got married in July 2023, it was just a little ceremony with my team and some other local friends.' Another tattoo on his eye has the wedding date.

So what motivates him to carry on, even now? For Snow, continuing to serve is a matter of principle. 'I've just come here to do what I feel is right,' he says simply.

Today he is one of the most decorated foreign fighters in Ukraine. Receiving the Presidential Medal from Volodymyr Zelensky helped secure his citizenship, which is notoriously difficult to obtain.

'That medal is very, very, very difficult to get,' he says. Snow, who has not returned to the UK since 2022, is proud of his Ukrainian citizenship and now feels more affinity with the country than his native Britain. 'I've done more for this country than I did for mine,' he says. 'When I'm here I feel very free. Everyone is more relaxed here. You don't get the bulls*** you get back in England.

'Like with my tattoos, I'm very heavily tattooed. In Britain people would assume I am a criminal. But here, they understand it's military.'

Snow served in the Royal Anglians for six years where he saw action on a peacekeeping tour of Mali in 2017

Since we last met, he has had a spider web tattoo added to his face to mark his time with the 2nd Mechanised Battalion in Third Assault Brigade whose motif is a black widow.

He was serving with them when he lost his leg. Since returning to service, he has formed his own platoon of foreign fighters who communicate in English and Ukrainian.

'I've got Polish, German, American, Belgian, French – a whole mixture,' he says. 'But no Brits – they don't seem to stay long,' he jokes.

His return comes as Ukraine prepares for another brutal winter. Following the parliamentary election 'victory' for Vladimir Putin's party in Russia last week, Moscow barraged civilians with rockets and drones, firing 30 ballistic missiles at Kyiv alone in 30 minutes on Wednesday night. Soon Putin is expected to mobilise a further 500,000 men.

'They have to mobilise, they are losing too many men,' Snow says matter-of-factly.

While he can no longer lead assaults on the ground, he commands his platoon from an underground command centre six miles behind the front line.

'I'm there with them,' he says of his men, who go on assaults as a team of ten to 12, split into two, with the first group seizing and holding ground before the second joins.

'We control them from the sky via drones,' he says. 'We watch them. I talk to them by radio. Tell them how to move when it's safe to move. They don't move unless we say. But if they're in a firefight that's when the freedom goes to them.'

He has only just returned from the front for two weeks' leave when we meet. While waiting for adjustments to his new prosthetic, he pulls out his phone and shows me a map with the positions of his men in an undisclosed location in eastern Ukraine. 'We snuck up behind them,' he says proudly of an assault just days earlier. Pointing to a treeline, he adds: 'They took this whole area. Now they are holding it.'

Gesturing further across, he continues as if discussing a mathematical equation that needs solving. 'Here's the enemy,' he says. 'That's what I want to do next.'

Yet directing his men by radio is not the same as being beside them. 'I used to like to lead on the ground. Lead from the front. Now it's different, I can't do that. So this is the second best.'

He talks fondly of the men he commands, but it is tempered by frustration at no longer being able to join them on assault. 'If I could, I would be there with them,' he says. 'But at the same time, I've done a lot for this country. I've done a lot for my part, so maybe it's time for them to be able to do it.

'But I have the same ambitions for them that I have for myself. I want them to be successful. I want them to climb higher, to become sergeants, to take the medals.