Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of For­eign and CARI­COM Af­fairs, Dr Amery Browne, has sought fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on T&T na­tion­al Bri­an Stone seek­ing to de­part this coun­try to help de­fend Ukraine against the Russ­ian in­va­sion. How­ev­er, the min­is­ter is ad­vis­ing oth­ers against fol­low­ing suit.

Stone, a Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress ac­tivist and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment con­sul­tant, is one of the coun­try’s first vol­un­teer com­bat­ants plan­ning to de­part for Eu­rope in two weeks to help de­fend Ukraine.

A dual cit­i­zen, Stone pre­vi­ous­ly served in the Cana­di­an armed forces re­serves.

Dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Browne said he is not en­cour­aged by in­for­ma­tion com­ing to him on the mat­ter.

He al­so not­ed there were sev­er­al pre­vi­ous in­stances of T&T na­tion­als de­part­ing to be mer­ce­nar­ies in for­eign con­flicts which turned in­to an “in­ter­na­tion­al co­nun­drum” for them.

“What I saw was very dis­turb­ing for me, cast against the back­drop that we have na­tion­als of this coun­try in the past who went over­seas as mer­ce­nar­ies to fight wars in oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions and that is cur­rent­ly an in­ter­na­tion­al co­nun­drum and night­mare for some of these in­di­vid­u­als and the host coun­tries,” he said.

“I don’t want to say too much more on this top­ic. I cer­tain­ly will not be say­ing any­thing to en­cour­age that type of...po­ten­tial grand­stand­ing but all I can do is sound a note of cau­tion for the good sense, the wel­fare and the phys­i­cal well-be­ing of all our na­tion­als and en­cour­age per­sons not to take bad ex­am­ple from those who might wish to be reck­less, who might wish to be on some sort of pop­ulist agen­da which could put them­selves and even our na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion in jeop­ardy.”

He al­so cau­tioned peo­ple against laud­ing the ac­tions of Stone.

“Noth­ing that I have heard is en­cour­ag­ing or would sug­gest this is some­thing that our cit­i­zens should ap­plaud or en­cour­age or mo­ti­vate in any way shape or form,” he said.

Six­teen days ago on Feb­ru­ary 27, the In­ter­na­tion­al Le­gion of Ter­ri­to­r­i­al De­fense of Ukraine, (For­eign Le­gion) was formed. It al­lows non-na­tion­als to join their de­fence.

Since then, Ukraine’s For­eign Min­is­ter in­di­cat­ed that at least 20,000 vol­un­teers from 52 coun­tries have vol­un­teered to fight for the coun­try with thou­sands more ex­pect­ed.

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