‘Crime not to help’: South Korean ex-SEAL has no Ukraine regrets

SEOUL: A former South Korean Navy SEAL flipped YouTuber who risked jail time to depart Seoul and guard Ukraine says it would have been a “crime” to not use his abilities to help.

Ken Rhee, an ex-special warfare officer, signed up at the Ukrainian embassy in Seoul the moment President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked for global volunteers and had been fighting on the frontlines near Kyiv simply by early March.

To get there, he had to break South Korean law – Seoul banned its residents from travelling to Ukraine, and Rhee, who had been injured in a fall while leading an unique operations patrol there, was met in the airport by 15 police officers on his return.

But the celebrity ex-soldier, who has the YouTube channel with 700, 000 fans and documented a lot of his Ukraine experience on his popular Instagram account, says which he has no regrets.

“You’re walking throughout the beach and you visit a sign by the water saying ‘no swimming’ – but you discover someone drowning. That is a crime not to assist. That’s how I view it, ” he told AFP.

Rhee was born in Southern Korea but raised in the United States. He attended the Virginia Military Institute and prepared to join the US Navy blue SEALS, but his father – a “patriot”, he says – convinced his kid to return to Southern Korea to get.

He served for seven yrs, undergoing both US and Korean SEAL training and performing multiple stints in war zones in Somalia and Iraq before leaving to build a defence consultancy.

“I possess the skill set. I have the experience. I was in two different wars, and going to Ukraine, I knew I could assist, ” he stated, adding that he seen breaking South Korea’s passport law in order to leave as equivalent to a “traffic violation”.