'No regrets': A Canadian volunteer wounded in Ukraine is coming home

Maybe it's luck, or some kind of divine providence. According to the capricious nature of life in a war zone, JT should not be alive.

Yet there he is — a Canadian military volunteer in Ukraine who beat the odds.

The former military combat engineer fought through the bloodied grape fields of Kandahar during Canada's war in Afghanistan. He first came within a whisker of death in 2006, when he and his fellow soldiers were strafed accidentally by an American A-10 ground attack jet.

He unwittingly stepped out of the way at the last minute. One of the shells from the jet's cannon smashed into a fuel can behind him.

Just a few weeks ago, JT cheated death a second time.

This time the occasion was a cool, clear night in mid-May in southern Ukraine. He said he and a group of Ukrainian soldiers — with artillery rumbling in the background — were trying to establish an observation post on the outskirts of a Russian-occupied town in the hotly contested Zaporizhzhya region.

He said he barely survived driving over an anti-tank mine while trying to rescue two comrades — one badly wounded, the other already dead.

The 50-year-old Ottawa resident spoke to CBC News by phone from his hospital bed at an undisclosed location in western Ukraine. He said he's hoping to be evacuated back to Canada.

CBC News has agreed not to use his full name for security reasons as friends at home scramble to raise money for his medical transport.

When he was injured, JT had been in the country for several weeks — drawn to Ukraine by President Volodomyr Zelensky's appeal last winter for foreign military veterans to help push back the Russian invasion.

Part of an intelligence-gathering reconnaissance team, he and other experienced foreign fighters spent their days making like ghosts around Russian trench lines in the scorched farm fields of southern Ukraine.

Their mission that May evening, he said, was to establish the observation post while combat engineers quietly cleared the mines stitched into the route Ukrainian troops would use to mount an attack the next morning.

As they were moving into position, he said, one of their number stepped on an anti-personnel mine, killing the team's sniper and gravely wounding another soldier.

As commander of the reconnaissance unit, JT called for an extraction vehicle — an old pickup truck. A bent skid plate caused the truck to become hung up on some nearby train tracks.