Yevhenii Brakh - Know Your Own

Why was a Ukrainian called “Mali”? It is the African country where he served with the French Foreign Legion. In 2022 Yevhenii Brakh left a settled life in France, came home to defend Ukraine and became a machine gunner in the Special Operations Forces. He was killed that same year.

Why “Mali”?

Did you know that Yevhenii Brakh’s call sign is the name of a country in Africa? Yevhenii was born in 1995 in the small town of Mashivka in the Poltava region and grew up in the nearby village of Seleshchyna. He wanted to be a soldier from childhood. After school he trained as a refrigeration technician, went on to university and took part in the Revolution of Dignity, the 2013–2014 protests on Kyiv’s Maidan.

A legionnaire without French

In 2014, when Russia’s war in Donbas began, Yevhenii was 19, and the army then took volunteers only from 20. So he left university, went abroad and in September 2015 joined the French Foreign Legion, even though he didn’t know the language. The Legion sent him to Mali, which gave him his call sign, and later to French Guiana in South America. In 2020 he finished his five-year contract as a corporal and stayed on in the Legion’s reserve. He lived and worked in France and ran a YouTube channel and an Instagram account.

Coming home

In spring 2022 “Mali” came back to Ukraine. He first fought in a volunteer battalion, trained in the UK that summer, and then became a machine gunner in the Special Operations Forces. Sources disagree on his unit: the Poltava city council and Memorial name the Special Operations Forces, while Streetcode names Tymur’s special unit of the Defence Intelligence Directorate. He took part in preparing the operation on Snake Island in the Black Sea. That same summer his son was born.

Yevhenii Brakh was killed on 21 September 2022 on a combat mission near Enerhodar in the Zaporizhzhia region. He was 26. Tymur, the commander of a military intelligence special unit, later said that three fighters were killed in those landings near Enerhodar, among them “Mali” and “Rugbyist”, Maksym Yalovtsov.

How he is remembered

Yevhenii was buried on the Alley of Heroes at Zaturynske Cemetery in Poltava and posthumously awarded the Order for Courage, 3rd class. A memorial plaque hangs on the school in Seleshchyna where he studied, and his family gave the school an obstacle course and a laser shooting range. In Poltava, Soniachnyi Park bears his name: in November 2025 a Streetcode plaque was unveiled there, with a QR code that tells his story.