For Justin Taylor, refusing to be paid was the whole point.
The American YouTuber, who spent six years as a US Army infantry officer before leaving active duty in 2024, traveled to Ukraine for two weeks to report from the front line – and covered every expense himself.
The trip, organized with help from UNITED24, Ukraine’s state fundraising platform, and AIR Brands, the influencer arm of Kyiv-based AIR Media-Tech, produced a video that has since drawn more than a million views.
“I didn’t receive a single dime from UNITED24, and I prefer it that way,” Taylor said in an interview. “Then I can say, I’m not getting paid to say this.”
For a creator whose channel is built on explaining military topics to viewers with little or no service background – Taylor estimates only about a quarter of his largely American and English-speaking audience has any military experience – that distinction mattered. Going into a war he had already spent years covering and commenting on from a distance, he said it would have felt “hypocritical” to keep talking about it without seeing it firsthand.
“I really wanted to get that experience of going over there,” he said, “and also do what I could with my platform to help Ukraine defend itself.”
From NATO’s eastern flank to Ukraine’s front
Taylor’s interest in the region predates the full-scale invasion. During his time in the army, his unit rotated along NATO’s eastern flank, giving him a firsthand view of the alliance’s posture near Crimea even before Russia’s 2022 assault. By the time he left the military and turned to content creation full time, he said continuing to discuss the war only through secondhand reporting no longer sat right with him.
The trip came together fast. A handful of contacts who had made similar trips connected him with UNITED24; less than a week after his initial outreach, he said, arrangements were largely locked in – itinerary, press credentials and all.
Of his two weeks in the country, Taylor said close to a week was spent near the fighting itself: interviewing troops, observing drone operations, and, by his account, waking up to the sound of the war rather than reading about it. He described one night in Kyiv, his last before heading back through Poland, when machine-gun fire outside his window marked an attempt to shoot down incoming drones.
“There wasn’t a point while I was over there that the area around me wasn’t getting hit, even in the larger cities,” he said, recalling nearby towns – including one he described as effectively destroyed – pockmarked by drone debris and explosions.
What surprised him
What struck Taylor most, he said, wasn’t the war’s scale but its improvisation – Ukrainian units coordinating fire support over Zoom or requesting ammunition on WhatsApp, using commercial phones instead of the heavily encrypted, specialized systems he’d grown used to in the US military.
“There wasn’t anything that they wanted to do that they couldn’t do,” he said, arguing Ukraine had matched the battlefield effectiveness of far more expensive Western systems using consumer technology – a drone tied to Starlink, in one example he cited. His takeaway, he said, was that Western militaries had something to learn from that approach rather than dismiss it as makeshift.
He also said the trip reordered his sense of Kyiv’s position in the war. Arriving as Russia was consolidating its drone forces and ramping up production, Taylor said he initially sensed Ukraine losing momentum. Looking back nearly a year later, he argued that the edge has swung back toward Ukraine, pointing to long-range strike capabilities – he cited the Flamingo cruise missile – that he said Russia has yet to counter.
A case for continued US involvement
Much of the interview turned to the argument Taylor said he has almost daily online: that the war, and NATO more broadly, remains a US interest even for Americans who feel disconnected from it. He drew a parallel to Cold War-era deterrence, arguing that countries without a NATO security guarantee – he named Georgia and Moldova alongside Ukraine – have ended up with Russian troops on their soil, while NATO members have not.
“The reason we never had to go to war with Russia isn’t because it’s never going to happen,” he said. “It’s because we spent the entire Cold War providing deterrence.”
Taylor, who turned 30 during the trip and celebrated in Kharkiv, said he intends to return, framing a potential second trip around how the war has changed in the year since his first visit. He has not set dates.
Asked about the response to his coverage, he described it as broadly positive, if not universal – an outcome he attributes to avoiding sensationalism. “I’m not trying to blow anything out of proportion for views,” he said. “I’m genuinely trying to explain how things actually are in that moment.”