Yao learned that the day he entered Ukraine to volunteer as a medic.

It was April 2022, and he had just crossed the border from Poland when a Russian missile struck near him, killing many of the people Yao had teamed up with since landing in Warsaw. “That was my ‘welcome to Ukraine’,” he tells Al Jazeera.

Before the missile strike, he had spent many hours being interrogated by Polish authorities and then by Ukrainian authorities. “I first landed in Poland, and they all wanted to know why I had come all the way from Taiwan to go to Ukraine,” he says. “They thought I was crazy.”

But with his own training as a medic in Taiwan's army, he had started planning his journey the moment he saw pictures of Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine. “Ukraine’s situation with Russia is very similar to Taiwan’s situation with China, so I wanted to go help,” he says.

He subsequently served in the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine doing supply runs and organising donations from Taiwan besides working as a medic.

When he returned to Taiwan after three months, he joined the military reserves, believing the armed forces, like him, were drawing lessons from Ukraine.

But he became disillusioned by what he considered to be a lack of proper training in the reserve force and in the established civil defence forces.

“When I raised my concerns with my superiors about this, they told me to shut up because there was not going to be a war with China anyway, so it didn’t matter,” he says.

“There are people in the established system that are too old-fashioned and are not taking the threat seriously.”

Military superiors in three different countries thought this guy is a dumbass lol