KYIV, Ukraine— Jamaican reggae music legend Bob Marley has, in some small way, become linked to the Ukraine-Russia conflict as a band of volunteer fighters have dubbed themselves the Bob Marley Volunteer Defence Squad.

The group of roughly 10 young Ukrainians first banded together to defend their homeland when Russia annexed Crimea and stoked conflict in the east of the country in 2014, as part of one of the dozens of volunteer battalions that formed to help Ukraine’s underfunded, outgunned military take the fight to the enemy.

“It’s about being guys who can switch between the war and being chill,” is how one of the group’s members, Dmytro Dubas, described their ethos, over a Zoom call from Lviv during a recent break away from the front lines.

“If we need to be rude, we can if necessary. If we have time to chill, we do,” Dubas said.

“We want victory, and peace. But we don’t want to fight our entire life,” he added.

As a respite from the horrors of war, the group were known among fellow fighters in their barracks for indulging in the finer things in life: good wine, food, music, conversation, and, of course, weed, Vice World News reported.

The unit wears patches depicting the late reggae icon, and cuts an unconventional presence on the battlefield. Its social media accounts use Ukrainian hashtags of #jahrastafari and a motto that states, roughly, that if you’re stoned you can’t be killed.

As the conflict with Russian-backed separatists in the east died down in 2015, members of the Bob Marley Squad drifted back to their civilian lives, resuming careers in psychology, medical science, and advertising.

But since Russia’s invasion in February, they’ve been forced to take up arms again to defend their homeland once again. They had long anticipated having to do this again, said the 33-year-old Dubas.

“Our commander always said during the war in the east [in 2014-15] that there would one day be a ‘big war’ with Russia, no doubt. For me, I hoped that there wouldn’t be.”

But as Russian troops began amassing on the border for huge military exercises last year, the long-dormant “squad” sprang again into action. Members joined the country’s territorial defence forces to renew their military training, and made contingency plans for what they’d do when the long-feared invasion came.

“We’d gather at a spot in Kyiv, and go to war.”

The first night of the invasion, most of the group, as part of the 112th Brigade of the Territorial Defence Forces, took up positions defending the northern approach to Kyiv. The war took an immediate toll on the group: on the first night of fighting, one of the group’s original members, Dmytro “Demon” Synjuka, and his wife, Iryna Cvila, were killed when their vehicle was hit by a rocket. The Bob Marley Squad’s leader, Dmytro Myhas, sustained serious injuries to his hand in the same attack.

Since those initial losses, another of the squad has gone missing in action, following heavy fighting recently near Borova, in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, Vice World News said.

These days, explained Dubas, the Bob Marley Squad is no longer a distinct unit of fighters but a community of veterans, dispersed between three different units of Ukraine’s armed and territorial defence forces. Most now fight for the 112th Brigade, within a platoon under the command of Vasyl Mangal, a Bob Marley Squad member.