George Hooley, a British paratrooper from Wallingford in Oxfordshire, died after an explosion in Ukraine while assisting Ukrainian troops. Darren Salter, the senior coroner for Oxfordshire, said Hooley’s death was not suspicious.
Hooley, 28, sustained multiple injuries on 6 December 2025 and died three days later in a hospital in Kyiv. The inquest found he had been moved through at least one other hospital in Ukraine before he died.
Parachute Regiment and Kyiv
Hooley joined the Parachute Regiment in June 2016 after training at the Infantry Training Centre Catterick in North Yorkshire. The Ministry of Defence said he was “an exceptional soldier and an impressive junior leader with extensive operational experience” and described his death as “a tragic accident”.
The Ministry of Defence said the incident happened while Hooley was “observing Ukrainian forces test a new defensive capability”. It also said the explosion happened away from the front line, adding a detail that places the death outside the most active fighting area in Ukraine.
Oxfordshire inquest findings
Salter said he had been given “limited evidence” about the circumstances and cause of the explosion. That left the coroner able to rule on the manner of death without setting out a full account of where the blast happened or what triggered it.
Hooley was the first British service member to die in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022. The UK government has acknowledged a small number of service people in Ukraine to support Ukrainian armed forces and provide security to diplomatic personnel, but it has never disclosed the number.
What the ruling leaves open
The ruling settles one point: Hooley’s death was not treated as suspicious. It does not answer the wider operational question of where exactly the explosion happened or what caused it, and those details remain outside the court’s findings.
For British service personnel in Ukraine, the case now stands as the clearest public account of a death linked to support work away from the front line, with the coroner’s decision fixing the cause of death in law even as the incident itself stays only partly described.
