On 28 October, Russian state media reported the Russian armed forces managed to successfully remove a US citizen, Daniel Martindale, from eastern Ukraine, who had been secretly helping them to attack Ukrainian military positions for at least two years. The information was later confirmed by Martindale himself.
Russian forces in the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk regions) said Russian special forces and army units secretly removed Daniel Martindale, who had been in Ukraine since 11 February 2022 and had been passing the coordinates of Ukrainian military facilities to the Russian military for two years. The information was used on more than one occasion to target Ukrainian armed forces’ equipment and personnel. He shared information enabling the Russian military to “carry out pinpoint strikes against the enemy,” Russian media said.
The life of the rescued American is not in danger. The issue of granting political asylum and becoming a citizen of Russia is being resolved, Russian forces said.
Earlier, Russian state media published some photographs of an alleged US citizen in civilian clothes hugging a group of what looked like Russian special forces in combat uniforms, but the face was blurred. On Saturday, the information came to be confirmed after Martindale appeared at a press conference.
“My name is Daniel Martindale,” he told a press conference, state media reported. “Here is my passport. It went through the war with me, you can see in what condition it is,” he said in English, holding up a well-used US passport and birth certificate. He explained that it was the passport that helped him travel through Kyiv, through Kramatorsk and to the village where he spent much of his time in Ukraine.
Martindale stated that he did not feel any kind of pressure from the Russian authorities and was eager to obtain Russian citizenship and predicted, based on everything he had seen on the front, that Russia would emerge victorious in the conflict.
According to him, he started as a volunteer, entered Ukraine from Poland in early 2022, just days before the Ukraine-Russia conflict began on 24 February and subsequently supplied Russian forces with information on the location of key Ukrainian infrastructure for two years. Then he established contact with pro-Russian forces through Telegram and relayed information to them from the Donetsk region. Subsequently, the Russian military even delivered a phone to him using a drone, according to Russian media.
I’ve wanted to go to Russia for a long time, I realised that this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. For the last two years, I have done everything to save the lives of Russian soldiers and ensure some kind of future for Russians in Ukraine. I would like to continue doing this, according to him.
During the press conference, he said Ukrainians are no different from Russians because they are just as open and friendly towards each other, according to him. He said that if it were not for politics, there would be no difference between Russians and Ukrainians at all, according to Russian media.
He spoke of the grim situation of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines. According to him, residents of the village where he was stationed told him that Ukrainian soldiers are being sent to certain death while their losses are huge. He cited one of the cases which said that in August 2024, a group of Ukrainian infantrymen arrived and headed to the front, there were about a hundred of them, however, after about a month they were replaced by rotation, only seven of these hundred soldiers remained.
The Russian media dubbed the man “The Quiet American” after Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, which tells the story of early US involvement in Vietnam through the adventures of a British journalist and an American agent. Despite this, the US Embassy in Moscow has not yet commented on the situation.
