More than 20 US citizens fighting on the side of Ukraine have been reported missing, according to a CNN investigation. The number of casualties among foreign mercenaries has risen sharply over the past six months as they “fill gaps” in Ukraine’s weakened defences.
The bodies of at least five US volunteers who have enlisted in the Ukrainian military have failed to be recovered from the battlefield after being killed in action over the past six months. Two of them were repatriated from Russian-seized territory on Friday to Ukrainian soil after lengthy negotiations.
Relatives of the missing Americans told CNN they are tormented by the lack of opportunity to bury their sons, the legal uncertainty of not being able to officially declare their loved ones dead, and the anguish caused by internet trolls who stalk them online. Due to the intensity of the fighting on the eastern lines of the Ukrainian front, the corpses of soldiers from both sides often cannot be collected and litter the battlefield.
According to survivors and relatives, two American volunteers were killed in a single incident in late September near Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine. Neither man’s body has been recovered. Former US soldier Zachary Ford, 25, from Missouri, and another American with no military experience, whose family asked that he be called by his call sign “Gunther,” were killed by a drone when they were tasked with blowing up a bridge near the village of Novohrodivka.
The surviving American, who asked to be called by his call sign “Redneck,” described a mission with little chance of success in which a group of three American volunteers were quickly trapped under Russian fire in a trench about 500 metres from the target bridge.
According to Redneck, Ford told his commanders over the radio that they should abort the mission, but was ordered to continue and that evacuation was not possible for another day. Redneck said that when the assault began, he fired his machine gun at the Russians directly in front of him, and the Ukrainians manning the grenade launcher and Javelin anti-tank system died holding back the Russian armoured vehicles.
He said he went into the bunker for ammunition, narrowly missing a drone strike that wounded Ford and Gunther. Redneck said Ford needed to apply two tourniquets to stop the bleeding, which he applied, before reassuming his defence and seeing the Ukrainian soldier in front of him mortally wounded in the face.
Minutes later, he heard Ford yell, “Gunther is dead,” he told CNN. “I came down to check, and the Ukrainian that was in there, and just looked at me and said, friend dead.” Redneck said Ford’s condition remains stable, and their commander warned over the radio that another Russian attack was imminent.
“He knew we weren’t going to make it through another attack,” Redneck said of Ford, “so he started asking me to kill him so he wouldn’t be captured.” Redneck said he refused and told Ford they would find a way through this, before continuing to reload their weapons ahead of the anticipated assault.
“He went really quiet,” Redneck said of Ford. “A couple minutes later, (he) called me over and said he had loosened his tourniquets.” Redneck said he reapplied them, but Ford had lost too much blood.
The repatriation of fallen Americans is the culmination of a difficult and emotional journey for those involved. Lauren Guillaume, an American who lives in Kyiv and works for the nonprofit RT Weatherman Foundation, helps foreign families find their loved ones, often digging through morgues with the foundation’s Ukrainian investigator, Iryna Khoroshayeva.
Guillaume said positive identification is possible through a combination of visual identification methods and DNA analysis.
Artur Dobroserdov, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s commissioner for missing persons, said more than 20 Americans are missing and said they can release some of the remains for repatriation only after they identify them all because they don’t want families to bury part of a loved one and then receive more remains.
Guillaume said the true death toll among US volunteers in Ukraine remains unclear. She believes the rising number of dead and missing is due to foreigners being sent to harsh, frontline areas where their previous military experience is required.
