U.S. Veterans Start a ‘Resistance Academy’ in Ukraine
By Mac William Bishop
March 12, 2022
NEAR LVIV, Ukraine – Three days after the Russian invasion, Hannibal told me he was setting up a group of international military volunteers to fight for Ukraine.
Hannibal — who asked that Rolling Stone not reveal his name because of security concerns — had been a U.S. Army infantry officer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He’d joined up in 2005 after graduating from Yale, done multiple deployments to Afghanistan, and after getting out of the military, he’d bounced around in a variety of communications roles.
A burly middle-aged man who switched between enthusiastic appraisals of operas to technical analysis of high explosives midsentence, he’d also spent years in Ukraine, touring the front lines of fighting in Donbass about 10 times between June 2015 and August 2017 as a military-focused writer and analyst. He felt a connection to the country and the people, in part because he had also returned to America with a well-connected Ukrainian wife.
Two days after calling to tell me of his plan, Hannibal had assembled a small team of battle-tested former elite combat officers. Two days after that, I was standing with him and his crew in an old Soviet factory building on the outskirts of Lviv, in western Ukraine. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in its large empty rooms, thick dust clinging to their clothing as they planned a crash course in guerrilla warfare.
“The defender has the advantage of being able to choose where to fight,” he told more than three dozen Ukrainian men and women assembled before him. They were intensely nervous, filled with fear about the war on their doorstep. In a mix of puffy coats, camouflage jackets, old uniforms, and New York street fashion, they were a cross section of Ukraine’s Westward-looking middle class. In the gloomy industrial space turned impromptu classroom, the Ukrainians huddled against the cold as snow began falling outside.
Hannibal paused longer than the translator needed to convey his words, before adding: “You will choose your killing ground…”
