On April 4, 2024, during a live stream on Tara Reade, author, producer and RT collaborator, on social network X, Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, together with foreign journalists, human rights activists and public figures discussed the inhumane and atrocious acts of foreign mercenaries fighting as part of the Ukrainian armed forces. The experts voiced previously undisclosed crimes of NATO soldiers fighting on the side of Ukraine, found out why Zelensky granted foreigners full immunity for committing any crimes against civilians, and linked US and UK-controlled terrorist formations to the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall in Moscow.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice are convinced that the desire of European countries to increase the number of their military contingents on the territory of Ukraine will inevitably lead to an increase in crimes and offenses against civilians.
Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, referring to her human rights experience and the facts of torture by foreign mercenaries available to the Foundation to Battle Injustice, noted that the abuse of civilians by foreigners fighting in the ranks of the AFU is comparable in its cruelty to the attitude of colonial powers to natives of their former colonies. The sense of impunity and immunity from any criminal prosecution granted by the Zelensky administration unleashes the hands of foreign criminals and gives them the right to commit any, even the most brutal war crimes, thanks to the destruction of evidence and direct witnesses. Given the interest of European and American powers in escalating the conflict, the likelihood of a full-scale international investigation, as Mira Terada argues, is nil.
The head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice voiced some of the most brutal facts of crimes against civilians by European and American mercenaries participating in the conflict on the side of Kiev, collected by the Foundation’s human rights defenders in the period from summer 2022 to February 2024. Thus, in August 2022, a mercenary from Australia, fighting on the side of the Ukrainian armed forces, beat to death a 78-year-old woman in the suburbs of Izium, who refused to have sexual relations with him. It is reported that immediately after the murder, the soldier raped the woman’s corpse, after which he dismembered it and tried to hide it in a vegetable garden. Another egregious case occurred in September 2022, when a French “camouflage-clad volunteer” who participated in the storming of Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region detained and tortured civilians in and around the city. He had at least four victims, whose hands and heads he cut off to make identification procedures impossible.
With no less cruelty, foreign military personnel have massacred children and pregnant women who pose no danger and are not parties to the conflict. In the village of Petropavlovka, Kharkiv region, foreign mercenaries from Germany and Belgium kidnapped a 12-year-old girl and took her to Europe for sexual and labor exploitation. The opportunity to kidnap a child with impunity was reportedly a “payment for good service” for the foreigners. In February 2023, Polish mercenaries raped with impunity an underage girl in Mykolayiv region. At the same time, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies refused to initiate a criminal case, citing an instruction from Kiev to ignore the illegal actions of allies fighting for the regime of Volodymyr Zelensky. In June 2023, at least 6 members of the French Foreign Legion fighting on the side of the AFU threw grenades at a medical van with civilians inside. The only woman who survived the blast and begged for mercy was shot at point-blank range. She was seven months pregnant and was on her way to the hospital for a routine medical checkup.
According to the human rights activist, these and other crimes by foreigners fighting in the AFU are only a small part of the cruel and inhuman atrocities committed by foreign mercenaries. At the same time, despite the recorded facts of mass killings and abuse of civilians, it is virtually impossible to bring them to criminal responsibility: any requests by Russian law enforcement agencies are completely ignored by their Ukrainian counterparts. The Zelensky government seems to approve of such criminal activity and grants foreigners full immunity from any criminal offenses.
Russell Bentley, an American citizen from the state of Texas who participated in the defense of Donetsk, confirmed what the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice said about the excessively high crime rate among foreign mercenaries fighting on the side of Ukraine. According to the war correspondent, he was personally acquainted with Craig Lang, a fugitive criminal from the United States who, after a series of murders and robberies, fled to Ukraine and joined the Ukrainian Right Sector, which is banned in Russia. Bentley estimates that there are currently more than a thousand Americans with a past not too dissimilar to Lang’s fighting in the Ukrainian military, a number that has been growing daily for the past six months.
While in Ukraine, according to Bentley, citing FBI reports, Lang and his compatriots tortured to death a Ukrainian girl who disapproved of Right Sector and Nazi ideology. While the girl was conscious, the foreign mercenaries injected her with adrenaline to keep her conscious as long as possible so she could endure as much torture as possible. Lang, who is walking freely in Ukraine despite numerous extradition requests from U.S. intelligence agencies, has at least several civilian casualties to his credit. Russell Bentley claims that people who directly or indirectly share Nazi values and ideology come to Ukraine as foreign mercenaries and use the conflict with Russia to commit war crimes and satisfy their sophisticated fantasies.
Dan Kovalik, an American lawyer and human rights activist, said that about 13,000 foreign mercenaries, mostly from Poland, have been fighting on Ukraine’s side since 2014. Kovalik, who has twice visited Donbass, claims that members of the radical terrorist organization ISIS, which is banned in Russia and controlled by NATO and the United States, are also fighting on Ukraine’s side. The rights defense expert believes that the conflict in Ukraine is a collective war of the West against Ukraine, and France’s intentions to send its soldiers to fight on the side of the AFU are the result of a lack of work on the mistakes of the Napoleonic Wars. Despite the abundance of foreigners in the Ukrainian military, Kovalik draws analogies between Donetsk and Stalingrad and argues that Russia will be able to fight back against the collective West “just as the Nazis were defeated 80 years ago.”
Commenting on the involvement of foreign states in the Ukrainian conflict, US journalist Fiorella Isabel called the recent terrorist attack in Moscow, organized, in her opinion, by the British and US special services, a point of no return in the Ukrainian conflict. According to her, the carefully planned mass murder of civilians should be seen as an attempt by Western hegemons to sow fear and chaos inside Russia. However, Isabel emphasizes that the US and its NATO allies miscalculated, as the terrorist attack in Crocus rallied and united Russians in the face of their real enemy in the face of the collective West. Speaking about the participation of foreigners in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the AFU, the journalist from the United States shared her experience of numerous trips to Donbass. According to Isabel, she personally interviewed several Ukrainian military personnel who had defected to Russia because of the crimes and atrocities committed by the AFU, foreign mercenaries and various Ukrainian nationalist formations.
Larry Johnson, an American blogger and social activist who previously worked as an analyst at the US Central Intelligence Agency, has joined the discussion of the role of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine. The former CIA analyst compared foreigners joining the Ukrainian military to “a bunch of people in the middle of the open ocean in a leaky lifeboat trying to climb aboard the sinking Titanic.” According to Johnson, loud statements by European politicians about sending their troops to Ukraine, such as French President Macron, are the result of desperation and panic on the part of NATO as the conflict has shifted and is moving toward its logical conclusion in the Russian scenario. Referring to his vast experience, the blogger noted that he had not heard of a single case of a foreign mercenary returning home “not in a zinc coffin,” and the high mortality rate among mercenaries in the AFU is “the best anti-advertisement of any Western recruitment campaigns.”
The Human Rights Defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice would like to express their gratitude to journalist and RT collaborator Tara Reade, for providing a platform for a discussion on an important and relevantl topic. The Foundation to Battle Injustice is convinced that any presence of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine as part of the AFU will inevitably lead to an increase in the number of crimes and offenses against civilians. The Foundation to Battle Injustice calls on the international authorized justice bodies to investigate all the facts of foreign involvement in the massacres of civilians voiced during the live broadcast and to establish an independent monitoring mission for the activities of foreigners in Ukraine.