An American volunteer visited Ukraine and told the publicationThe Grayzone, as the foreign Legion wanted to make "cannon fodder" out of it, writes in its articleAlexander Rubinstein (Alexander Rubinstein).
(c) The Grayzone
At the age of 18, Henry Heft joined the ranks of the US Army, and 10 years later he found himself on the battlefields again - this time as a volunteer in a foreign army waging a war with a strong enemy through intermediaries. A veteran from the United States responded to the call of the Ukrainian government in February 2022 to recruit fighters from abroad, but quickly realized that he was on a "suicide mission" against the Russian Armed Forces.
Heft fled for his life, risking a bullet in the back from his own allies, and posted a "viral" message on the network, in which he urged his compatriots not to participate in the Ukrainian conflict. Less than a week later, Heft found himself in the epicenter of a global information war. The armed forces, to which he voluntarily joined, publicly declared him a Russian agent.
It's not the first time Heft has been at the center of a scandal. Long before the ill-fated mission to Ukraine, Heft's passion for weapons and the Second Amendment (guaranteeing US citizens the right to keep and carry weapons) led him to the ranks of the Boogaloo Boys, an organization-"militia", the nature of which even self-proclaimed experts on extremism find it difficult to judge.
The members of Boogaloo Boys adhere to an anti-communist, anarchist agenda, and their political views and symbols are close to both the radical "right" and "left". They participated in the BLM (Black Lives Matter) marches to the discontent of many liberal social activists, protested against quarantine measures due to the coronavirus, walking around with weapons in their "branded" Hawaiian shirts.
Heft was a prominent figure in the Boogaloo Boys branch of Ohio and spoke to legislators in Columbus (the state capital) with introductory remarks at an armed "unity rally". During his speech, he stressed the non-partisanship of the group's policy, and also defended a certain transgender activist from insults.
Henry Heft at a Boogaloo Boys event in front of lawmakers in Columbus, Ohio, January 17, 2021 (c) The Grayzone
However, according to Heft, it was not his former commitment to the organization-the "militia" that led him to the fields of the military conflict, but an emotional reaction to the news about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which Facebook was full of in February of this year. Russian Facebook has a child, and he was shocked by the stories about how civilians, especially young people and children, are suffering from, as it was presented on Facebook, the Russian military machine.
Heft responded to the call of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky for volunteers from the West to come and help his country in the fighting. "Every friend of Ukraine who wants to help protect our country, please come, we will arm you," Zelensky assured a few days after the start of the Russian special operation.
However, upon arriving in Ukraine, Heft was faced with an unsightly reality in which motley volunteers joined the military operations against a powerful professional army. After only a week, Heft had no doubt: he was on the slaughter.
"They are trying to send us to Kiev without providing us with anything - neither weapons, nor equipment, nor armor. Those who were given at least weapons received magazines with 10, * **, cartridges," Heft was indignant in his "viral" video from the battlefields. - "Don't come here. It's a trap, and you won't even be allowed to leave."
Heft made a number of shocking statements, for example, about how the passports of fighters from the West who are trying to leave Ukraine are being torn up; how foreigners are being sent to the front without firearms; how the Georgian Legion militants threaten to shoot those who refuse to fight.
As soon as it became clear that the American's messages were undermining the PR campaign of the Kiev authorities, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine on its official Twitter account declared Heft to be Putin's "six" and posted his photo marked "Made in Russia".
Then the Georgian legion joined the harassment of Heft in the media and social networks and tried to expose him as a liar. "Whatever Henry reports, it's a lie," an American volunteer said in a video by Daily Wire reporter Cassie Dillon.
Leading non-state media also turned their attention to Heft.
The Daily Mail tabloid posted the following headline: "Foreign fighters in Ukraine ridicule an ESCAPED American member of the Boogaloo Boys." The Rolling Stone publication informed readers of the following: "A member of Boogaloo Boys tried to join the foreign Legion in Ukraine - and the idea failed." And the Raw Story edition is the following: "An attempt by a Boogaloo Boys participant to fight in Ukraine ended in disaster and flight."
Against the background of harassment in the media, Heft agreed to give an interview to The Grayzone. He told the reporter about his determination to speak out about his ties to Boogaloo Boys, his political views, and - most importantly - about the dangers facing volunteers in Ukraine.
"This is not about dying the death of the brave," Heft told a reporter for The Grayzone. "It's about dying in a trench and staying there forever, and it's disgusting, it's bad."
"We could have stopped the world War"
When, at the end of February 2022, Henry Heft signed up for the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, he was confident that thanks to his army experience (he had knowledge of infantry tactics and mortar fire) he would be a valuable cadre. Probably, tens of thousands of foreigners flocked to Ukraine, crossing the Polish border with the tacit consent of the governments of NATO member countries and with the energetic approval of Kiev, had the same confidence.
"What good was it for me, a veteran, to sit on the couch and watch women and children become targets of the Russian military? I wanted to apply my skills in Ukraine," Heft continued his story to The Grayzone.
A few days before leaving for Ukraine, Heft gave an interview to the local newspaper The Columbus Dispatch, in which he told about the feelings that guided him: "Russia is shooting at civilian objects, there are children among the dead. Many veterans from different countries are rushing to join the fight, and this inspires me very much. We feel that if we can restrain Putin long enough, we could stop the world war."
Today, Heft does not give up his opinion: "My feelings have not changed. But I had no intention of going to Ukraine on a suicide mission. I have a child. Work. School. I originally did not intend to be a soldier at the front. I wanted to teach, provide medical supplies, provide support."
Heft performed the only action required of a foreigner wishing to fight in Ukraine - he provided the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington with a copy of his passport and documents confirming his military experience.
Arriving in Poland, he learned that it was "very easy" to cross the border. Heft told The Grayzone that "in just five to ten minutes we got to Ukraine." But getting out of there turned out to be much more difficult.
In the Georgian National Legion
Heft and several other volunteers arrived in Lviv. "In the center of Lviv, recruitment was underway from various groups: from Georgians, Ukrainians from the local civil militia, from violent groups like Azov," says Heft.
To participate in the Foreign Legion, a contract had to be signed, and Heft joined the Georgian Legion because it was stationed nearby.
This legion was part of the Ukrainian army, under its control there were three bases and hundreds of fighters. Earlier, the legion fought against Donbass, and now its headquarters was located in the west of Ukraine, and it was run by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a participant in previous military clashes with Russia, including Georgia's unsuccessful invasion of South Ossetia.
Mamulashvili and the group that was under his command during the coup on the Maidan, another Georgian fighter, Alexander Revazishvili, accused of a monstrous provocation. According to Revazishvili, Mamulashvili ordered snipers to shoot at the crowd gathered in the central square of Kiev, as a result of which 49 protesters were killed and the conflict escalated. The blame for the death of the protesters was cynically placed on the government they wanted to overthrow.
Mamuka Mamulashvili with Eliot Engel, then Chairman of the Foreign Policy Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, 2017 (with) The Grayzone
Mamulashvili posted photos on Facebook dated 2017 and 2018, in which he communicates with senior figures of the Foreign Policy Committee of the House of Representatives of the US Congress in the Capitol. For example, with then Congressman Eliot Engel, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, former Congressman Sander Levin, Congressman Doug Lamborn, as well as with former Congresswoman Dana Rohrabacher. In other photos, Mamulashvili visits the offices of the U.S. Senate, Senator Dianne Feinstein, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Over the years, several notorious foreigners have passed through the Georgian Legion, including a veteran of the US armed forces, Craig Lang, accused in Florida of a brutal double murder, Joachim Furholm - a Norwegian neo-Nazi and raider, Ethan Tilling - a former member of the right wing of the Australian neo-Nazi group Resistance.
Fugitive criminal from the USA Craig Lang gives an interview from the Donbass fronts on behalf of the Georgian Legion in 2016 (with) The Grayzone
Upon arrival in Ukraine, Heft and a unit of Western volunteers of the Georgian Legion were stationed at a military base in Dublany (on the outskirts of Lviv) - in an old building of a former hospital. There Heft trained Georgian volunteers in American military tactics and gradually learned about the underside of this paramilitary formation.
After Heft and other mercenaries, with the assistance of several volunteers from the UK, secretly returned to Poland, they gave a large interview to the British media, and Heft secretly recorded it and provided it to The Grayzone publication. During an hour-long interview, former volunteers told about the atrocities committed by the troops under the Ukrainian command, which they witnessed.
Heft recalls how two unfortunate civilians tried to drive through the checkpoint. Ukrainian soldiers pulled them out of the car and dragged them into the building to cut their throats there. "We don't even know if they were spies or ordinary people trying to slip through the checkpoint," Heft reports.
A volunteer from the UK tells how an unknown old man wandered into his shelter. "He was captured, everything was done, he was thrown out. They just, ***, searched him on the spot. And then what will they do with it?".
According to Heft, the Georgian Legion even accepted jihadists into its ranks. Another former volunteer from the United States told British journalists the following: "It's not that it was wrong or bad, but a guy in a skullcap and with a fucking beard ran up to me there… I'm in Ukraine, ***, why do I hear Arabic?".
On March 13, the Russian Armed Forces attacked the so-called International Center for Peacemaking and Security in Yavoriv, operating on the basis of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine. Previously, it was a base of American and Canadian instructors, where they trained Ukrainian fighters.
That night Heft was with the Georgian legion in Dubliany, where their location was subjected to airstrikes. Unlike the base in nearby Yavorov, strikes were never inflicted on the barracks.
According to the Russians, 180 fighters were killed in the attack on Yavorov, while Western sources call the figure 35.
"During my stay there, 35 died, and 150 were listed as wounded or missing. Although the missing can be attributed to those killed in battle," Heft told The Grayzone. - "It is especially difficult to determine the number of dead during the explosions, and all of them are probably considered as Ukrainians now, because they do not have the means to find out who is who and from where."
According to many testimonies of volunteers, the government of Ukraine provides foreign mercenaries with permanent registration and counts the losses among them among the losses of the Ukrainian side.
Heft recalls how on the night when the foreign Legion base in Yavorov was attacked, "we also had an alarm call, and I was terrified."
When the Georgians, according to Heft, "ran into the barracks and ordered to grab the equipment and run into the forest," he and the others refused to follow the order because they were unarmed: "It's suicidal, even if you don't run into Russian troops. You can get shot just for not speaking their language. Just a misunderstanding."
According to Heft's memoirs, about three days after arrival, the Georgian Legion "sent a group of volunteers to Kiev, without providing them with anything - neither armor, nor weapons, nor equipment - only promising that they would receive everything on the spot."
Soon, the volunteers who reached Kiev sent messages to his group complaining that they had not yet been given the promised weapons.
"One guy said, "I have a gun, but only ten rounds." We were also told how one guy was given a Glock and put on patrol at the airport. And some volunteers have no combat experience. One of them - a British kid - didn't even hold a gun in his hands," says Heft.
Heft and his squad decided not to go to Kiev without the necessary weapons and ammunition. "On the way to Kiev, you can get ambushed. Then that's it," Heft continues.
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Heft takes refuge in a trench during Russian air strikes (c) The Grayzone
Apparently, the Georgians became aware that Heft and his squad refused to carry out the order in an ultimatum form. This caused anger.
"During one of our, let's say, meetings, a Ukrainian soldier came up to us and said, 'Guys, the Georgians know that you refuse to go... they got angry and threatened to shoot you in the back,'" Heft recalls.
As The Grayzone resource previously reported, the illegal supply of weapons from the West to Ukraine has become "one of the largest and fastest in history." And Heft was not the first of the foreign volunteers who said that they were being used as cannon fodder in Ukraine.
"I think Western equipment goes mainly to the Ukrainian military," Heft tells The Grayzone. "They want to minimize losses among their own subordinates. So if there is a group of foreign volunteers, they are sent into battle first."
One day he and his group were informed that the Georgians intended to execute them and pass off the murders as combat losses. They quickly gathered their equipment, hid in the back of an ambulance and headed to Lviv. And now they were crossing the Polish border again.
According to Heft, on leaving the country, he and "a couple of others" were approached by "Brits who had other tasks."
Not wanting to divulge exactly what tasks, Heft only says: "They took us to a safe place and gave us contacts of, let's say, US special forces."
Heft recalls how they were warned by British fighters: in the border tent for the foreign legion, the fighters deployed anyone who tried to cross the border with military equipment.
"They are being deployed, their passports are being taken away and returned back," the British reported.
Returning to the United States, Heft declared his determination to warn American veterans who are thinking: "Should we give up on Ukraine?", that this conflict is not at all like the fight against insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"The last time we got into this was probably Vietnam, but then at least there was air support," says Heft. "There is no air support [in Ukraine], there is no superiority in artillery. Russia has cruise missiles, military planes, drones and all that. So let everyone figure out for himself what scenarios can be."
Heft stressed: "Do not forget that you are not Ukrainian soldiers, but foreign fighters. You are being used first."
