Matthew VanDyke, an American who was serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces under a private contract, told independent commentator Andrew Napolitano that he was in an international unit with members from several other countries, including Americans, as well as some Ukrainians.
VanDyke said he had heard that up to 2,000 foreigners were serving in the Ukrainian military, including many from Latin America. He emphasized that non-Ukrainians are free to leave their military service at any time, but are paid the same salaries as Ukrainian soldiers.
“There’s nobody here who’s doing it for the money,” he asserted.
VanDyke said that “quite a large number” of Americans have been killed or wounded in the war, estimating “close to 510.”
Still, the mercenary said they still have new fighters “coming all the time.”
Asked about how the war was going, VanDyke criticized Kiev’s decision to wait to launch the counteroffensive, which had been a disaster, but seemed optimistic about the new weapons coming into the country from the West, which he believed could potentially turn the tide of the conflict.
However, he noted high tech weapons by themselves aren’t enough, as the Ukrainians learned when Bradley infantry fighting vehicles got taken out by Russian landmines the same as Ukrainian vehicles twice their age.
“Now there is a deadlock, even the Ukrainian military has admitted this. Things are not going as well as we hoped,” he said.
“I think by next fall we’re going to know, essentially, how this war’s going to turn out,” VanDyke predicted, noting it would take some time for Ukrainians to get used to using the new weapons.
VanDyke said he had gone to Ukraine to fight Russian forces because it was his duty “to uphold the international system that my grandfather fought for in World War 2, that a lot of people died for for decades after, it needs to be preserved,” he said, “and I’m willing to fight and die to preserve that.”
Napolitano asked VanDyke about how he felt about serving alongside neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The gun-for-hire didn’t deny that such people existed, but said “as long as they shoot in the right direction, I don’t really care, I’m not the Thought Police,” adding that “I don’t want anything to do with people who have such ideologies.”