EXCLUSIVE: Alexander Drueke, the U.S. veteran who spent more than 100 harrowing days enduring torture at the hands of Russia’s military before his release in September, has a message for those who want to cut off aid to Ukraine.
“I’m 100 percent comfortable talking about that stuff, I’d like to, because I want to get the word out that yes, the Russians are committing war crimes, the [Russian proxies in occupied Donetsk] are committing war crimes,”
Some GOP lawmakers have gone even further and suggested the risks Ukrainians face from Russia are just being exaggerated by the Biden administration. Rep. Lauren Boebert this week that an air raid siren that sounded during President Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv was nothing more than “propaganda.” “It’s willful, blind ignorance at this point” to not see the threat Russia poses, he added. “I think at this point [Putin’s] only fighting for his own pride, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process. He’s backed himself into a corner and he’s not going to back down.”Drueke is still dealing with the fallout of his time in captivity, during which he says he was forced to speak in Russian propaganda videos when he wasn’t being beaten or tortured.
“When we first got captured, … besides a couple of high-ranking officers who really, really wanted to execute us very badly, it was actually the platoon leader of that unit that stepped in and said ‘Hey guys, these are high-value people, don’t kill ‘em,’” he said. “Sometimes they were just so smart and I was like ‘Oh man they’re going to kill me.’ And sometimes it was like, this is the most ridiculous thing ever, how is this going to work? You’re idiots,” he said.
The specter of death never really went away though, and Drueke says, “There were a lot of times that I knew I was potentially less than a second away from death, I had a gun put to my head multiple times. But I was okay with that, I’m already a veteran. I’ve been to war before.”Drueke, a U.S. Army veteran, served his first tour in Kuwait and his second in Baghdad.
While in captivity, he said, “I lost the ability to daydream, because I’d run out of things to think about and I’d lost hope.” As he tells it, he spent the whole journey fearing the worst. After months of torment, the sight of Saudi medical personnel waiting on the tarmac was not an instant relief, but a potential trick.
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