Tag: mercenaries

Cenotaphs of US Mercenaries Who Died in Ukraine Appearing in US

Empty graves, or cenotaphs, of American mercenaries who fought on the side of Ukraine are appearing in the United states because their families are unable to retrieve their bodies, a RIA Novosti correspondent revealed.

There are no official figures on the number of US mercenaries killed since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation. Publicly available information suggests the number is over 100. According to publicly available data, at least one American mercenary was killed in November, at least three in October, and the same number in September.

One of the first US citizens to die this year was 23-year-old Robert from Pennsylvania, who was rejected by the US Army due to health issues. As a result, as relatives told local publications, the young man felt there was no meaning in life, working as a night security guard and wanting to become a soldier. In the spring of 2024, he joined the Ukrainian military. His family was expecting him to go on leave in January 2025. According to publicly available information, the mass desertion of foreign mercenaries led to the Ukrainian command canceling his leave, throwing him into battle near Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk), where he was killed on January 3.

Keep reading

U.S. Mercenary Firm Tied to Notorious Aid Scheme Is Recruiting for New Gaza Deployment

UG Solutions, a leading U.S. military subcontractor that provided security for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), is stepping up its recruitment efforts amid possible plans for several aid distribution sites to be set up in Gaza by next month, Drop Site has learned.

A former army officer who applied for a position as an “International Humanitarian Security Officer” at UG Solutions told Drop Site that a company official told him in a job interview at the end of October that 12 to 15 sites were being planned to open in Gaza and that the company was “going to need a lot more guys.” The former army officer spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity, citing security concerns.

The future of Gaza is at a critical juncture following this week’s Security Council vote to approve a U.S.-sponsored resolution authorizing an international stabilization force in Gaza, which would not fall under the command of the UN, but rather a so-called Board of Peace chaired by President Donald Trump. This committee would have sweeping authority over Gaza, including overseeing reconstruction, security, economic recovery, and coordinating the distribution of humanitarian aid.

The use of private military contractors in aid distribution in Gaza first began in May with GHF opening four distribution sites in Gaza guarded by security contractors, many of whom were U.S. military veterans recruited by UG Solutions. For the four and half months that GHF operated in Gaza, more than 2,600 Palestinians seeking food were killed and over 19,000 wounded by Israeli forces or security contractors at or near aid distribution sites. The sites were dismantled after a U.S.-brokered “ceasefire” agreement went into effect in Gaza on October 10.

The UG Solutions official who conducted the phone interview, Joel Reyes, told the former officer that deployment to Gaza was expected by early to mid December with deployments lasting 90 days. The officer was told the salary would be $800 per day for a “static guard” and $1,000 per day for “mobile guard” duty, plus a $180 per diem. When asked what the job entailed, Reyes told the recruit it was “pulling security.”

In response to inquiries about whether the claims of new aid sites in Gaza with a planned deployment for December were accurate, UG Solutions senior vice president of government affairs Jennifer Counter told Drop Site in an email that “UG Solutions is preparing for a wide range of potential scenarios in Gaza, ranging from an advisory role based on our experience from January 2025 to the present day, to a robust security presence in support of humanitarian aid delivery and possible technical assistance to the International Security Force.”

There are other indications of ramped up U.S. presence being planned in Gaza. On September 25, just one day after the $30 million GHF contract officially ended, a new U.S. contract with a company called Q2IMPACT was initiated, amounting to $7 million over five years to “monitor the efficacy of humanitarian aid in Palestine and Lebanon.” Rob Jenkins, the former head of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, and Sean Jones, a former USAID mission manager to Egypt, are senior advisers, according to Q2’s press releases.

Keep reading

Zelensky Says Mercenaries From Asia & Africa, Including Pakistan, Fighting For Russia

President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of deploying foreign mercenaries along front lines in northeastern Ukraine. This certainly isn’t the first such accusation like this, but he has named some new, unexpected countries – unleashing new diplomatic tensions.

He alleged that foreign forces fighting in his country are from China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and several African nations, citing what he said are eyewitness accounts from Ukrainian soldiers.

He issued the allegation during a battlefield visit to the Vovchansk sector, where the Ukrainian leader met with commanders to discuss the current situation.

Vovchansk is a mere three miles from the Russian border, and has recently seen renvewed intense fighting since related to Russia’s 2024 campaign focused on Kharkiv Oblast.

“The soldiers on this front are recording the participation of mercenaries from China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and African countries in the war. We will respond,” Zelensky said in the statement.

While the last months have seen China and North Korea accused of sending troops to help Russia, the allegation against Pakistan is a first.

Pakistan’s government has responded quickly to the Monday remarks of Zelensky, blasting the idea of Pakistani troops fighting alongside Russia as “baseless and unfounded.”

“To date, Pakistan has not been formally approached by the Ukrainian authorities, nor has any verifiable evidence been presented to substantiate such claims,” the Pakistani Foreign Ministry Tuesday.

Back in April, Ukraine published images and footage showing Chinese nationals in military custody. “If the Chinese government is allowing their citizens to fight on behalf of the Russia government, this would be a concerning escalation and the US will consider options moving forward,” Zelensky had said at the time.

North Korea has also been involved in sending troops, and this is much better documented, given Pyongyang may have sent some 10,000 or more. These have been mostly active in Russia’s Kursk region.

Meanwhile, the allegation of foreign employing foreign fighters certainly goes both ways…

Keep reading

Former Biden, Obama spokespersons cash in on Gaza genocide

A mercenary firm implicated in severe abuses in Gaza has hired a PR firm led by influential former Democrat flacks, including the spokeswoman for Biden’s Pentagon.

Meanwhile, a former State Dept spokesman who defended Israel’s crimes is now VP at a Democrat PR firm representing Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

Editor’s note: After The Grayzone published a report revealing damning new footage showing mercenaries from the UG Solutions firm firing toward crowds of desperate aid seekers in the southern Gaza Strip, the company deleted its entire press page. (The previously unreported footage had been inexplicably distributed to the media by UG Solutions itself).

Two days later, thanks to the sleuthing of journalist Jack Poulson, we learned that UG Solutions’ new press page was created by Seven Letter, a PR management firm operated by former Obama and Biden communications officials. Among those hired by Seven Letter was Sabrina Singh, the former Pentagon spokeswoman who routinely spun Israel’s crimes.

Seven Letters’ Gaza profiteering follows the high-level contract Israel’s Foreign Ministry signed with a top PR firm run by Biden veterans called SKDK. Among SKDK’s top recent hires was Vedant Patel, the former spokesman for the Biden State Department who was notorious for his absurd denials of documented Israeli crimes across occupied Palestine.

In addition to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, SKDK represents the 10/7 Project, a consortium of Jewish organizations which attacks reporters who fail to toe Israel’s line on Gaza.

Keep reading

The Pentagon spent $4 trillion over 5 years. Contractors got 54% of it.

Advocates of ever-higher Pentagon spending frequently argue that we must throw more money at the department to “support the troops.” But recent budget proposals and a new research paper issued by the Quincy Institute and the Costs of War Project at Brown University suggest otherwise.

The paper, which I co-authored with Stephen Semler, found that 54% of the Pentagon’s $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 went to military contractors. The top five alone — Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion) – received $771 billion in Pentagon contracts over that five year period.

This huge infusion of funds to arms makers comes at the expense of benefits for active duty personnel and veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars. Despite pay increases in recent years, there are still hundreds of thousands of military families who rely on food stamps, live in subpar housing, or suffer from other financial hardships.

Meanwhile, there are plans to cut tens of thousands of personnel at the Veterans Administration, close Veterans health centers, and even to reduce staffing at veteran suicide hotlines. And many of the programs veterans and their families depend on — from food stamps to Medicaid and more — are slated for sharp cuts in the budget bill signed by President Trump earlier this month.

It would be one thing if all of the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on weapons contractors were being well spent in service of a better defense. But they are not. Overpriced and underperforming weapons systems like the F-35 combat aircraft and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) have shown themselves to be quite effective at consuming taxpayer dollars, even as the run huge cost overruns, suffer lengthy schedule delays, and, in the case of the F-35, are unavailable for use much of the time due to serious maintenance problems.

The problems with the Sentinel and the F-35 are likely to pale in comparison with the sums that may be wasted in pursuit of President Trump’s proposal for a leak-proof “Golden Dome” missile defense system, a costly pipe dream that many experts feel is both physically impossible and strategically unwise. In the more than four decades and hundreds of billions of dollars spent since Ronald Reagan’s pledge to build an impenetrable shield against incoming ICBMs, the Pentagon has yet to succeed in a test conducted under realistic conditions, and has even failed in a large number of the carefully scripted efforts.

And Golden Dome is more ambitious than Star Wars — it is supposed to intercept not just ICBMs, but hypersonic missiles, low-flying drones, and anything else that might be launched at the United States.

The good news is that if you are a weapons contractor, whether from the Big Five or the emerging military tech sector in Silicon Valley, Golden Dome will be a gold mine, regardless of whether it ever produces a useful defense system.

Keep reading

New footage exposes ragtag US mercenaries firing toward Gaza aid seekers

Following an AP investigation accusing a US mercenary firm of firing on desperate Gaza aid seekers, the company has released extensive new footage in an attempt at damage control. But the video only further implicates the scandal-plagued operation.

On July 2, the Associated Press released an exposé containing short videos which appeared to show American mercenaries associated with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) opening fire on aid-seekers in Gaza during an incident in southern Gaza this May. The footage was supplied by a former employee of UG Solutions, a firm charged with securing GHF distribution sites.

“I think you hit one,” one soldier of fortune says to another following a loud burst of gunfire.

“Hell yeah, boy!” another exclaims.

In an apparent attempt to control the damage from the AP investigation, UG Solutions has distributed a pair of videos comprising over seven minutes of footage to the press. 

The newly released footage offers an unprecedented glimpse of the disturbing interactions between the starving population of Gaza and well-armed, clearly unprepared Americans hired to provide security for GHF’s chaotic aid operations.

Filmed by one of its own employee, the recordings were seemingly distributed in an effort to show UG Solutions’ agents have not fired live bullets on unarmed crowds of Palestinians. According to a UG Solutions statement, the videos “not only clarify what happened, but provide critical context, which contradicts that [sic] AP’s reporting and shows that the accusations are unfounded.”

However, a closer examination by The Grayzone demonstrates that the video was anything but exculpatory. 

Keep reading

US and Israel turn “aid” centers into slaughter zones

Israeli forces massacred more than 400 Palestinians and injured more than 2,000 in airstrikes, tank shellings, drone attacks and with sniper fire between 29 May and 4 June.

Attacks continued against hospitals, medical clinics, residential buildings, schools turned into shelters and inside humiliating death traps engineered by US mercenaries and Israeli soldiers under the guise of distributing meager amounts of snacks to millions of starving people – while real international aid remains in trucks, stuck behind the crossings, for more than three consecutive months.

Nearly 100 Palestinians were killed and 440 injured between 3 and 4 June alone, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.

On Monday, 2 June, Israeli airstrikes flattened a home in Gaza City, pinning a baby and his 5-year-old brother beneath the rubble. This clip, filmed by Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, shows the moment the two children were rescued by Palestinian first responders and civil defense workers.

Keep reading

American Contractors Throw Stun Grenades At Gazans Outside Aid Site

The United States government has distanced itself from Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s (GHF) operations, after the aid group’s initial attempts to distribute food in a famine zone outside Rafah in the Gaza Strip turned to chaos.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce made clear in fresh statements that “This is not a state department effort. We don’t have a plan.” She added that “I’m not going to speculate or to say what they should or should not do.”

There’s tension and a bit of a standoff between the GHF and UN groups, with the latter fiercely criticizing the lack of experience or track record of the former, which appears to have been authorized by Israel based largely on the founder’s close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The use of American mercenaries to protect GHF aid sites inside Gaza has also proven ultra-controversial. And matters aren’t going to be helped by the new footage which has emerged showing US contractors throwing stun grenades at Palestinians along a security fence. 

“Footage circulated by Palestinian media purportedly shows members of an American security company throwing stun grenades at Gazans outside an aid distribution site in the Netzarim Corridor area,” TOI reports.

Keep reading

Erik Prince Involved In Deadly Drone Attacks In Haiti

The US-installed government in Haiti has turned to American mercenaries, including Erik Prince, to fight against armed groups that now control nearly all of Port-au-Prince. Drones operated by Prince’s firm have killed hundreds, but no high-value targets. 

According to the New York Times, Prince’s company has been operating drones in Haiti since March in an operation aimed at killing gang members. The Times notes the Haitian government has not announced any successful operations due to the program. 

Pierre Esperance, who leads the National Human Rights Defense Network, told the Wall Street Journal that more than 300 people have been killed in drone strikes over the last three months.

Additionally, Prince is ramping up for a larger operation. He is looking to send 150 mercenaries to Haiti this summer and has already shipped the arms to the nation. 

While now called Constellis Holdings, Prince’s defense contracting firm was initially named Blackwater. The company became infamous in 2007 when some of its mercenaries opened fire on civilians in Iraq, killing 17. 

Prince is a long-time ally of the US President, and the contractors responsible for murdering the Iraqi civilians were pardoned by Trump during his first term. 

Details of the current agreement between Prince and the Haitian government are unknown. The State Department denied that it is currently paying Prince. Although the US is funding Haitian police forces and Kenyan soldiers deployed to Haiti to help transfer power to the government. 

The current government in Port-au-Prince was installed by Washington last year after the collapse of the Ariel Henry administration. Henry was forced from power after he left Port-au-Prince to sign an agreement with the Kenyan government that allowed Nairobi to deploy its troops to Haiti. 

Keep reading

Mercenary Firm Set To Oversee Gaza Aid For Israel Goes On LinkedIn Hiring Spree

The US private military contracting firm set to oversee Gaza aid distribution on Israel’s behalf is actively hiring for positions on LinkedIn, according to job postings shared with Middle East Eye by current and former US officials.

The firm, Safe Reach Solutions, or SRS, says it is actively looking for “Humanitarian Liaison Officers” who will “serve as vital connectors between our operational teams and the broader humanitarian community,” according to one job description.

Another position on offer a week ago but has since closed is for a “Team Deputy/Manager” to support “day-to-day management, planning, and mission execution”.

A liaison officer position appears to be analytically focused. It says that hires will “advise on best practices for engaging with affected populations, local authorities, and community-based organizations” while monitoring developments that could impact “operational posture”.

The team deputy position is geared towards recruits with a background in operations. One of the requirements is “field experience in the Middle East, especially in conflict-affected or post-crisis settings”.

The positions want applicants with at least seven years of experience. They require applicants to be US citizens and say fluency in Arabic is preferred. 

Ironically, SRS is seeking people with UN experience, but the plan to take over aid distribution seeks to supplant the United Nations, which is already capable of delivering aid in Gaza. “These mid- to senior-career professionals will help bridge communication, coordination, and trust with NGOs, international agencies, and UN bodies operating in complex environments.”

Demand for the positions appears to be high. According to LinkedIn, more than 100 people applied for the humanitarian liaison officer position within two weeks.

The team deputy position also drew comments from interested users directed to “Ali Ali,” SRS’s recruiting consultant. “Hi Ali I worked in Gaza last summer with the US army. I was in charge of the humanitarian aid delivery through the trident pier. Please reach out to me at your best convenience to talk more,” a LinkedIn user wrote.

The former Biden administration floated a costly pier project to bring aid into the Gaza Strip last year, but it was widely considered a failure.

American private military contractors have already started arriving in Israel, according to photos shared on social media of khaki-clad and bearded men at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. MEE couldn’t independently verify the photos. 

Who is Phil Reilly and his firm SRS?

Keep reading