As a very loud group of U.S. lawmakers rallies for Ukraine funding to be cut off and claims the country could achieve peace if only its Western partners would stop helping, there’s someone who’d like a word with them.
He’s no armchair warrior or TV pundit—he spent more than three months in Russian captivity and just as much time before that watching battlefield horrors unfold on the ground.
“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,” 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, told The Daily Beast in an interview.
Drueke, who was captured near Kharkiv in June along with fellow vet Andy Huynh as the two served on a Ukrainian task force, says that even if he can’t physically go back to Ukraine to help on the frontline (“My mama won’t let me,” he said), he will do “anything” he can to help them win.
“The biggest problem is that Russia has really amped up their munitions production... They’re working on it like we did during WWII. It’s constant. And we’re not doing that for Ukraine. So, Ukraine is going to win this fight as long as they have the tools to do it. We’re just not giving them enough tools,” Drueke said. “They need tanks, they need artillery, they need planes, they need shells.”
Alex Drueke and Andy Huynh being honored at a welcome home party hosted by Ukrainians living in Alabama.
Photos courtesy of Dianna Shaw
His warning is a timely one: A group of Republican lawmakers signed on to a resolution earlier this month calling for Ukraine to be choked off from all future humanitarian and military aid—at a time when Russia is expected to unleash a renewed large-scale offensive.
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 (R-CO) claimed this week that an air raid siren that sounded during President Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv was nothing more than “propaganda.”
To claims like this, Drueke says: “I would say let me come up to D.C. and meet with you and I’ll tell you what’s really happening.”
He saw firsthand the cynical ploys Russia’s military has been using to try and convince the rest of the world the war is somehow justified.
“Even while we were in prison in Donetsk, they were actively firing artillery out of the residential areas near our prison so that the Ukrainians couldn’t respond, because then it looks like they’re bombing residential areas,” he said.
“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.”
‘Idiot’ captives
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.
He was left with nerve damage in his hands from the “24 hours of pure torture” that preceded his release.
“They had bound our hands with packing tape and then locked us together in a stress position to where it spread, and my hands swelled horribly and it caused a lot of nerve damage,” he said, adding that he was also having some heart issues.
“And we’re not sure if that’s just anxiety or if it’s ‘cause they also electrocuted me four times with a car battery.”
“ I knew I was potentially less than a second away from death.”
After enduring brutal interrogations and beatings in Russia, likely at the hands of Russian military intelligence, he says, he and Huynh were moved to a “black site” before finally ending up in a prison in occupied Donetsk.
“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.
That one, off-hand remark would save them.
From there, their Russian captors engaged in a bungling propaganda effort to at once undermine Ukraine and stoke panic in the U.S. about the prospect of Drueke and Huynh facing execution, a move apparently intended to force Western leaders to recognize Russia’s puppet republics in eastern Ukraine.
They forced Drueke and Huynh to reach out to the “silliest levels of the [U.S.] government” to plead for help, he said.
“I think one they made Andy call was the head of LLC business licensing for Alabama. And she said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you, I’m going to pray for you.’”
“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.
“They told me, ‘We can boil your legs.’ And I thought, well how? Do you have a large galvanized tub? I haven’t seen it. Is it going to be preheated? Am I going to be heated up in it?”
Having fellow captives from the West to talk to in the same prison helped keep all their spirits up, he said, despite the “miserable and boring” time in captivity.
“We found that humor was our best weapon in that situation. And man there’s graveyard humor, and then there’s what we were doing, and it’s way below graveyard humor… but it kept us laughing.”
Alex Drueke and Andy Huynh at the Ukraine House in Washington, D.C. last November.
Photos courtesy of Dianna Shaw
Some of the other prisoners passed the time by fantasizing about food, he recalled.
“The other guys would come up with like ‘What if we stuffed cheese in a chicken nugget? Would you like a hamburger pizza or a pizza hamburger?’ They were always talking about food. … During our hour of outside time they’d just yell over the walls all this random food stuff,” 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.”
Breaking point
Drueke, a U.S. Army veteran, served his first tour in Kuwait and his second in Baghdad.
When he saw what was happening in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion last spring, he went there on his own and then signed a contract with the Ukrainian military to serve in a unit made up of foreign fighters.
“I saw the horrible things that the Russians were doing to these innocent people that hadn’t provoked it in any way, and I said I have to do something about it. I have training, I have experience, I can be of value to these people. I have to do something,” he said.
He never expected he’d wind up a prisoner in the darkest depths of the twisted “Russian world” the Kremlin hopes to foist on Ukraine.
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.”
“We had started talking about, like, hey what’s your limit? How long can you go through this before you commit suicide?”
Drueke said he’d been bracing for an official indictment from Russian proxy authorities in Donetsk when things took a sudden turn. The Kremlin-backed authorities there had already orchestrated a hasty sham trial to sentence some of Drueke’s fellow Western captives to death.
“There’s no way they’re letting us go.”
So when Drueke says he and others were abruptly moved out of the prison and taken to a Russian airstrip, his first thought was not necessarily a good one.
“All of us were thinking, either we’re moving prisons, we’re being exchanged, or this is mass execution,” he said.
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.
“Are they doing a final health check before they kill us? Is my blood pressure okay to be shot in the face?” Drueke recalled thinking. “And then when we got on the plane, we said, ‘Well they’re obviously just going to shoot us out of the air once we take off.’ There’s no way they’re letting us go.”
“It wasn’t until we landed in Riyadh that we were like, ‘Huh, we might actually be getting released,’” he said.
Aftermath
With Russian authorities having spent weeks taunting the West with the prospect of a public execution for the foreign prisoners, Drueke’s release was almost just as unexpected to the rest of the world as it was to him.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the men’s Sept. 21 release was the result of painstaking, lengthy negotiations with help from Turkey and Saudi Arabia. In addition to Drueke and Huynh, the prisoner swap also saw eight other foreigners freed, along with 215 Ukrainians, most of whom had taken part in Mariupol’s brutal last stand against Russia. Russia, in return, got 55 prisoners back, including Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk.
Drueke says he’s “living one day at a time” now that he’s home with family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and pouring all of his energy into helping Ukraine from afar. His main focus is to “get the message out that other people need to support Ukraine.”
Alex Drueke is seen with his 89-year-old grandmother over the Christmas holidays.
Photos courtesy of Dianna Shaw
“Number one, keep contacting your representatives, it does make a difference. … If we keep hounding our representatives about Ukraine and say yes, we need to give them money and weapons and everything they need to win this, if there’s a large enough effort it’s going to make a difference and it will help,” he said.
And for those looking to make donations to Ukrainians now enduring an entire year of Russian attacks, Drueke said, the United 24 fundraising platform allows you to decide exactly how your money will be spent.
“You get to say here’s my 100 bucks and here’s where I want it to go,” Drueke said. The Ukraine Defense Fund, he said, is also “doing some really good things” to get equipment to those on the frontline.
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