Stephen “Elvis” Pressley has been fighting in Ukraine since March, arriving just weeks after Russia invaded. He’s a strong believer in protecting the lives of the innocent, and across his months living in the country he has become enamoured with Ukrainian hospitality, nationalism and pride.
But the 27-year-old Californian has also become disillusioned with the way the army is run, saying the Soviet-era style of management was harming soldiers.
“I knew there was corruption coming to Ukraine as an ex-Soviet bloc country, but I just didn’t understand how deep the rabbit hole went,” he said.
Crikey has spoken separately to three military specialists from the UK and the US who each allege the armies are supplied with outdated weapons, raising concerns about the efficacy of Ukraine’s military — and how NATO and allied donations are being used. Similar concerns were raised by two other veterans Crikey spoke to in May.
A war of attrition
Pressley has been on the frontline for much of his time in Ukraine, working within a specialist weapons detachment of the International Legions. The former specialist E-4 in the US Army (the highest rank for junior enlisted recruits) said he was recruited while abroad but couldn’t reveal whom by due to a non-disclosure agreement.
He said mismanagement almost lost him his life. While fighting near the Azov chemical plant in Severodonetsk on June 10, he was in a building that came under artillery fire by Russians.
“I asked for clearance for fire and they told me to stand down. They said it would give away our position … this is while we’re taking artillery, small arms fire and a T-90 [tank] just levelled half the building,” he told Crikey via video chat.
“They do quantity over quality, which is not the Western way. We’re trained in small unit tactics, whereas the Russians will just throw hundreds of people in an area and they don’t give a shit if they live or die.”
Two weeks ago, Ukraine conceded the city to Russia.
Pressley has a US flag signed with the names of soldiers he meets — a tradition in Western warfare. Many of those who signed have lost their lives. Pressley struggled to talk about the fallen: “I pray to God every day … that this isn’t going to be a war of attrition … because I don’t think the West and the rest of the world are really ready to see and hear the true number [of deaths].”
While Pressley said he felt comfortable with many of the arms he was provided on the frontline — armed personally with a machine gun while his team had NATO anti-tank rockets — a huge concern was getting medical help to the frontline.
“There’s not enough painkillers for guys that are bleeding out and badly wounded. You have to pretty much suffer for hours and hours and hours until [medical personnel] can arrive,” he said.
“A lot of guys have been dying from sepsis, which is completely preventable.”
Pressley said he’s fought in Afghanistan and that the warfare in Ukraine was more brutal as soldiers fought directly with soldiers in urban fighting and trench warfare.
“This is way more intense, there’s no comparison — we don’t have air superiority, the logistics suck. We have to pretty much improvise, adapt and overcome in every situation we’re thrown into and the bureaucracy and the rear just don’t help — it makes it three times harder.”
NATO tanks missing from training bases
Both dual US-UK citizen Todd Chamberlain and UK citizen Mike Perkins said they were recruited by contacts of the Ukrainian Army to train Ukrainian soldiers. Chamberlain said he was given the title of major, while Perkins was his first lieutenant. Crikey first met Perkins at Europe’s large border crossing in Medyka, Poland, while on assignment covering the Ukrainian refugee crisis in April and has sighted Chamberlain’s passport.
A letter sighted by Crikey, reportedly written by members of the Ukrainian Army, asks border staff to allow Perkins and Chamberlain to cross into Ukraine. It’s stamped with the logo of a Ukrainian humanitarian organisation, though both Perkins and Chamberlain said this was to allow them to present as humanitarian workers to avoid detection by undercover Russian agents.
Chamberlain, who has formally been involved in the UK military and has since worked as a tank operator and mechanic, said he was contacted after commenting on a post in a Ukranian aid support Facebook group with details about armoured equipment. He said he checked the person’s passport and was put in contact with a UK resident who he understood to be the brigadier general of the Ukrainian Army with connections to the Ukrainian embassy. Crikey could not independently verify this contact’s identity.
“He basically recruited me to go over initially to train the Ukrainian military on the operation of these different platforms,” Perkins said, adding that this included being in command of equipment, organising a centralised staging point for it, determining where equipment has to go and when, and training soldiers on its use.
The UK has donated a range of military equipment, including 120 armoured vehicles, anti-tank missiles, thousands of night-vision devices and dozens of heavy-lift UAV systems to provide logistical support to isolated forces. In recent weeks, Britain pledged short-range Brimstone 1 missiles, Mastiff armoured patrol vehicles, Malloy T150 heavy-lift drones, Starstreak missiles and the Stormer HVM air defence system.
A letter written by Chamberlain stated that the pair were to travel to Ukraine to select and train five to 10 soldiers who spoke English and Ukrainian to train in driving armoured vehicles, including the Russian-built T-72 vehicles, before then going on to train other soldiers. Chamberlain planned to stay until July 25 and Perkins until July 8.
They had hoped to visit former British soldier Josh Griffiths, who was targeted in a Russian mortar attack and was being treated in a Kyiv hospital. Instead, they said they were transported directly to a secret military base on the outskirts of Kyiv upon their arrival on June 24, meeting with Ukrainian commanders who tested their knowledge of equipment.
“This military base where we were taken is supposed to be the most secret military base in Ukraine. But Ukraine can’t do secrets,” Chamberlain said, adding soldiers were permitted to bring women onto base after a night out, and it wasn’t uncommon to see the soldiers’ families, including young children, visiting.
They soon learned none of the equipment with which they were supposed to be training soldiers had arrived. They left within a week at a large personal financial cost.
Key equipment ‘locked in warehouses’
Perkins said the disorganisation was so bad that “Ukrainians [couldn’t] even get the simple thing of toilet roll into an accommodation block”. He said they weren’t initially given uniforms, there were no secure coms, night vision or thermal imaging.
“A lot of this stuff has gone over to Ukraine — however, it’s been stored in a warehouse and the quartermaster will not issue it out, in case it gets lost or damaged because he’s been told that he would then have to pay out of his own pocket to replace it,” Perkins said. He added that while those on the frontline were equipped, weaponry was taken off soldiers once they left — even in areas targeted by grenades and RPGs.
“People are dying because they haven’t got access to this equipment,” he said.
An additional issue he witnessed was the number of separate armies fighting for Ukraine without adequate communication systems, meaning those on the same side were occasionally engaged in warfare. Perkins, who is a paramedic, said he brought his own medical equipment with him, though locations lacked key items, such as defibrillators.
All three men are concerned that by the time the war ends there’ll be nothing left of Ukraine as cities are flattened across the country.
Michael Shoebridge, director of defence, strategy and national security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, tells Crikey that chaos in war was to be expected and that individual soldiers don’t often have a clear picture of command and organisation. But he added that the war had also moved from its initial phase of a war of movement into one of attrition.
“This is a much more grinding, longer-term kind of conflict, which plays to the Russian military’s strengths,” he said.
“The Ukrainians are dependent on [Australia], NATO and other external materials support, and the production systems across NATO aren’t able to sustain wartime production. There are some limitations in the supplies that are getting to the Ukrainians.”
He said this created pressures for NATO about new forms of support, especially as infrastructure is destroyed across the country, making it harder for Ukraine to wage war. But the Ukrainian military had done a “remarkable” job in reinventing itself, he added, since the annexing of Crimea in 2014.
Despite the devastation, Pressley said he planned to “hang up his boots” in Ukraine if he survives the war. He, like many US veterans, lived on the streets in his home country, but said he was offered a number of jobs by Ukrainian locals.
“People don’t know what kind of courageous and brave men and women have died out here and the amazing things that I’ve seen in the sheer face of pure evil, knowing they were not going to walk away,” he said.
“I always say the best people in society are killed in war.”
