Two American dead, two captured and one missing in Ukraine

There is a good article in Rolling Stone that recounts the American and other foreign fighter losses in Ukraine. Recommend reading the whole article: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/stephen-zabielski-russia-ukraine-conflict-1371094/

To summarize the losses:

  1. Two American’s have been killed.
    1. Willy Joseph Concel, Jr., 22, died in late April. He was an ex-Marine from New York/Tennessee with no combat experience.
    2. Stephen D. Zabielski, 52, died 15 May 2022. From New York/Florida. Served in the Gulf War (1991) with 101st Airborne Division.
  2. “Three” other western foreigners have been killed in combat.
    1. Ronald Vogelaar, 55, Dutch, killed by shelling on May 4 and buried in Kharkov.
    2. Bjorn Benamin Clavis, German.
    3. Wilried Blerio, 32, France.
    4. A humanitarian volunteer from Australia.
  3. Two Americans have been captured:
    1. Alexander John-Robert Drueke, 39, from Tuscaloosa Alabama. Former staff-sergeant, U.S. Army, served two tours in Iraq.
    2. Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, from Hartselle, Alabama. Ex-Marine with four years of service but no combat experience.
  4. Three foreign fighters have been captured in Mariupol by the DPR and sentenced to death.
    1. Aiden Aslin, 28, English
    2. Shaun Pinner, 46, English
    3. Saaudun Brahim, 21, Moroccan (he is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone article).
  5. One American is missing:
    1. Grady Kurpasi, 49, a retired Marine captain from Wilmington, NC. Three tours Iraq.
  6. The Ukrainians claim the International Legion has as many as twenty thousand fighters from over fifty countries.
    1. Russia is claiming 6,956 “foreign mercenaries” from 64 countries (see Day 117 post below).

Oh, and the Kremlin press secretary is saying that the Geneva conventions do not apply to the two captured Americans.

 

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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