APR news has covered the war between Ukraine and Russia a lot. When President Joe Biden said, ‘We will walk softly and carry a big javelin,’ he was paraphrasing Teddy Roosevelt and his saying about carrying ‘a big stick.’ Biden was also giving a nod to the Lockheed Martin plant in Troy, that Alabama factory makes the shoulder fired anti-tank missiles. Listeners to APR notebook also heard stories from Yaryna Zhurba of Huntsville. She co-founded the company Ukrainianpuzzles. That business makes jigsaw puzzles depicting cultural heritage sites in Ukraine destroyed by Russia in the war. And then there's the perspective of Alex Drueke. The Tuscaloosa military veteran, made international news when he volunteered to fight for the Ukrainian army. He spent over 100 days as a POW in the hands of Russian forces. In the hours leading up to his freedom through a prisoner swap, he said he thought he was going to die. Alex Drueke joins me next on APR Notebook.
PAT DUGGINS—Alex Drueke, thank you so much for talking to me.
ALEX DRUEKE-- Thank you, Pat.
PAT—Now, driving up to your home, it was easy to spot because you've got the Ukrainian flag outside. But as I was coming in, it'sthe, it's the door sign talking about the American Revolutionary War descendant thing that I'd like to start with.
DRUEKE—Sure.
PAT—Can you talk about that? Would you please?
DRUEKE-- My mother is very much into genealogy. She's a D-A-R member, Daughters of the American Revolution. But, she's traced our family coming back to this or coming to America around like 1630 something, and so she's the one that discovered that we are actually descendants of revolutionary patriots. She can trace the lineage.
PAT—A spy, I hear was one of them.
DRUEKE-- Yeah, yeah. He was.
PAT—So, your career in the US military, I understand, began with the attack during 911 was, was there a moment regarding Ukraine, the Russian invasion, where you said, okay, no longer on the sidelines. I'm going there.
DRUEKE-- Yeah, um, you know, when it happened-- I saw it and, and really it was, I mean, all of it was horrible. And, I realized they were about start receiving NATO weapons, and for that, you need NATO tactics and NATO doctrine. But really it was watching that young man play the piano in a hotel in Kyiv, while it was getting bombed. And I'm a pianist. I've played piano since I was three years old. I can't now from the nerve damage from captivity. But, yeah, I don't know something that was really the poignant moment for me to go that, you know this is wrong and I have to do something.
PAT-- Did you tell your family?
DRUEKE-- I eventually, I did. You know, I had to order a few pieces of gear. I didn't like the body armor I had at the time and a couple other things. So, it took me a couple weeks before, before I was ready to go, and then i i finally got up the courage and I told my family. And, you know, I expected some resistance, and I expected a lot of questions, but really the response I mostly got was, we're surprised. You're not there already. You know this, this is what you do. We expect you to be there doing it.
PAT-- What did the Ukrainians say? I mean, I could, I could see, on the one hand, they're like, Wow, we could use all the help we can get, especially somebody with your background. But also, I could see them saying, ‘you want to do what?’ What was it?
DRUEKE-- Um, it was, it was amazing. I had, I didn't really know what to expect when I showed up. I mean, I'm a student of history, and so I was kind of familiar with the history of Ukraine, but I didn't really know much about the culture or the people and and part of me did expect somewhat of a, you know, backwards post Soviet, horrible gray buildings everywhere and just mean people, but I was, I was extremely impressed. I mean, the cities are modern, European, beautiful, the food is delicious, the countryside is gorgeous, and the people were incredible. They are the most kind, most generous people I've ever met. They were able to retain humor even in the face of this horrible situation.
PAT-- What was the first word of Ukrainian that you picked up?
DRUEKE-- I'm not Ukrainian. I don't have Ukrainian heritage. You know, I had, I had no connections to Ukraine, but I figured I would need to know some words. So I made myself a little cheat sheet for that nine flight. Like nine hour flight over the very first time, but almost all of it was tactical stuff. You know, it was grenade, tank, left, right, 123, you know, thought the things I thought would be useful in combat, and so I studied that the entire flight. And the breakthrough for me, because you have to learn an entire new alphabet. You know, the Cyrillic alphabet is very different. And, the breakthrough for me, I was sitting on a patio. I was traveling with a small group of guys. We were waiting to go to our next location, and sitting on the patio, and I looked across the street, and there was a sign that to me and Latin characters. It looked almost like hot topic, which, you know, is a like, rock style clothes from the 90s, essentially, you know, they used to be in malls and stuff. And I looked at it, and I finally sounded it out, and it said, ‘нотаріус.’ And, I realized that was a notary, and that's why I'd seen it all in almost every single corner in every single city because the Soviet holdover of needing stamps for everything. But that was my breakthrough to realize hot topic was ‘нотаріус.’which was a notary. Since then, I've been working off and on on my Ukrainian and I'm pretty good. I can get by, but I still rely heavily on Google Translate when I'm over.
PAT-- Yeah, I read an earlier interview that you did where you said that that you were actually pretty amazed at the diversity of the international volunteers who had shown up to help Ukraine. Can you talk about that?
DRUEKE-- Very much? Was, I mean, it was, it was from almost every country you can imagine, Germany and Poland and France and Canada, the UK, America, a ton of South Americans from various countries down there. I mean, it was, um, it was really impressive to see, you know, some guys had combat experience. Some had just military experience. Some had law enforcement and some had had no experience at all. They just like all of us, or the, you know, the ones of us that were there for the right reasons. We we all just knew this was the right thing to do.
PAT—And then there's Andy Huynh.
DRUEKE-- There is Andy.
PAT—So, there's a whole bunch of people from different countries, and you run into another Alabamian. What was that like?
DRUEKE-- Initially, we were in, we were in the same platoon, but we were in separate, separate squads, and so we, we didn't really have a lot of contact at first, but he was in that small group that that broke off, and we started getting to know each other and became friends and started working together. He's a former Marine, and I'm former Army. And but he's, he's 13 years younger than me, and he never had a combat deployment. And so, you know, I kind of, I loved being a platoon sergeant in the Army. It was my favorite thing to do, and so I kind of took him under my wing, like he was my soldier, and got to be platoon sergeant again. It, it really didn't even come up much that we were both from Alabama, until we got captured, and then the Russians they, they swore that because we were we were both from Alabama. We were both over there. We both had primary military experience that Alabama must be the CIA training headquarters Mecca, that every, every CIA operative had to be trained in Alabama. And we're like no, and we didn't even know each other, like we didn't come over together. You're making connections that don't exist. But they, they so badly wanted us to be CIA that they they were willing to, they were eager to beat those lies into us and try and get us to say that we were CIA and we had been trained in Alabama.
PAT-- So prior to your capture, I understand you were what on a reconnaissance mission to find Russian artillery and what was Kharkiv. I think it was?
DRUEKE-- Right, yeah.
PAT-- And okay, so what? What led to that?
DRUEKE-- It was primarily because of a delay. We, we were expecting some, some certain weapons in the morning, and it took an extra about two or three hours for them to actually get delivered to us. And so we were very late heading out, and by the time we arrived at our staging area to then, you know, hike a couple kilometers through the woods and do our recon mission. By the time we got there, the firefight was already right on top of us. You know, a small arms fire. There was mortars, artillery. We could hear Bradley's and other other armored vehicles firing. We spent about 10 hours overall, well, about 12 overall, evading the enemy drones, tripwires, landmines, mortar and artillery regular coming in Russian patrols all around. And eventually we got to the village that we thought had been providing us the intelligence to go out on these missions. And it turns out the Russians had already taken that village. So there they got us in a pincher movement and captured us.
PAT-- When they found out you were Americans. Did that help or not? Or what do you think?
DRUEKE-- Overall, it did. I. Yeah, you know, I mean, some, some of it was worse, because, you know, they wanted us be CIA and all that kind of stuff.
PAT-- Define that for the non-military folk out there.
DRUEKE--They wanted us to be US intelligence that we had been sent by the US government, because they wanted to say the US government was directly involved, but honestly, we would be dead if we weren't American. I mean, we were put down on our knees, blindfolded guns, put to our heads multiple times. And really, I think it was as best we can figure. We think it was the platoon leader of that, that group that captured us, young man, very intelligent, spoke pretty decent English. Seemed college educated, so we thought he was the platoon leader. I really do think that he stepped in to the higher ups that really wanted us dead to say, ‘hey guys, these are Americans. They're valuable. We can get something for them.’ If it wasn't for him, I'm pretty sure we'd be dead.
PAT—So, I've heard there was time on a truck with everyone's, you know, head bagged, and then confinement and cells, and you get chicken and egg. How did, how did that? How did that go?
DRUEKE-- Yeah, then, I mean, it was a whole series of bags on your heads and fake assassination, you know, the mock execution thing, and beatings and beatings, beatings. And eventually, we were taken to a what appeared to be a semi permanent POW camp. Had several, several tents, green military tents, and double fences with concertina wire on top and rotating guards and everything. And in the in the night, I was the first night I was forced to stand in one position the entire night, probably about 18 hours altogether, with random beatings and a young, very, very large young man came up to me, and I was forced to keep my head down, looking at the ground, but he lifted my chin up, looked me right in the eye, said, Welcome to Russia, and then punched me as hard as he could in the gut. And I was like, Yeah, I think, I think we're in Russia now.
PAT-- I'm not gonna pretend for a second that I know or even can imagine what you went through. But was it tougher taking the mistreatment yourself or hearing it happen to a comrade?
DRUEKE- It was, it was tough for knowing that Andy was going through these things for sure, because, like I said, I I had accepted him as my soldier, and I'd taken him under my wing. And as soon as we got to that POW camp, they separated us. We were separate for we were in the same locations, but had no contact with each other whatsoever for about the first half of the experience. But I think it was the it was the second night they'd actually let me go to sleep there at the POW camp. And about two three in the morning, two Russians woke me up, got me out of my rack, put a bag on my head, led me across the compound, forced me down to my knees and and this man just beat me for probably an hour. There were no questions. It wasn't an interrogation that he didn't say a word. He just beat me, and I was I had my hands taped at that time and a plastic bag on my head so I can't see when the punches are coming. I can't defend myself. I can't fight back. And he was really, really good at hitting ribs and kidneys. He broke four of my ribs. He was a professional. He knew what he was doing, but I didn't cry out once. The only time I cried out in the whole experience was when I got electrocuted. But I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. I didn't want to let them know that they were hurting me, you know, I didn't want to let them know where hurt me. But I could hear in the tent next to me Andy getting beaten because he was crying out a little bit, and I was like, it doesn't matter that I can't fight for myself. I can't fight for him. And there were so many times throughout this experience that, you know, something would happen and I'd go, oh man, they killed Andy, and I failed on my mission, like, Andy's dead. So that, yeah, that was that was a lot harder than putting up with it myself.
PAT—So, it was 100 days, I hear?
DRUEKE—105.
PAT—105…105. And there was an effort underway for a prisoner exchange, but I would assume that you didn't know anything about that was going on.
DRUEKE— Absolutely not. No At the black site while they were trying to figure out what they were going to do with us. They started this system of about every three evenings or so, of having us separately make force phone calls home to the United States, trying to make contact with the US government and some so much of it was so, so ridiculous. They made Andy call the secretary of the Head of Business LLC, licensing for the state of Alabama, because it was government, yeah. And then eventually they, it's eventually one of the calls. As I made, made contact with the State Department, and that became our, our one sole contact. From that point on, we were POWs. There were some political prisoners there, but we stayed in that that cell for hours, and we didn't know what was happening. And some of those guys spoke Russian, so they started talking to the guards, and the guard essentially said, I don't know. You know, maybe you're moving prisons, maybe you're getting exchanged, maybe you're being executed. And so we were like, All right, so we started asking for cigarettes, and the guards and trustees started passing them out like candy. And we said this, this isn't good. They're being way too generous. They are going to kill us. This is a mass execution. So eventually, they finally, finally, one by one, they took us out of that, that cell. They put plastic bags on our plastic bags on our heads, and marshes cost the compound, I could see underneath this little, little gap around my chin of the plastic bag that they had handed us off to Russian military personnel, I could see their camouflage pants. They they took, took us and used packing tape, which, you know, duct tape and some other tape has some give to it. Packing tape does not and they took packing tape and tightly wrapped it around our our wrists, and tightly wrapped it around the plastic bags that was on our heads make sure we couldn't, couldn't pull it off. It was, you know, over our eyes, essentially. And long story short, we overnight. I mean, it was probably, probably somewhere around 14 hours altogether. We were locked together in these horrible stress positions and in the back of a military truck just driving a route. And finally, it was the only time that Andy's a praying man, and I'm not, but you know, it was the only time that that that those who prayed for death to come and those who didn't asked for death to come. It was, it was so incredibly painful that I said to myself, I don't even care if it is an exchange. I don't care if we're being released. Kill me now. This has to end it was bad. But then eventually, they finally, they changed the route. They stopped at a location and took us into a building. Finally cut the tape off of our wrists and our eyes, and we were in what we assume is a small International Airport in Rostov-on-Don. And, it had been shut down for us, and there were a lot of Russian guards there, and there were Middle Eastern personnel in lab coats, doctor's coats, and they brought us up one by one, and Wanted next to Ken information and checked our blood pressure. And I thought, do you really need to know if I have high blood pressure before you shoot me in the face? I understand you need next to Ken so you can call and say, Hey, we shot your son in the face, but not blood pressure. But I looked at the paperwork and saw the Saudi Arabian flag. And I said, Well, these are Saudi Arabian people, like, why are they involved? And they, they flew us to Riyadh. But you know, I mean, when they said you're getting released, like, we all stared each other, wide eyed and opened mouth, but we still didn't quite believe it. We said, I mean, they said we're flying to Riyadh, but we're probably flying to Siberia, or we're flying to some mass execution site. You know, we're going into Russia. Whatever's happening, we're going into Russia. But we, we finally landed in Riyadh, and they did the little photo op, dog and pony show, and then we each got sent to our respective consulates or ambassadors. And Ambassador Bridget was there and said, ‘guys, you're you're getting released, you're going home.’ And that was the first time that I thought, man, we, we might be getting released. She said, Do you want to call your families? Said, Of course I do. So I gave her mom's number and she dialed it and introduced herself, then handed me the phone. I said, ‘Hi mama.’ And she said, ‘What are you doing in Saudi Arabia?’ And I said, ‘Well, I'm free.’ She said, You're what? I said I’m free. She said, ‘free?’ It was like the word didn't even make sense to her.
PAT -- When Andy got back, he said, the first thing that he wanted was spaghetti. How about you?
DRUEKE—I didn't really know we had been. On such a horrible diet, that I knew I couldn't go.My favorite food on Earth is beef, just whatever form beef, but I knew I couldn't step right back into that. You know, I wanted to be, because I'd lost the good bacteria in my stomach so many times, and I've been essentially on a soft food diet. It was moldy bread and oatmeal. For the most part. I wanted to be really careful and ease back into things. So I had a lot of, lot of bland stuff, a lot of soft stuff first, and then eventually felt, felt like I could be, you know, eating more normal. So one evening, I said, Well, I'm gonna have some popcorn chicken. I'm just gonna put popcorn chicken in the oven and had that and was snacking on that and watching TV, and I bit into a piece of chicken on my right side, and the entire left side of my jaw shattered. We really think my doctors and my dentist and me, we really think that it was the electricity just the way I clenched up and tightened up, especially on that side. We think it caused a bunch of airline fractures that once I started eating solid, solid food, they just completely shattered. So I had to, I had to go through pretty extensive surgery. I've got a titanium plate and a bone graft in there. So yeah, I was, I was glad that I had kind of eased back into into eating food.
PAT-- Now that it's over,and I guess is a crazy thing to ask, but any regrets for going?
DRUEKE--No regrets, none at all. I do it all over again. I do it differently. We didn't realize how much we could troll the Russians, you know? I mean, we we did our fair share, but looking back like we could have done a lot more, and I would have loved to, but, but no regrets,
PAT-- As a someone with a military background and experience, can you kind of like talk about the way the Ukrainian military, Ukrainian military was when you were there, compared to where they are now?
DRUEKE-- Yeah, it's, um, it's incredible how they've how they've grown. I've gone back to Ukraine every single year since getting released. Yeah, yeah. I've gone back every single year. And like all together, I've been in country for about a year and a half, and I've already got my trip, my trip for this year, planned out, and it's been amazing to watch. You know? I mean, Ukraine had a a professional fighting force. I mean, technically, they've been fighting this war since 2014 with the invasion of Donbas and Crimea. But it's such a young country, you know, it just declared its independence in 91 and so there's a initially, there were a lot of holdovers from the Soviet Army still present within the military. You know, you could tell it was, there's no there's no sergeants, there was no NCO (enlisted or Non-Commissioned Officer) Corps. You know, the officers ran everything and everything needed a “27 stamps” to be approved. And, you know, there were a lot of issues. And so that's, that's why so many foreigners from NATO countries were showing up, myself included, was to teach them like, here's how you become an effective western style military. But what they've done with drones is mind blowing. My last trip there, I was there with a defense tech NGO, and we were going to conferences and exhibitions held by the Ukrainians for just specifically drone warfare and counter drone warfare. And from when I was showing up as in a recon unit, we're sending a Mavic up in the air and bringing it down to we've got drones. We have ground drones that have taken entire Russian positions, including POWs, without a single Ukrainian having to be on the battlefield in that fight, they're just controlling the ground drones, air drones are starting to involve AI technology to where, you know they don't need if the operator loses signal, because there's so much electronic warfare and jamming going on, if they lose signal, it doesn't matter, because the drone can control itself. It's it's just, it's mind blowing what they're doing. And right now, the Ukrainians all are the most battle hardened, battle tested, experienced fighting force on the planet. They are decades ahead of us in drone technology and and how modern wars are going to be fought for at least the next two decades, I guarantee you, and we, it would be incredibly stupid of us not to partner with Ukrainians, get them into NATO and have them teach us how wars are fought, because I guarantee you, Russia is teaching our enemies how these wars are fought. And. And if we have to go to a war with a peer adversary, we're toast. We don't know what we're doing.
PAT-- What would you like Americans to know about Ukraine that they think they know but they don't?
DRUEKE-- Oh, man, everything you know. It's I want to say again, how incredible the people are, so generous, so kind. There. They've adopted me. We have a pretty good, pretty good sized Ukrainian community in Birmingham and a fairly large one in Huntsville, and they've adopted us as family. We go to all their events that we can get, managed to attend. They're just, they're incredible, incredible people. And reiterate that that you we have so much to gain from partnering with Ukraine. It's, it's not just their military knowledge or their in their drone technology and things that, things that we need to stay current and, you know, have have a deterrent against bad actors. But there are countless economic opportunities. They're so rich in minerals and natural gas, it is proven by science, they have the healthiest soil on the planet, and so that's why they grow so much wheat and sunflowers and all that. So, I mean, they feed Africa. If Ukraine falls, Africa starves. So we have a lot of opportunities to partner with them for economic resources, you know, natural resources, the military knowledge, the culture. You know, there are so many, so many reasons that we need to get them into the EU we need to get them into NATO, and we need to partner with them, not Russia, for any economic deals.
PAT-- What would you like Washington to do about this current situation that you feel that they are not?
DRUEKE-- What we should have done in early 22 in all of 22 and in early 23 I guarantee you, if we had given Ukraine what it asked for and needed when it asked for it and needed it, this war would already be over, and they would have won. We would have won by the spring of 23 promise you, I don't ask. I demand that Washington stops dragging its feet. Stop doing this slow trickle of providing arms that are enough that Ukraine doesn't lose, but they aren't enough that Ukraine can win. You know, they are domestically producing about 80% of all of their own armaments, including drones and their own domestic cruise missiles right now, but they're a small country, and they didn't have much of an economy going into this. And of course, we're in the fifth year of the war now, and so the economy's hurting. The labor force is hurting because so many people are deported to the front line. They need the full support of NATO and especially the US, get them what they need. They will win this war, and then we can be partners with them in all the ways I described.
PAT—Alex Drueke, thank you so much for talking to me.
DRUEKE-- Thank you Pat, really enjoyed it.
PAT-- APR notebook is now available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. The student interns in the Alabama public radio newsroom are Matt Moran, Brooke Goodrich, Alex Schoenfeld, Vivian Lang, Alexis, Barone, Kedar Costa, Bella Steiart, Nicole DeJana, John Underwood, Josie Malave and Sarah Murph. I'm Pat Duggins. We'll see you next time on APR Notebook.
