Meet the US veteran that joined Ukraine but defected to Russia

Russia was able to etch out a big propaganda win in March when Russian media reports revealed the identity of a former American soldier who had joined Ukraine to fight against Vladimir Putin's invasion and ended up spying on his comrades and defecting to the other side.

John McIntyre served two years in the American military according to Newsweek’s Ellie Cook and joined Ukraine’s International Legion before switching to the Russian side in February 2023.

Photo by Twitter @LvivTyler

When asked in an interview with Russia Today’s Murad Gazdiev why he had joined Russia, McIntyre said he was a communist and had always planned to betray Ukraine. 

Photo by Twitter @MuradGazdiev

"It's the reason I came to Ukraine in the first place," McIntyre told Gazdiev. "I'm a communist, I'm an anti-fascist, and we have to fight fascism everywhere."

In a deep southern accent, McIntyre explained his original plan was to gather as much information as he could about Ukrainian forces before defecting to Russia. 

"When I came to Ukraine, I knew that I would try to get as much information as I could, anything that would be helpful, and defect across lines," the former soldier said.

Russia Today claimed that McIntyre had served in Ukraine since March 2022, fighting for both the Ukrainian Foreign Legion and the country’s Carpathian Sich battalion.

McIntyre told Gazdiev that he had planned to infiltrate the Azov Battalion before defecting but was forced to flee after he said he was “compromised.”

McIntyre said he fled to Odesa where he was able to contact his mother who provided him with $300 dollars, money he used to get out of Ukraine to Chișinău, Moldova. 

“From Chișinău, once I had made contact and everything and got my visa, I went to uh, Istanbul and then to Moscow,” the defector said. 

Unfortunately, Russia Today explained that McIntrye brought a wealth of information with him, which was “already being used by the Russian military and law enforcement.”

When asked what he would say to the people he served with during his year in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, McIntyre said: “All's fair in love and war."

The former Ukrainian soldier went on to say with a smirk that “it is what it is, spies exist you know… and I’m a spy. Mission accomplished.”

Throughout the report, McIntyre referred to many of the propaganda points that had become familiar with the stories Putin used to sway the Russian public's opinion of the conflict. 

McIntyre called the Ukrainians he fought beside Nazis and spoke about the country's war crimes, though no supporting evidence is provided for those claims in the report and the defector's comments should be taken with a grain of salt. Russia Today is, of course, controlled by the Russian state. 

Newsweek’s Ellie Cook noted that little was known about John McIntyre’s history at the time, though she noted we could infer from the video that he was probably an American and that he was in Moscow when the Russia Today report was filmed. 

Russia Today is a Kremlin-backed media outlet and was banned in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the European Union in March 2022, shortly after Putin’s invasion.