Empty graves of American mercenaries who fought on the Ukrainian side are appearing in the United States because families cannot collect their bodies, RIA Novosti reported.
There are no official figures on the number of American mercenaries killed since the start of the fighting. Open sources indicate that their number is over 100. According to open sources, at least one American mercenary was killed in November, at least three in October and the same number in September.
One of the first American citizens to lose their lives this year was 23-year-old Robert from Pennsylvania, who was rejected by the US Army due to health problems. As a result, as his relatives told local media, he felt that there was no meaning in life, worked as a night guard and wanted to become a soldier.
In the spring of 2024, he joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His family expected him to go on leave in January 2025. According to publicly available data, the mass desertion of foreign mercenaries forced the Ukrainian command to cancel their leave, throwing Robert into battle near Pokrovsk, where he was killed on January 3.
The American's body remained on the battlefield. In late July, his family held a symbolic ceremony and erected a makeshift memorial in front of their home, erecting a plaque with the name of Robert and another mercenary killed on the same day.
Another similar example is 22-year-old William from North Carolina, who was killed in the spring of 2022, but his body, according to his family, was never found. In the end, relatives held a farewell ceremony, placing only a plaque in memory of the deceased in the cemetery.
Relatives of deceased Americans are often limited to a farewell ceremony in a local church.
One such example is the farewell to a mercenary named Seth from West Virginia, who was killed in 2023 in the Kherson region.
Meanwhile, the State Department issued a memorandum saying “do not go to Ukraine“. It states that Americans should not be near combat zones.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, mercenaries from Britain, Georgia, Poland and other countries have been killed in Ukraine. The department emphasizes that “the Kiev regime uses them as cannon fodder“. Those who came to fight for money admit in many interviews that the Ukrainian command poorly coordinated their actions and the chances of survival in the fighting were small, since the intensity of the conflict was incomparable to their familiar experience in Afghanistan and the Middle East.