Three days after the Russian invasion, Hannibal told me he was setting up a group of international military volunteers to fight for Ukraine.
His name is Hannibal? As in, famous Carthaginian General Hannibal? I mean is that his last name or something?
Hannibal — who asked that Rolling Stone not reveal his name because of security concerns —
Oh it’s his gay little callsign. Got it.
had been a U.S. Army infantry officer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He’d joined up in 2005 after graduating from Yale, done multiple deployments to Afghanistan, and after getting out of the military, he’d bounced around in a variety of communications roles.
I’m getting a weird sort of feeling here.
A burly middle-aged man who switched between enthusiastic appraisals of operas to technical analysis of high explosives midsentence, he’d also spent years in Ukraine, touring the front lines of fighting in Donbass about 10 times between June 2015 and August 2017 as a military-focused writer and analyst.
Wow, he sure is quite the renaissance man. Don’t tell me, in Afghanistan he was fighting against a secret Nazi Cabal. His mission was so top secret that there’s literally no evidence for it. That’s how you know it was super top secret.
Two days after calling to tell me of his plan, Hannibal had assembled a small team of battle-tested former elite combat officers.
Did he now. Elite combat officers? As opposed to elite enlisted men I suppose. I’ve never served in the military, but I don’t think I’d be opposed to having some experienced jarheads join me in Ukraine. But I guess officers will have to do.
Two days after that, I was standing with him and his crew in an old Soviet factory building on the outskirts of Lviv, in western Ukraine. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in its large empty rooms, thick dust clinging to their clothing as they planned a crash course in guerrilla warfare.
Sorry I’m a little confuzzled here. Why does he need to give the elite combat officers a crash course in guerilla warfare?
“The defender has the advantage of being able to choose where to fight,” he told more than three dozen Ukrainian men and women assembled before him. They were intensely nervous, filled with fear about the war on their doorstep. In a mix of puffy coats, camouflage jackets, old uniforms, and New York street fashion, they were a cross section of Ukraine’s Westward-looking middle class.
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Fucking. Kidding. Me.
First of all, it is entirely debatable whether or not the defender really has “the advantage of being able to choose where to fight.” After all, the entire point of an encirclement, which the Russians do constantly, is that you just starve out the defenders without a fight, and if they want to attack you they have to actually attack.
Encirclement at Mariupol.
Shit like “the defender gets to choose where to fight,” is exactly the sort of thing that someone with no actual combat experience would say. It’s possible that this was true in Afghanistan, where fights were usually ambushes as patrols, or at least often. But in real wars like, no, you have to be counter-attacking or you’ll just get starved out.
So we’ve got a guy with a extremely suspicious military record of having a four foot long cock while murdering dozens of terrorists while being a paratrooper for Democracy while getting his PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard or whatever, and he’s teaching a room full of aspirational Oven-Middle Class dipshits who have no fucking idea what they’re getting into. Not only that, but the things he’s teaching them are pretty much objectively false. But maybe I just misinterpreted what he said. I’m sure he’s –
Hannibal paused longer than the translator needed to convey his words, before adding: “You will choose your killing ground.”
Oh okay. No, he’s doubling down on this. Yeah these people are all dead if they actually see combat. Imagine a room full of BLM supporting pre-catladies going up against a professional army.
As tens of thousands of Russian soldiers poured into Ukraine at the end of February, Hannibal and his team had linked up with Ukrainian officials to help teach the average Ukrainian how to become effective partisan fighters. It was time to create a new “Lincoln Battalion,” as Hannibal called it half-jokingly, after the heavily romanticized but ultimately ineffective group of American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. “If you are very unlucky and alive at a moment in history,” Hannibal told me, “when your position in life and skill set mean that you can contribute usefully on the side of good in an immoral war, there’s really only one choice: to help try to end it.”
This is glorious. I hope we get more of this.
I had my doubts.
This propagandist appears to have at least half a brain. This is half a brain more than all of his colleagues combined.
Hannibal readily admitted he didn’t know how it was all going to work.
I’m sorry doesn’t this guy have a PhD from Yale or something? And isn’t he the veteran of 90 battles so hardcore the CIA had to keep them secret. I mean, even I could figure out some actual valid use for civilians during a war, although I’d probably just say “sign up for the actual army, not this LARPfest.”
“You and I both know if you get on a train to Kyiv, and you show up in Kyiv,” Hannibal told me, “there’ll be an AK for you, or a Molotov.”
A molotov? A fucking molotov? Molotov cocktails have not worked against tanks since the 60’s. If I know that, you’d sort of think that the guy who supposedly is this A-Team expert would know that.
These Aspirational Faggots are going to be spending time away from indoor plumbing for the first time in their lives. They’re going to need to cook food outside. And this Guy Who Once Got a Killstreak in Call of Duty is telling them that they might get a single molotov cocktail and he’s not really sure what they’re supposed to do next.
I didn’t know what to make of the small group of Americans Hannibal had enlisted to his cause. Due to ongoing security concerns, they will be identified by pseudonyms. For my generation, if you talk about a small team of soldiers of fortune that show up to help when no one else will, you immediately think of one thing. Therefore, these pseudonyms will be taken from one of the most popular television shows of the 1980s: The A-Team.
I’m almost going to feel sad for these people when they get slaughtered. Almost.
Faceman served two tours in Iraq and developed a subsequent career as an artist and actor, landing a few small but recognizable roles in popular TV series. When I first saw him, I assumed he was a burnout more familiar with getting baked on the couch than infantry tactics. I was surprised to learn he had been a decorated Marine officer. His latest project is recording a rock album on his farm in rural Michigan. He also claimed he had never smoked pot.
You’re all going to die and I’m going to enjoy it.
B.A., a former cavalry officer, also served in Iraq and conducted intelligence operations targeting insurgents. He’s now a novelist with several books under his belt. Despite the pseudonym, he’s a photographic negative of Mr. T.: laid-back, thoughtful, and anything but intimidating.
Murdock is a dead ringer for a spy, with the physique of an ultramarathoner, and the unflappable aura of a Zen master. He talked about having lived in France, so perhaps he’d been in the French Foreign Legion? But no. Murdock had no military experience. He said he was a serial entrepreneur, having started successful restaurants in Paris. Shortly before joining Hannibal’s team, he’d been on a trek in Nepal studying meditation. His now-cleared mind was coordinating logistics.
Is this satire? I thought you said this guy had an entire squad of highly decorated ex-US officers? We’re only at the fourth guy and we’re already getting into “no military experience,” territory. However different Afghanistan was from Ukraine, at least it’s something. I’m not sure I want a guy running logistics who “just knows meditation.”
Which actually brings up something that always really bothered me with the Reddit Dilation Force, and those similar to them. These faggots always talk about holding a gun. Like, they need truck drivers to you fucking dipshits. Then again, Ukraine has always had the meatbags even without the foreign Dilation Legions joining them. What they really needed was to go back in time 10 years and not be a completely corrupt shithole that had such an incompetent military that their airforce could be taken out on day 1.
Ukrainian Mig-29.
So: a chef, a novelist, an actor, and a Yalie.
They’re undeniably prepared for intense guerrilla warfare.
Two other English speakers joined the team to coordinate training efforts. One, who asked to be identified only as Stacy, was a serving Ukrainian military officer who had been on the front lines when the invasion began. An outgoing and energetic redhead, she described taking shelter in a bunker for days of Russian artillery barrages and airstrikes that, she said, were aimed at destroying her unit: “It was not fun.”
Getting shelled by Russian Artillery isn’t fun. Who knew? And yet, something tells me this is exactly what these dipshits need to hear.
The semicovert operation required a certain level of comfort with ambiguity, and the embodiment of that was the other English speaker: Mykyta. He had an impressive beard and dressed in “operator chic” — baseball cap, cargo pants, boots, parka, and lots of pouches — and no one could pin down any precise details about his role or background. But he could get things done.
Weapons, vehicles, food. Whatever. Mykyta nodded without expression, typed on his phone, and the problem was solved. Soon Hannibal’s team was standing on the roof of a Soviet-era factory in a crumbling industrial complex.
Maybe Mykyta can wave his magic wand and give them an actual military.
“Some of you may have never thought you’d be in a position like this,” B.A. told the volunteers. “But more than anything . . . I want you to know that you have the advantage when the enemy comes here. Because this is your home. It is not a matter of if the resistance wins, but when.”
I actually feel bad for these Ukrainians. These guys are middle aged losers LARPing as important people. Do these types ever head on over to Palestine, and help them with their actual resistance to ongoing genocide at the hands of Israelis? Do they ever hop on over to Yemen and help them stop Saudi Arabia from murdering the civilians there?
Of course not. These people are television watchers who exist purely to serve.
Above is a picture of this Hannibal faggot included in the article. Apparently he’s so concerned with anonymity that he… allows his face to be broadcast to the world. Something tells me the guy isn’t going to get ID’d by any ex-military guys, because something tells me his military experience is entirely made up. Something that these Ukrainian Volunteers are going to be finding out the hard way.
Something tells me that those pics were taken in a sin-a-gog. And “Hannibal”s real name is Schlomo.