The three men described by Russian website Pravda.ru as slain American “mercenaries” were deployed to Ukraine with the Tennessee National Guard in 2018 as part of a multinational training mission to support the Ukrainian military. All three had come back to the US by 2019, the Guard said.
Two of the three remain in the Tennessee National Guard and are in Tennessee, a US official told CNN on Friday, while one of them has left the Guard but is alive and has not been in Ukraine during the 2022 war.
“They are accounted for, safe and not, as the article headline erroneously states, US mercenaries killed in Donetsk People’s Republic,” the Guard said, attributing the information to the office of the Tennessee Adjutant General.
But neither the Telegram posts nor Pravda.ru provided evidence that the flag was in the possession of any American killed in Ukraine this year. It’s possible that the flag, if authentic, was a gift from the prior Tennessee National Guard deployment to Ukraine.
