I was still dripping from the shower, red wine sweat clinging to me after a night of Malbec-fueled nihilism in the hills of Mendoza, Argentina, when the door of my Airbnb cracked with three deliberate knocks. I wasn’t expecting visitors. Since Ukraine, I’d drifted—a modern nomad with a war record and a digital trail. Nobody local knew where I lived. My address wasn’t listed. I opened the door.
Two FBI agents with badges. Two Argentine special police officers behind them.
“Coffee or a drink?” the taller agent asked. “We need to talk.”
They didn’t cuff me. That’s the thing about these visits—they’re never pleasant, but they’re not necessarily hostile either. Still, I’m a paranoid man by nature and conditioning. Any veteran gets it—you come back wired differently. Especially if, like me, you were one of the more public foreign fighters in Ukraine.
We walked across the street to a Starbucks. The agent botched my coffee order, but at that point it felt like a cosmic joke more than an insult.
Then came the punch:
“Do you know Russia has an international warrant out for your arrest?”
Yeah. I knew. Charged in absentia by a Donetsk court for “mercenarism”—their legal shorthand for any foreigner who joins Ukraine’s defense. Fourteen years of hard labor in a penal colony. They tried James Vasquez too. I’m not thrilled to share a docket with him, but infamy has its own ecosystem.
The Bureau’s message was part warning, part intelligence primer. Argentina, they told me, was flooded with Russian networks—diplomatic fronts, criminal undercurrents, intelligence proxies. From Buenos Aires to the Andes, it was layered: ex-FSB operatives posing as businessmen, mafiosos doing soft work for the Kremlin, and a web of influence that stretched north through Venezuela and Bolivia. Even Colombia, they warned, was heating up with Russian-aligned gang elements. Whether the agents flew out just to pass me that briefing, or whether they came to see if I was still a threat to their paperwork load, I still don’t know.
But maybe it was about Chosen Company.
If you were paying attention last summer, you might have caught the New York Times piece that named me and Caspar Grosse. If not, it’s still online. Chosen Company was an American-led volunteer group, attached to Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade. Its commander, Ryan O’Leary, had a long war resume from the anti-ISIS fight in the Levant. By the time I joined in fall 2023, the unit was a ghost of itself. The casualty rate before my arrival was north of 60 percent. Of the 60 men I was told would be there, 18 could still fight. I tried to leave.
But the Avdiivka offensive had closed the roads, and I was trapped.
I sat out the first operation. That decision saved my life. Fifteen of the 18 were hit. Two were killed, including my friend Joel Stremski. After that, I felt obligated—or maybe I just wanted revenge. Over the next three weeks, I went out on four QRF missions that fizzled before they started. What I did hear, though, was persistent talk of war crimes.
I never saw the executions firsthand.
But I heard, credibly and repeatedly, that a man code-named “Zeus” was executing Russian POWs. One account centered on the October 13 Pervomaiske offensive—a chaotic retreat where Zeus allegedly gunned down prisoners. One fighter likened it to the scene in Band of Brothers where Lt. Spiers wastes surrendering Germans. Only this wasn’t a dramatization. It was a battlefield with no cameras and no accountability.
Ryan O’Leary gave me the impression of a man uninterested in the Geneva Conventions. Before one QRF mission, he said plainly: if you see wounded soldiers in trench lines and can’t identify their uniforms, kill them.
That is, by every legal definition, a war crime.
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibits “violence to life and person,” including the execution of combatants who are hors de combat—those who have laid down arms or been rendered incapacitated. Article 3(1)(d) also forbids the “passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court.”
And it gets worse. That order, from what I understood, wasn’t limited to Russians. It extended to wounded Ukrainian soldiers who couldn’t be visually confirmed as friendly. Imagine explaining that to a mother in the Donbass. Her son, born in the Soviet Union, grew up speaking Russian, conscripted by geography into a war he barely understood, shot in the mud by Western volunteers.
Even if he wore the wrong patch, that kind of killing is indefensible.
Russia has committed atrocities on an industrial scale. But that doesn’t absolve Ukraine of responsibility for its own. War is hell, yes—but war crimes are its choreography. They are ritualized cruelty masquerading as necessity.
I saw other things too.
One day, sorting grenades for a mission, a soldier beside me pulled out a modified M18 smoke grenade. It had a red mark on the side. “You know what this is?” he asked.
“A smoke grenade?”
“No,” he said. “It’s war crimes gas.”
I asked if he meant OC gas.
“Nah. You breathe this in, you’re done.”
We suspected it was some sort of nerve agent—maybe phosphine. I can’t confirm that chemically, but I wasn’t the only one who saw it. Caspar Grosse confirmed it to me in private. The Times left that part out.
Caspar witnessed executions, too. He kept a diary. After leaving Ukraine, someone tried to kill him with a poison envelope traced back to Belarus. He’s still getting death threats. He’s now in medical school somewhere in the Alps, living under a pseudonym, his location undisclosed.
Ryan O’Leary, meanwhile, has gone on podcasts and YouTube interviews to muddy the record. He falsely claimed that Caspar was never part of Operation Shovel. That alone is a lie. But worse, it was O’Leary himself who deleted all footage showing Caspar on operations—footage that would have directly disproven his narrative.
Then he went further, smearing Caspar with baseless accusations of drug use.
I knew Caspar. He was sober, kind, and a dedicated medic. What O’Leary did wasn’t a misunderstanding—it was a deliberate effort to erase a good man from the story and protect his own ego.
As for me? I left in a separate scandal. Someone tried to frag me over a personal dispute. Chosen Company had turned into a death cult, masquerading as a combat unit. There were decent men there, and some died in combat later, after protecting me from a maniac with a knife. But the culture was broken—a loose collection of ideologues, adrenaline junkies, and failed men trying to rewrite their lives through violence. And they have since gone on to orchestrate well-planned character assassinations against me.
Which brings me to the bigger point.
What happened to the Geneva Conventions?
That foundational code wasn’t drafted in some ivory tower. It was born from horror. In 1859, Henri Dunant witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino—thousands of men, from multiple nations, left dying without care. That moment led to the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention in 1864.
Even in war, there must be limits. That was the core idea.
But today, we livestream violations. Hobbyist drones drop grenades on writhing, wounded men while TikTok soundtracks play in the background. We add music to the murder. We “brand” our barbarism.
What will happen when the drones no longer need us?
Soon, we will witness the first battle between human combatants and fully autonomous systems—an event no longer confined to science fiction. These machines will not pause for screams, hesitate at wounded bodies, or process a surrender. Their targeting protocols will rely on movement patterns, thermal signatures, and predictive threat models. When they are deployed, they will kill without context, without empathy, and without doubt. The opening engagements will be massacres. Units caught unaware will be culled, not by human judgment, but by lines of code trained to maximize lethality. The battlefield will be stripped of its last shred of humanity. It will not be war as we’ve known it; it will be a test case for machine-sanctioned extermination.
In response to this coming shift, we need a new treaty—not another symbolic gesture, but a legal instrument with teeth. We need a second Geneva Convention, one designed for an era of algorithmic warfare, grey-zone operatives empowered by states, and the viral aesthetics of violence. The current international system is too slow, too deferential, and too politically entangled to meet this moment. The International Criminal Court, once envisioned as a check on global barbarism, has become a vestigial organ of European soft power—selective, slow-moving, and largely ignored by the worst actors. We need a framework that doesn’t just outline what is forbidden, but that actively regulates and restrains the development of war-fighting technologies before they spiral beyond moral reach. Until we do that, we are not soldiers. We are data points awaiting deletion.
It may be too late to change the nature of war, but we can still choose how we respond to its worst instincts. And if we don’t respond—if we let this moment pass—then we become complicit in a new kind of warfare, one not just fought on battlefields, but shaped by code, image, and silence. The need for a second Geneva Convention is no longer theoretical. It is urgent. We must confront the reality of algorithmic warfare, grey-zone operatives empowered by states, and a new kind of branded barbarism that packages atrocity for public consumption. If we fail to act, we are not just surrendering to these horrors—we are legitimizing them. There is still time to redraw the moral boundaries, but only if we recognize how quickly they are vanishing.
I never committed a war crime.
But I am wanted by Russia.
I don’t need sympathy. I need people to understand the stakes. Because what happened in Chosen Company is not an isolated story. It is the early tremor of a world losing its grip on moral accountability. The next war crimes trial will not be in The Hague; it will be on Telegram, or a livestream, or buried in a machine’s audit log. It may be too late to rewrite the past, but if we fail to redefine justice now, there may not be a future worth defending.
So I ask you: what does justice look like in a world where the guilty are protected, and the accused are simply inconvenient?
And what kind of system are we building if the only thing we hold sacred is who gets to tell the story?