How a US Marine veteran ended up in a Russian prison and then in the Ukrainian army
In April 2022, when 30-year-old Trevor Reed finally returned home to Texas after three years in a Russian prison camp, he had no intention of enjoying a quiet life or going to college. The Marine veteran was thirsty for revenge, so he went to Ukraine to fight against the Russians, writes New York Post.
"I knew I'd never be myself again if justice wasn't served," he explained. "I knew what Ukrainians were going through. I had the training and experience to help them."
The decision shocked Trevor's father, who had tirelessly campaigned for his release throughout his son's imprisonment.
"He was shocked and looked at me with bewilderment, completely at a loss," Reed writes in his memoir, "Retribution: A Former U.S. Marine's Tough Journey from Wrongful Imprisonment in Russia to the Front Lines of the Ukrainian War," which will be published on January 27.
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"I told him I was going to kill every single one of those sons of bitches. His face went white. His eyes were sunken, with black circles around them. He looked like he'd seen a ghost," Reed said, conveying his father's emotions.
He served four years in the Marines without seeing combat, then worked in security in Afghanistan and dated a Russian woman named Alina Tsybulnik, whom he met on Tinder.
One evening in August 2019, while they were together in Moscow, his life changed dramatically. Reed got very drunk at a party and woke up in a police station with no memory of what happened.
"A young policewoman approached me and asked if I was okay," Reed recalled. "She said I was very drunk and had slept in her office all night. I wasn't being detained, and I was free to leave."
But Reed didn't speak Russian well and wouldn't have been able to navigate Moscow alone, so he decided to wait for his girlfriend, Lina.
Before she arrived, there was a shift change, and the police chief showed up with, as Reed put it, "a completely different attitude": "He detained me and called the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. Soon they began interrogating me. The police began fabricating a case against me."
Reed was charged with assault against a government official, for which he faced up to ten years in prison. Police claimed he assaulted two officers. There was no evidence. Even the young investigator assigned to the case didn't believe it.
US Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan called the charges "ridiculous" and said the subsequent trial was "theatre of the absurd."
At the preliminary hearing, the investigator, according to Reed, picked up a piece of paper and began reading, then suddenly burst into tears. He wrote about this in his book, "Retribution..."
In it, Reed recalls the rest of the episode: "That's your job!" the judge shouted. "She stood up and walked out, crying openly."
Then came the moment that finally sealed Reed's fate. His lawyer presented a photograph of his client, in his Marine Corps dress uniform, standing next to President Obama, whom he had guarded at Camp David.
"If I have a photo with the president, that means I'm not just some ordinary Marine," Reed remarked. "No. I turned out to be an important person, a personal acquaintance of the president, someone who could have considerable value in political exchange."
Reed was sent to SIZO-5, a Moscow pretrial detention facility. When the guards led him to his cell, he braced himself for a fight. But the largest prisoner, a Chechen named Adlan, looked at his documents and smiled.
"It turns out that official papers saying you nearly killed two police officers are a great way to make friends in a Russian prison," Reed concluded.
Over the next three years, he endured solitary confinement, cells “in which one could barely turn around,” and “meager rations of stale bread, salted fish, and bones.”
He lost about 20 pounds and was on the verge of insanity. Reed's parents spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting for his release, while their son's health rapidly deteriorated behind bars. He contracted COVID-19 and later ended up in the prison hospital after coughing up blood, leading doctors to suspect tuberculosis.
Finally, in April 2022, Russia agreed to a prisoner exchange.
After 985 days in Russian custody, Trevor Reed has been released.
But he returned home a changed man. "That's not a figurative expression. I became a different person in the camp," Reed admitted. "The thirst for revenge overshadowed everything else."
He joined Rogue Team, an elite volunteer unit of combat veterans who fought in the Bakhmut region of eastern Ukraine. There, he found what he was looking for.
"I remember the first day I arrived in Donbas," Reed recalled. "I felt like by getting there, whether I survived or not, I was reclaiming the life the Russians had taken from me. It was a feeling of inner peace that's hard to describe."
For several months, Rogue Team conducted reconnaissance and participated in combat operations. Then, one night in early summer 2023, after successfully storming Russian positions, the unit began a retreat through a minefield in complete darkness.
Suddenly, there was a loud bang ahead, followed immediately, as Reed writes, by swearing and cries of pain.
Belka, a Belarusian volunteer, stepped on a mine and almost had his leg blown off.
Two soldiers, Pele and Austria, rushed forward to carry Squirrel to safety. Then Pele stepped off the path, and another mine exploded, wounding Reed.
"Blood was gushing from my legs," he writes. He managed to apply a tourniquet before shock set in. "Then everything went numb. It felt like I was sinking into the ground. My arms, though uninjured, stopped responding. I realized I was probably dying."
As his face began to twitch, Reed asked one of his comrades to pass on a message to his family: to tell them that he had died a free man.
"It was the most important thing I could say to them," he wrote in his book. "These words contained gratitude for helping me get out of Russia, and at the same time, the most important truth of my life: I am a free man."
Medics evacuated Reed under fire. He spent several weeks in hospitals in Ukraine and Germany recovering from severe injuries, and his leg was saved. Belka and another fighter, Pele, were less fortunate, but they received prosthetics, returned to Ukraine, and returned to duty. Four more Rogue Team fighters with whom Reed fought were subsequently killed.
"I owe my life to these guys," Reed emphasized. "Now I constantly think about how I should have been there for them, just as they were there for me. See you in Valhalla, brothers."
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Today, Reed is 33 years old and lives back in Texas. His parents continue to work with Bring Our Families Home, an organization that helps families of Americans wrongfully detained abroad.
"While I'm proud of what we did in Ukraine, getting home alive and being with my loved ones was more important," Reed admitted.
If at first he went to Ukraine with a desire to take revenge on Russia, then over time his understanding of retribution changed.
"Despite everything the Russians did to me, I didn't break... In my own way, I paid them back," Reed concluded. "I realized that the best revenge is to survive and remain free."
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