Former MSNBC Analyst Malcolm Nance Joins Foreign Fighters In Ukraine
“I’m DONE talking,” former MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance tweeted Monday (April 18), joining the wave of foreign volunteers fighting alongside Ukrainian forces against the Russian invasion.
Wearing military fatigues, Nance told MSNBC’s Joy Reid Monday from Lviv, Ukraine that he joined the International Legion of Territorial Defense about a month ago.
The former U.S. Navy senior chief petty officer and counterterrorism expert said he decided to join the conflict after friends in the Ukrainian army told him that Russia’s military onslaught was overwhelming them and expressed concern that they wouldn’t survive.
“The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, ‘I’m done talking, all right? It’s time to take action here,’ ” he said. “I am here to help this country fight what essentially is a war of extermination.”
Russia has been attacking Ukraine since its invasion on Feb. 24. Russian president Vladimir Putin has claimed that he is fighting neo-Nazi extremists, but reports from multiple global news organizations have illustrated the carnage taking place. Entire cities have been decimated and the Ukrainian capitol Kyiv sits in wait of a Russian offense attempting to collapse its government.
“This is an existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people, and they are mass-murdering civilians. And there are people here like me who are here to do something about it.”
Nance told Reid that his goal in joining the international legion was to “protect the innocent people of Ukraine from this Russian aggression.”
“They’re using mass heavy weapons used in combat against civilians,” he said, adding that this was “not a conventional war.”
“They are destroying infrastructure, and then you find they go to the cities and they massacre men, women and children, and that is the fundamental reason everyone is here.”
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MSNBC tweeted Monday (April 18) that Nance is no longer “affiliated with the network.”
Nance confirmed to The Daily Beast that he doesn’t work for MSNBC, explaining, “I let my contract expire and came right over.”
According to Nance’s author page, he was previously deployed to intelligence operations in the Balkans, Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. He spent 35 years in field and combat intelligence activity. Nance is currently the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies.
