Three days after the Russian invasion, Hannibal told me he was setting up a group of international military volunteers to fight for Ukraine.
Hannibal — who asked that Rolling Stone not reveal his name because of security concerns — 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.
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. He felt a connection to the country and the people, in part because he had also returned…
