A Michigan man living in Ukraine with his wife and mother-in-law spent more than a month in custody after Russian invaders accused him …
A Michigan man living in Ukraine with his wife and mother-in-law spent more than a month in custody after Russian invaders accused him of being a spy. Kirillo Alexandrov, 27, was about to be transferred to Moscow, where he could have been imprisoned for decades, when a Florida-based nonprofit snatched him up last month and brought him to safety. Mr. Alexandrov, who was reunited with his family in Poland, is among about 2,000 people who have been rescued from the warzone in Ukraine by the volunteers of Project DYNAMO, a Florida-based private group initially formed to secure the release of Afghan allies left behind after the U.S. pullout last year.
“We’re really busy. We’ve got a lot going on,” Project DYNAMO cofounder Bryan Stern said from Ukraine in a telephone interview with The Washington Times. “We’re doing operations pretty much every day.”
Their name comes from Operation Dynamo, the May 1940 mission to rescue British, French and Belgian troops who were trapped by the invading German army on the coast of France near Dunkirk. Mr. Alexandrov told his rescuers that Russian soldiers handcuffed him, conducted mock executions, and beat him on multiple occasions during his captivity. After his mother contacted them, the Project DYNAMO volunteers began to work their contacts and eventually found where he was being held: a Russian-controlled region more than 60 miles behind the lines. The area was ringed with land mines, Russian troops, and artillery.
