This is a very strange incident in what’s shaped up to be an equally strange war, but it’s not without precedent. But before I examine this particular incident of an alleged German Leopard crew, some context is needed.
I have been arguing since mid last year that western weapons must be coming with, at the very least, advisors. I find it difficult to believe that NATO sends their best weapons without at least some supervision, both in command staffs and officers/senior NCOs overseeing the systems themselves.
Historically, large weapons shipments have invariably come with human operators, and I can’t think of even one counter-example. German weapons to the Ottoman Empire came with German officers. German and Soviet weapons to Spain in the 1930s came with thousands of soldiers to manage and operate them, including in combat. Soviet pilots shot down Americans, and were often shot down themselves, in “MiG Alley” during the Korean War. Kennedy sent special forces to Vietnam, and so on.
And yes, this even includes Lend Lease shipments to the Soviet Union. The Soviets of course had their own fully functional military industrial complex and their own doctrine, but Americans nonetheless came to the Eastern Front as observers, and this happened even while the Soviet Union was officially interning American aircrews who crashed on their territory (so as to not antagonize the Japanese).
It is true that the American presence in the Red Army was microscopic in comparison to the other examples I listed, and the reasons why are fairly obvious. The Soviet Union was taking proportionally small amounts of foreign equipment and shaping it to their own ideas of how a war should be fought. That is why Lend Lease to the Soviet Union 1941–45 isn’t comparable to military “aid” to the Ukraine starting in 2014, and escalating dramatically in 2022. The Soviet Union was the primary actor in their war, but Ukraine is the object of the present war. They are entirely dependent on and being shaped by foreign actors. One might see some American Shermans in a Soviet tank division, but the unit as a whole was still very much a Soviet unit following Russian ideas of war. In Ukraine the reverse is true. You might find a Ukrainian tank division company with T-72s, but it is still an American unit following American ideas of war.
That is ultimately why I believe there is a high level of NATO participation in the Ukraine conflict, how could there not be?
Another clear pattern from proxy wars throughout history is that the participation of foreign soldiers is kept hush-hush. Not only is this direct participation kept secret, both sides keep it a secret. The Soviets pretended they weren’t sending pilots to directly fight Americans in Korea and Americans pretended they weren’t directly fighting Soviets. The US was motivated to help keep the secret, because publicly announcing it would be outrageous and embarrassing. If the “enemy” is meddling in your war, then you must do something in retaliation. If you don’t want to retaliate, then it is better to just pretend the meddling isn’t happening.
The deaths of service members in a proxy war can be covered up or attributed to other causes. That’s why every “training accident” in the NATO bloc over the past 18 months needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is also possible to engage in some creative bureaucratic gymnastics. Officers can resign their commissions and enlisted soldiers can receive discharge papers on the “wink wink” understanding that they will be unofficially conducting official business.
Here’s another possibility, and in my mind the most likely one. Biden is sending reservists. A reservist is entitled to almost all of the same benefits as an active-duty soldier, and even benefits normally denied to reservists can generally be cleared up with a piece of paper (everything has a loophole if you’re a human resources professional and it’s your job to know them). There are literally millions of active and inactive reservists in the American population with relatively recent combat and operational experience who could be sent to Ukraine to operate our weapons. Ultimately, it makes no sense to send expensive, difficult to replace weapons without also sending qualified professionals to operate them.
Yesterday the New York Times published an admission that a US Army hospital in Germany is treating American “volunteers” injured in Ukraine. That’s a little wacky, isn’t it? Even American mercenaries in Afghanistan could only receive life-saving treatment at military hospitals. For anything else they had to seek treatment on their own time and dime. Why are American “volunteers” in Ukraine getting lavish taxpayer-funded treatment? Because of course they’re not just volunteers.
Last month, Polish media claimed that 10,000 Polish volunteers, mostly reservists, have been killed in Ukraine. Easy.
With all that in mind, let’s look at the most recent “western soldier dies in Ukraine” story to make a big splash in the media. Two days ago RIA News shared a claim allegedly originating from a Russian scout commander that he had come across a whole crew of dying German soldiers inside a hit Leopard II. It’s of course a very Russian story – wounded German soldier says he misses his wife and baby, regrets signing up to fight Russia, repents of his sins, and dies. Curtains. This is so Russian it could be the plot to a 1970s Soviet movie.
Ultimately, it’s not possible to prove or disprove. Foreign troops in a proxy war should be sanitized of all individually identifying documents like passports, identification cards, and personnel tags. The Russians probably could not definitively prove these were German servicemen unless they made a diplomatic stink about it, and Germany confessed.
I would personally dismiss the story as probably bullshit made up by an overly enthusiastic patriot on Telegram, but RIA News repeated the story. TASS and RIA I consider to be the most reliable Russian outlets, in large part due to their ties to the state. As a general rule, stories that are obvious nonsense don’t generally make it to these two outlets because the state ties some of their own credibility to them. If a story is shared to TASS or RIA then proven to be fake, that is damaging to Russia’s information strategy. That makes me inclined to believe the story has at least some merit to it and isn’t necessarily made up. The total lack of serious diplomatic attention could be explained by the reasons I laid out previously.
Image: the good German soldier, maybe. Also video evidence of his death:
Ian Kummer
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There’s also the simple possibility that as a merc the one temporarily surviving crewman expected to be killed or left to die and so pretended to be a regular in the desperate hope that this would get him PoW status.
In any case, of course NATO regulars are fighting and getting massacred in Ukranazistan. The article you refer to claims 20 American dead. The actual number will probably be ten times more.