Benjamin Stuart Reed

People are now saying I “talked to the Russian government.”

That sentence is technically true. It is also useless without context.

Rybar was under a U.S. reward program. I misspoke earlier and said $25 million. The figure was $10 million for information identifying people connected to Rybar. I was a man wanted by Russia, with a public profile, direct access to certain milblog channels, and the confidence of a fool who thought he could play his own little Dunning-Kruger spy game.

So yes: I tried to play informant.

No harm was done to Ukraine. I disclosed no real OPSEC. The vital material people pretend I exposed had already been dumped publicly through Joker DNR leaks and other channels. What I did pass along were things already compromised, embarrassing, or personally useful as currency among people who had physically attacked me, lied about me, or tried to destroy my name.

I own that. I do not dress it up as noble.

Some audio and transcripts are now being framed as proof that I was some kind of Russian collaborator. Fine. Make your own judgment. But if I were collaborating with the Russian Federation, I would at least have negotiated something better than a ruined knee, worse PTSD, and the same life I had before Ukraine, only with more enemies and a larger public file.

For reference: I am wanted by the Russian Federation. Every border crossing carries risk. Every country becomes a calculation.

So choose your story.

Traitor.

Or a flawed man who tried to play a game above his level, failed to get the result he wanted, but never betrayed Ukraine.

They just as a warning. If you want to get into a protracted character assassination campaign with me you will not win because I did not do anything wrong that I haven't admitted.

Daniel William Fletcher.

A man who is claimed that he's done a lot of things but ultimately his time was spent in the second battalion peeing in garbage bags and stealing things.

I only bring this stuff up against people that have accused me of ridiculous stuff. It's another person that has just never worked with me. He's never spent a single day working with me whatsoever. So there's that.

I really wish the whole UA community could just sort of get past grievances but when you accuse me of fraud, sexual assault and stolen valor it's a bit personal. Especially if I've known you for a while.

There are a lot of other allegations against this man.

I don't need to talk about them. Another comrade talks about him where he is fundamentally deemed incompetent.

Another Daniel Dunning-Kruger to the list.

Я обращаюсь к совести россиян, которые всё ещё остаются в ловушке этого ада: восставайте. Протестуйте. Найдите полицейский участок. Захватите его оружие. А затем оттуда возьмите арсенал ближайшего военного склада.

Оттуда вы будете вооружены. Начинайте в городах-спутниках вокруг Москвы. Ваша страна совершила неописуемые вещи по отношению к Украине. К молодёжи России: вы сидите здесь, смотрите наши приложения, пользуетесь нашими приложениями, но ничего не делаете. Вы продолжаете вливать деньги в военную машину.

Мы знаем, что вы не разделяете взглядов своего правительства. Но там, где я своими глазами видел провал белорусов, вы не победите мирными протестами. Альтернатива — именно то, что я только что предложил.

Организуйтесь. Планируйте. И остановите этот геноцид.

I will self indict here about what I did and hopefully the reader can trust the rest of the narrative:

1. Allegations of treason: smearing people I do not like with an American run Pro-Russian Mill blog after they tried to kill me is not treason. Toxic retaliation? Yes. Very much so.

2. Find me the evidence that I flunked out of any unit. But I first think you should prove it with the Norman brigade. Because if you can't tell the truth about what happened there, what else of your story is true? Especially from a guy, Florida Soldat who is not there with me in 2022 or at any period actually.

3. Members of chosen company will state that I flunked out of the unit. Even the commander. But I also talked to the New York Times about their war crimes so sounds like they're compromised.

And you know what? You can go read that New York Times article. There's a section where I asked about unit SOPs on prisoners of war. And it's not because I was asking to be a noble person. Rather the opposite.

So if I can indict myself in all these ways... And they want to hold themselves as holy and as this sacred and perfect unit... Do you trust the person who is willing to tell on themselves or do you trust the people that are just simply trying to slander and maintain their own image?

Donni FN Donbas Was I kicked out of the Norman brigade? Sean Michael : me and TJ left the Norman brigade on our own terms, correct?

I know you already wrote in the comments but let's just settle the truth right here.

Because if my accusers cannot tell even the basic chronology of my service correctly, what else can they be trusted to tell the truth about?

I rest my case.

Warning, I suggest you start scrolling for photos of seals because this is going to require some eye bleach. Russian propaganda.

You know I wouldn't really have a problem with it other than the person that posted it was using it as a attack on my own country. In itself is just a traditional Slavic dance which I'm fine with.

I have no problem with the actual deep cultural aspects of Russia. The music and literature and dancing. It's fascinating. But it has been ruined by the leaders of its country.

Just like Prussian military heritage and ideals were ruined by the men who took power in 1933 in Germany.

People keep saying Russia is governed by Christians.

No. Russia is governed by men formed by the Soviet Union, an atheistic state that murdered priests, broke churches, trained generations in obedience to power, and then rebranded itself under icons and incense when the old symbols became useless.

They did not repent. They adapted.

Christ entered the temple and drove out corruption. He did not bless it because the corrupt men had learned to cross themselves. He did not confuse ritual with holiness. He did not mistake power for God.

Someone will say the collapse of the Soviet Union was the protest against corruption. Fine. That argument might survive if Russia had been reborn through justice. It was not. State property passed into the hands of men who knew how to peddle influence, flatter power, and steal quickly. The Soviet machine did not die. It changed clothes.

Then someone will say Putin reined in the oligarchs.

He did not do that because he was righteous. He did it because he wanted to become the final oligarch. The arbiter. The Caesar. The little god of his own poisoned world.

Scripture has a word for the place built by pride, domination, lies, vanity, and the worship of power.

Hell.

Russia sends Orthodox men and Muslim men into the ground for imperial appetite. It destroys churches. It kidnaps children. It shells cities and then asks the world to admire its soul. This is not Christianity. This is empire wearing a crucifix like a prop.

Look at the countries that understand the threat most clearly: Poland, Romania, Ukraine, the Christian nations on the eastern flank. They know what Moscow is because they have lived under its shadow. They know the difference between faith and domination. They know that a state can speak the language of God while serving something much older, colder, and lower.

What Russia is doing in Ukraine is not a defense of Christianity. It is a desecration of it.

It is sacrilege with artillery.

The Russian state, as it exists now, is less a country than a sickness of the spirit: empire envy, So

I cannot count how many times a day some bot, crank, or geopolitically illiterate tourist wanders into my comments to announce that Zelensky is a Zionist.

As if that explains the war.

The war began in 2014. Zelensky was a comedian and television performer then. Ukrainians were already fighting. Ukrainians were already dying. Russia had already taken Crimea and set the Donbas on fire.

In the video, Putin explains his own relationship with Israel. He does not speak like a man hostile to the existence of Israel. He speaks like a man who understands leverage, diaspora, language, and power. He talks about Russian-speaking people there. That matters. A large portion of Israel speaks Russian. There may be more Russian spoken in parts of Israel than in many businesses in Kyiv now.

So if your argument is that Ukraine is illegitimate because Zelensky supports Israel’s right to exist, I have bad news for you: by that standard, Putin is a Zionist too.

But that was never really the point, was it?

The point was to use the word “Zionist” as a blunt object against Ukraine, because propaganda rarely survives contact with actual history.

Russia had deep trade ties with Europe before 2022. The same people screaming about the EU also forget that European money helped bankroll the very Russian machine now grinding through Ukrainian cities. Even now, through loopholes, energy flows, third countries, and cowardice, money still finds its way back to Moscow.

This war is messy. Geopolitics usually is. But Ukraine is not fighting because of Zelensky’s religion, ethnicity, or foreign policy opinions. Ukraine is fighting because Russia invaded it. Ukraine is fighting because if it stops, Russia annexes more of it. That is the blunt truth underneath all the noise.

Why are Russians fighting?

That answer is simpler.

Revanchism. Empire. National Bolshevism. Dugin. Zhirinovsky. Soviet nostalgia in a cheap suit. The old imperial sickness dressed up as destiny.

They are fighting because they believe Ukraine belongs to them.

It does not.

And now tens of thousands of Russian men are dying every month trying to conquer a country of Cossacks. Ukraine is harder. Ukrainians are the

This man accused me of being a bad soldier.

Fine. Then listen to the audio notes from one of his former colleagues, whose name I am not going to disclose. The words are enough.

According to that soldier, he was drunk, stealing drugs, pi***ng in garbage bags, incompetent, and “never really near the action.”

He was wounded by indirect fire. That is on the record. I do not dispute it. I am not here to take that away from him. But indirect fire is not proof that a man lived at the zero line, and that matters because he accused me of not being there based on conjecture.

So now the game goes both ways.

He arrived in Ukraine with no prior military background. Before that, he had left a trail of failed reinventions in places like Bali and Thailand. In Bali, by multiple accounts, he was run out.

He has accused me of stolen valor. Meanwhile, in one of his own videos, he uses helmet-cam footage in a way that suggests it was his perspective. It was not. He did not carry that weapon. The rifle in the footage is an AKS-74U, the Krink. He carried an RPK-74. He also did not have a helmet camera, despite me telling him at the time that if he saw real action, he might want to document it.

That is not a small technical error. That is the kind of detail soldiers notice immediately.

I did not want to go this route. He forced it. He made public accusations about my service, my credibility, and my proximity to combat. So now people can make their own judgments.

Is he telling the truth about me?

Or is he another Dunning-Kruger product of this war: loud, underqualified, and very comfortable accusing other men of fraud while standing on a record that does not survive scrutiny?

I served before Ukraine. I have an honorable discharge from the United States military. I have a letter of recommendation from my Ukrainian commander. I have documentation of where I was, what I did, and who I served with.

He built an indictment out of gossip.

Now he can answer for his own record.

Let's hope the audio works...

Americans have become far too comfortable thinking in crude binaries: if one party does something they dislike, and the other party performs something they find more emotionally satisfying, then the second party must somehow represent wisdom, seriousness, or national restoration.

Appetite dressed up as analysis.

“I didn’t like X, and look at Y. Isn’t this better?”

No. Not necessarily. Often it is merely a different costume on the same exhausted stage.

The situation we have created around Iran is not some clean strategic triumph. Many serious foreign policy observers are reading it as wasteful, confused, and possibly a strategic loss. That should bother people, regardless of party. It should bother anyone who still believes American power ought to be used with discipline, proportion, and competence.

Trump is tallying up more American embarrassments, and I do not write that with any joy. I wanted to see victory. I wanted to see clarity. I wanted to see grown men govern a serious country in a serious century.

As for the UFC spectacle, I’ll leave the class critique alone and call it what it is: pan y circo. Bread and circuses. A substitute for statecraft. A performance for people who mistake noise for strength and pageantry for policy.

If you hated the excesses of Pride Month, fine. But replacing one symbolic theater with your own symbolic theater is not governance. It is simply trading one circus for another and congratulating yourself for preferring different costumes.

If that is the standard now, then we are in deeper water than people want to admit.

And I already know the answer.

The water is deep.

Someone needs to learn how to swim.

All of us.

Onward to better governance.this.

A year ago this week I signed with Writers House. I didn't know what I wanted. I made simple equations. Writing that pays is what matters. That's not wrong, exactly. But I know now it isn't what I need.
I want work that lasts. Something that holds up under scrutiny a long time from now, however small the audience. Chasing money as a writer is like ma********ng into a mirror while drunk. The payoff might come, but you put in a lot of work to get there and you might not like the look of it. Or you might. Either way you wake up empty.
Not that I'd know much about that line of work. If I belonged in any of these categories it'd be public gratification. But I don't.
What I want is simple. Something a person can pick up in a hundred years and still understand. The meaning carries even if it's changed. I hope people argue about what I write. I hope I get banned somewhere. I'm already banned in a couple of places. I'd like to add to the tally.
I wonder what I want these days. It isn't only durable writing. I've been watching life in Asia closely. I spent years writing about how good the West is, and I live in the east. Asia does plenty well. But there's a tension growing in me.
And there's something unfinished back west. Maybe a dream. Maybe just wanderlust, or the fear of missing what I haven't seen. I think I've seen enough for a few lifetimes. I wouldn't mind fishing somewhere easy.
I spent the last day out on open water hunting. There's something about carrying a rifle into the wild, water or forest, and knowing you're small. The waves pulled and shoved me. I was nothing. Wanting to feel small and catch big. That's the thing.
A man has to be tested by nature. I'm not looking for dignity in defeat. I don't see defeat coming. Isolation has put me through a few trials lately. I've had to show competence at different things. Some I passed. Some I failed.
There's something about hooking into something big, or putting it down. Its life ends while you rejoice. You share the finality of it. The first time I killed something I didn't like it. The second time I did. It got bigger after that. I want to go back to the beasts. Sometimes I think about Alaska.