Dead Drop: April 22

MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE:  Familiar TV talking-head Malcolm Nance made an unexpected appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” show recently. He wasn’t in the studio with host Joy Reid. And he wasn’t Zooming in from his kitchen.  Instead, Nance was dressed in combat gear, embracing an assault rifle and revealed that he was in Lviv, Ukraine. Nance said he had joined Ukraine’s foreign legion to help fight Russia. That seems like an unusual career move for the 61-year-old, retired Navy senior chief petty officer. But Nance told Reid that, “The more I saw the war going on, the more I thought, ‘I’m done talking’, adding that he joined the international legion about a month ago. We understand that to do so, he had to give up his MSNBC contributor gig where he has appeared for several years.  Newsweek says the “International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine” was established on February 27^th, right after Putin’s Army invaded Ukraine. Also on Tuesday, Nance posted a steely-eyed black and white photo of himself on Twitter with the caption, “I’m DONE talking.” Last we checked, the post had about 190K likes.  This week, Nance’s twitter followers went up from (an already astounding) 1 million to 1.1 million. Unsurprisingly, Russian TV was not happy with Nance’s stance. Julia Davis noticed they aired a portion of Nance’s MSNBC appearance, calling him a mercenary. But they skipped the part where he talked about Russians murdering civilians in Ukraine. Nance has written several books since hanging up his uniform. While on active duty he was a “cryptologic technician interpretive” which the Navy says is, “more than a linguist” but someone who is a “cultural expert, able to translate and interpret foreign communications.”

TAKING AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH:  Patrick Lancaster is also a Navy veteran.  In his case, he only made it to petty officer third class.  But now he says, he is, “an independent crowdfunded journalist” working in Ukraine. Task and Purpose reports that critics call Lancaster a part of Putin’s disinformation machine. This week, Lancaster posted a video from Mariupol placing the blame for the city’s devastation on the Ukrainians.  Task and Purpose does not assert that any of the crowdfunding Lancaster’s reports is coming from the Kremlin – but Lancaster’s work regularly appears, and is praised, on Russian state-run media like RT and Zveda.