Recently deceased MSNBC foreign policy analyst Malcolm Nance announced Monday night that he is on the ground in Ukraine fighting against invading Russian forces.
Nance, a retired Navy intelligence officer, told Joy Reid on The ReidOut that he joined the country’s international legion about a month ago.
“The more I saw of the war, the more I thought, ‘I’m done talking, okay? It’s time to act,'” said Nance, who was wearing a flak jacket and carrying an assault rifle. “I’m here to help this country fight…which is essentially a war of annihilation. This is an existential war and Russia brought it to these people and they are killing civilians en masse and there are people like me here who are here to do something about it.”
Nance, the executive director of a think tank called the Terror Asymmetrics Project, was asked if being a foreigner posed “a particular danger” to others like him there.
“No, it doesn’t, because the war that’s being fought here is against everyone,” Nance said. “[The Russians] do not go around chasing American flag insignia or to see who is black, who is Asian, or who is Hispanic.”
Speaking to The Daily Beast from a secure outpost in Ukraine on Monday night, Nance said he was “touched” when he first met his platoon.
“The International Legion is one of the best kept secrets in the country. That’s the story. They were higher ranking people than me. Most journalists have never seen a real member or followed freelancers all over the battlefield. I really can’t tell you how diverse this group really is. It’s literally a multinational force of men and women who are here to defend Ukraine,” the US Navy veteran told The Daily Beast. “I was very touched when I met the first train and saw that they were here for the right reasons.”
“They weren’t just here to get guns,” he noted.
An MSNBC spokesman told The Daily Beast that Nance is no longer an analyst for the network after joining the international legion.
At one point during the MSNBC interview, Nance made a direct appeal to President Joe Biden for “heavy guns.”
“Russia has an advantage on the battlefield, and that’s long-range artillery,” Nance said.
“Let me say something to the President of the United States: Give [Ukraine] Long-range counter-battery artillery – multiple missile launch systems…to outperform the artillery’s range. If you do that, stop the attacks on civilians, because that’s what they do with artillery.”
While in the Navy, Nance, who is also fluent in Arabic, served as an intelligence officer and later wrote the book Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe, which explored the terrorist group’s influence.