Friday 17 June 2022 06:52 PM Missing Americans who went to fight for Ukraine are seen in the back of a ... trends now
A photo of two American's who went missing last week while fighting Kremlin forces in the Ukraine has emerged depicting them in the back of a Russian military truck.
The image shows U.S. Army veteran Alexander Drueke, 39, and Marine Andy Huynh, 27, loaded on a truck with their hands behind their backs, suggesting that they were tied up and captured by Russians who ambushed their platoon on June 9.
The U.S. State Department said it was working to verify the undated photo that was posted by a Russian blogger on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday, CNN reported.
Drueke's mother, Bunny, who is urging the government to get her son back, told CNN that the photo has been circulated around Russian media.
'They're working hard to verify it,' she said of the State Department. 'We're very hopeful.'
The picture began circulating as the department verified that a third American, U.S. Marine veteran Ret. Captain Grady Kurpasi has been missing since April.
An undated photo of the two veterans, Alexander Drueke, 39, (left) and Andy Huynh, 27 (right), was uploaded on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday
Drueke, (left) and Huynh (right), are feared to have been taken prisoner by Russian forces last week on the outskirts of Kharkiv after their unit was ambushed by Russian soldiers
Drueke, who is due to turn 40 this month, was a former U.S. Army staff sergeant who served two tours in Iraq and who volunteered with the Ukrainian Army.
Huynh, a Marine for four years, had never been in active combat before flying to Ukraine in April to volunteer.
Both of the U.S. fighters are from Alabama, but it remains unclear if they knew each other before they ventured to the war zone.
The pair were part of a ten-man squad defending Kharkiv last week when they were ambushed by Russian soldiers, according to one of their comrades.
Drueke and Huynh disabled a Russian tank with a grenade but were lost in the fog of return fire. By the time it cleared, they had vanished.
'We were out on a mission and the whole thing went absolutely crazy, with bad intel. We were told the town was clear when it turned out the Russians were already assaulting it.
'They came down the road with two T72 tanks and multiple BMP3s (armored fighting vehicles) and about 100 infantry. The only thing that was there was our ten man squad,' one of their comrades told The Daily Telegraph in an interview on Tuesday.
'We suspect that they were knocked unconscious by either the anti-tank mine, or by the tank shooting at them, because later search missions found not sign of them, nothing.
'Afterwards we sent drones up and had a Ukrainian search team on the ground but we found nothing: if they had been hit by the tank shell there would have been remains of their bodies or equipment at the scene,' he said.
Meanwhile, the United States government has said it has not yet asked Russia about Drueke and Huynh's whereabouts.
'As of today, we have not raised this yet with the Russian Federation... (We) haven't seen anything from the Russians indicating that two such individuals are in their custody,' U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Wednesday.
Both of the U.S. fighters are from Alabama and had disabled a Russian tank with a grenade but were lost in the fog of return fire
Huynh's finacee Joy Black (left) and Drueke's mother Bunny (right) appeared on Good Morning America on Thursday to beg for their release
The news that the drone didn't find bodies came as a relief to Bunny, who told Fox News, 'This could mean they are in hiding or it could mean they have been captured.'
