U.S. Army Veteran Killed in Ukraine

An American veteran has been killed in Ukraine while helping in the fight against Russian-backed separatists near the border. Mark Gregory Paslawsky, a 55-year-old West Point graduate and former Army Ranger, was fighting with the volunteer Donbas Battalion in Ilovaysk when he sustained fatal injuries. “He was saying that he was in pain and that he didn't want to die,” Maxim Dondyuk, a Ukrainian photographer embedded with the Donbas Battalion, told Vice News. “People were telling him he was going to be okay. I think it might have been possible to save him if we had medevac helicopters or ambulances, but all there was on hand were the battalion medics." Paslawsky was born in New York but lived in Kiev for several years. He chose to fight against the separatists in Ukraine because of his family’s Ukranian heritage and his own frustration over Russia’s takeover of the Crimea peninsula. “Given what I saw, the level of incompetence, the corruption, the lack of activity—I just decided that I needed to go and participate,” Paslawsky had told Vice News earlier this month. “If there was ever a time to help Ukraine, this was the time to do it.”