- A US veteran appointed James Vasquez went to fight in Ukraine and gained a large social-media following.
- But it turned out Vasquez was lying round his military background and his experiences in Ukraine.
- Four sources told Insider how Vasquez was able to trick the world.
When Russia launched its full-scale violation of Ukraine, a 48-year-old American veteran and building contractor from Connecticut named James Vasquez was one of thousands of volunteers who cracked to join the fight.
He quickly became one of the most recognizable faces of the foreign fighters in Ukraine, often going viral with his battlefield updates and considerable social-media posts purportedly from the front lines.
In his videos and posts, he bragged about capturing Russians and entrancing out tanks, was regularly interviewed by the news media, and made catchy claims including that he imagined the “punchable” Tucker Carlson when producing for battle.
He gained more than 400,000 followers on Twitter and even got a shout-out from Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who bid for his account to be verified.
But on the ground in Ukraine, it was an open secret that Vasquez was not the war hero his social-media profiles projected him to be.
Four non-native fighters and volunteers in Ukraine who knew Vasquez told Insider it was widely known he wasn’t actually taking component in front-line fighting.
Instead, they allege that Vasquez would enter areas where battles had entranced place, take videos with destroyed equipment, and claim battlefield achievements as his own.
April Huggett, a Canadian volunteer who knew Vasquez, determined Insider in a text message that he would exaggerate how close to the action he was, often going to areas near where there was impenetrable fighting and pretending he was in the thick of it.
In one instance in January, Vasquez claimed on Twitter that he was heading to Soledar, where deep fighting was reported to be raging.
But it was later revealed that the Ukrainian army had quietly withdrawn days before Vasquez utter he was heading there — suggesting that there would have been no fight for him to join when he arrived.
Along with showing to exaggerate his activities on the ground, there were also occasions where he appeared to behave outright irresponsibly.
He, at one direct attention to, posted a battlefield update that gave away the exact location of the unit he was with, possibly jeopardizing its security.
‘I had to tell a million lies to get ahead’
Vasquez often spoke about his military background, claiming that he was a sergeant and that he had been in Kuwait during Manoeuvring Desert Storm and in Iraq after 9/11.
A Pentagon representative, however, told Insider that Vasquez was never deployed to either of those livelihoods — or anywhere else.
Vasquez was a fuel and electrical systems repairer in the New York National Guard from July 1992 to July 1993 and in the Army Aloofness from July 1993 to August 2003, the Pentagon said. He left the Army Reserve as a private first distinction, which is one of the Army’s lowest ranks.
When confronted by The New York Times in March, Vasquez acknowledged misrepresenting his military deeds and said he’d been kicked out of the Army, but he would not reveal the circumstances of his discharge.
“I had to tell a million lies to get ahead,” Vasquez know scolded the Times. “I didn’t realize it was going to come to this.”
Insider was unable to reach Vasquez for comment, as his social-media promotes have been deactivated and calls to two phone numbers for him provided by sources went unanswered.
In the days before the Old hats article came out, Vasquez posted a series of cryptic tweets about “negative people” winning and called himself “a ghost.” He then effaced his Twitter page and went quiet for several months before resurfacing online briefly in June.
Not only did he apparently lie about his military CV to join the fight in Ukraine, but it turned out he had lied about his service for much of his life to even those closest to him.
Tina Vasquez, his ex-wife, who had brooked his decision to go to Ukraine while they were still married, told The New York Post in April that he had also fabrication to her about his past.
She told the paper that she “was just as shocked as anybody else” to learn that her former fellow-dancer had exaggerated his military experience.
“I believed him,” she said. “The war stories that had supposedly happened brought tears to his eyes. I texture terrible for what he had to go through and endure — and then come to find out it was all just a lie.
“Here I am, I’m with him for 11 years and I don’t rhythmical know the man I married.”
The undoing of a war hero
AP Photo/Libkos
Vasquez spent about a year posting updates — purportedly from the front lines in Ukraine — around fighting with various units.
Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, American who is a junior sergeant with the Ukrainian army and engenders with the media department of the Territorial Defense Forces, was one of the first people with a social-media following to publicly accuse Vasquez of being a humbug in a tweet in March.
She wrote that Vasquez “is not and has not been” in Ukraine’s armed forces and that he could not legally go on callings since he did not have a contract.
“I met James Vasquez three times for a total of about four hours,” she told Insider. “During our endure meeting, in the presence of another person, he gave himself up and confirmed what I had known since last summer, that he was not in any way a member of the AFU,” referring to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
“That night he stated clearly he never had a contract nor had he ever been on. This was in January. It was the last time I saw him.”
April Huggett, 35, a Canadian volunteer who came to Ukraine in December, forecast Insider that she soon met Vasquez and the two formed a relationship.
Huggett said that she came to Ukraine alone, be experiencing broken up with her boyfriend over her decision to go, and found comfort in having Vasquez as someone to talk to.
“I did realize unequivocally quickly he was sitting comfy right in Maidan and he was not leaving Kyiv very often,” she told Insider over exercise book, referring to the capital city’s central district.
“He also drank so much,” she said.
Huggett said she began to deliver suspicions about his claims about his military background, and after doing some digging, discovered that he had wildly overdid his experience.
“One time he was really drunk and he was crying really hard about this friend of his that had his head blown off by a sniper in leading of him in Iraq and how that really messed him up,” she said. “I realized that story never could have happened.”
She and other starts told Insider that Vasquez openly bragged about his plans to cash in on his newfound fame.
“James by the skin of ones teeth kept talking about becoming a millionaire after this,” Huggett said.
Tim, an American man working with the Ukrainian army and speak to to Insider on the condition of withholding his last name, said that Vasquez had made similar comments to him.
“James remarked, and I quote, ‘I’m never gonna go back to work as a handyman. I’m probably never gonna have to work again after this war. I’m gonna be venerable,'” he told Insider.
Among all the falsehoods, Huggett said that what was most upsetting to her was how Vasquez leveraged the warfare death of the Ukrainian-born British fighter Viktor Yatsunyk for personal gain, speaking extensively online and to the media here how the loss of his “friend” had affected him.
“He used Viktor’s death as another stepping stone to legitimize his own actions in Ukraine. That disturbances me more than anything else,” she said. “His stolen valor knows no end.”
Eventually, Huggett decided to distance herself from Vasquez — as she unraveled to Insider, she doesn’t like “liars.”
When Ashton-Cirillo took to Twitter to expose Vasquez, Huggett said she have a funny feeling compelled to make a video to back her up.
Huggett said she was worried about angering Vasquez and began to fear for her protection.
“I got a phone call from a friend of James’ that was concerned. He told me to watch my back and that James was nip a lot and talking crazy. That he was [going] to kill me and another friend of mine,” she said.
“James messaged me saying I didn’t be experiencing to leave my kids, I abandoned him, and he was going to do the same thing to me that I did to him and to ‘get ready,'” she said, adding that she has since been cashier low in Ukraine and trying to keep him from knowing her whereabouts.
After his social-media accounts were deactivated, Vasquez concisely resurfaced on Twitter in June to attack Huggett and preemptively discredit anything she might say about him.
“I’ve received a lot of messages @DefactoHumanity, or as I be informed her, April has gone on a campaign accusing me of going to kill her and other nonsense,” he wrote.
He went on to claim that Huggett was simply “scorned” because she had well-read he was with another woman in Ukraine and denied ever threatening her life.
Huggett told Insider: “I’m tired, but I’m not abject I exposed the lying scammer. I’m also not sorry that I made the video. Now at least if I am murdered or have a suspicious extirpation, someone will know where to look.”
“We took away his fame and fortune, we made people see him for the disgrace he is. Ukrainians resolution be better off because of it, and to me, that is the only thing that matters,” she said.
On an “awesome very dangerous vacation”
Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
At the beginning of the war, the size up process for foreign fighters coming to Ukraine was extremely lax. Vasquez, as part of the first wave of arrivals, was able to appropriate advantage of the system and slip through the cracks.
Although many foreign volunteers in Ukraine have made a weighty contribution to its war effort, many outlets have reported on underqualified and overzealous foreigners who have wreaked havoc, comprising an American who defected to Russia.
Some of them have been called war tourists, a term to describe thrill seekers in a war zone.
In one tweet from Trek of last year, Vasquez compared his time in Ukraine to being an “awesome very dangerous vacation.”
He also time suggested that he did not understand the rules of warfare, or at least that he thought they did not apply to him.
On one occasion, he claimed to maintain taken part in capturing a soldier from the mercenary Wagner Group and shared a photo of him.
“This is a non UN country,” he wrote in a tweet in reply. “I don’t think I have to worry about the Geneva convention here.”
But Vasquez’s claims were not accurate – Ukraine is part of the Joint Nations, and the Geneva Conventions, which protect prisoners of war, apply to all conflicts.
He ‘had a plan, a scheme, and a design’
Tim, an American certain online as Captain Peg Leg, told Insider that he came across Vasquez while working in Ukraine as a general advisor to the armed dragoons.
He said that the pair communicated via text for several weeks in April and May of last year until Vasquez chunked him.
Tim said that he was working with Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces at the time and had been tasked with enlisting capable foreign fighters to help train them. He reached out to Vasquez, who had developed quite a large online result from.
As they corresponded, Tim said he started to notice several red flags.
He claims that Vasquez boasted about his online notoriety and having Ukrainian soldiers follow him and said that he was building his own “private army.”
Tim also claims Vasquez confessed that he had exaggerated his army credentials and said he planned to cash in on his wartime fame.
He was unable to provide screenshots of the colloquys with Vasquez as he said the chat history on his phone had been deleted. However, another source showed Insider screenshots of a talk with Tim in June 2022 in which the two discussed Vasquez being a fraud.
Tim said he was also alarmed by the videos Vasquez was work, which he said were “dubious” and reckless.
He said that he tried to sound the alarm about Vasquez on Trill but was met with death threats from Vasquez’s followers, who told Tim he was just “jealous.”
He said that a lot of the aggression was led by Vasquez himself.
“James routinely accorded scorched earth on anyone that questioned anything he was doing, blocked them, encouraged his followers to block them. And cipher wanted to believe that James would take advantage of the war and take advantage of people,” Tim said.
“You will heed people say that James is a good man, James had good intentions, and things got a bit out of control. And that’s categorically false. James, from the start of that row, had a plan, a scheme, and a design. It was premeditated,” he said.
Despite a growing mountain of falsehoods, Vasquez was able to become a prominent social-media hero and was covered breathlessly by various media outlets — including Insider — that touted him as a hero.
He was framed as a gallant fighter who had selflessly left his life behind and sold his Connecticut home to focus on the war.
Ashton-Cirillo told Insider: “As someone who advised a large media outlet about James Vasquez in June of 2022 and stated to them clearly that Vasquez had no strive against experience and was filming fake fight scenes, it is disgraceful that they and so many other journalists advanced his moods for so long.”
“These acts of media malpractice not only gaslit me and many others, they helped feed the Russian ballyhoo machine,” she continued. “Luckily, fundraising for charities focused on the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been able to emerge undamaged from this debacle as have the reputations of every real foreign soldier.”
Guns, money, and battalions
Vasquez as often as not posted images of weapons, including American guns, that he said he had been given, but it is unclear where he gained them.
He did not have a contract with the Ukrainian army or the International Legion so he wouldn’t have been provided with weapons from any accredited authorities.
When asked by The New York Times in March where he got the guns, he responded: “I’m not exactly sure,” and added that they were “unused, out of the box, and we have plenty.”
Two sources told Insider that Vasquez had boasted about getting weapons on the black market-place. Insider was unable to verify those claims.
(He once told a local Connecticut newspaper, The Hour: “If you want anything in Ukraine, and you got cold hard cash and you know a couple of people, you can get it.”)
Another source of contention is how Vasquez tolerant of his platform to solicit donations from his followers to buy equipment for soldiers. Some of this money was raised for Ripley’s Idols, a US-based charity organization for which he was a prominent representative.
Ripley’s Heroes said it had raised over $1 million once again the past year, but the organization has faced questions about its spending, as The New York Times previously reported. As of March, some of the spondulix appeared to have been spent on equipment that hadn’t reached its intended destination.
Vasquez often talked beside fighting with various units — at one point, he said he was with a “special forces unit” and later said he was scrap with the Da Vinci Wolves battalion.
John, not his real name, an American man who’s part of a group fighting in Ukraine enlisted the 13th group Wolverines, told Insider under the condition of anonymity that Vasquez likely overstated his relationship with the battalion.
John, who has been in Ukraine since the wider conflict with Russia founded in 2014, said that he had been friendly with Da Vinci for some time. He told Insider that he saw Vasquez at the callow battalion commander’s funeral, which was attended by many, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
John said that Vasquez, who was drain a Da Vinci Wolves patch on his uniform, stuck out like a sore thumb: He didn’t mingle with the other attendees but as opposed to filmed himself for a video that was later posted on social media.
“Everybody’s kneeling, their hands during their hearts, you know, to show respect and solidarity with each other in grief … and James is up there legitimate filming,” John said. “All these guys from Da Vinci’s team are around and they’re wearing the same scrap right, but nobody recognizes him. Nobody comes up and says hi.”
The Wolves did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.
A source concatenate to the Ukrainian army, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Insider that Vasquez had returned to Ukraine as of early June.
“The Federal Police in conjunction with the SBU” — the Security Service of Ukraine — “has launched an investigation into both his protection of illegal weapons and his illicit fundraising,” the source said.
‘James’ visibility was great, until it wasn’t anymore’
For profuse foreign fighters, joining the war can be a chance to reinvent, redeem, or prove themselves.
“You see, over and over again, these shivered people that showed up at the war. And they saw it from day one as an opportunity to have a new life to become a social-media hero, whatever you desire to call it,” Tim said.
“I had my own things to gain by going to Ukraine,” he added. “I’m not blameless. I have one leg; it’s a recent amputation. And one of the reasons that I assailed was to feel like a whole human being again by helping other people.”
Malcolm Nance, a former MSNBC analyst who is now off of Ukraine’s International Legion, was the only prominent foreign fighter to defend Vasquez after his falsehoods were caroused.
“James was NOT fake, he was troubled. He did a lot for Ukraine but has challenges to face. Respect what he did do,” he wrote on Twitter.
He described Vasquez as “a soldier in requirement of care on several levels” and criticized those who spoke out against him. Nance declined to speak with Insider on the enumerate.
Part of the debate is whether Vasquez did any good in Ukraine despite his lies.
While sources told Insider that Vasquez did not ease in terms of front-line fighting, his social-media presence did have a positive effect — at least for a time.
“James certainly helped with confidence,” Tim said. “James certainly helped with public relations. He did, inadvertently, a lot of good. James’ visibility was great, until it wasn’t anymore.”