Former POW Alex Drueke speaks ahead of Waynesville appearance tomorrow
Alex Drueke, held as a prisoner by Russian Armed forces, will speak at Grace Church in the Mountains on Jan. 17.
Cory Vaillancourt photo
On Saturday, Jan. 17, Grace Church in the Mountains in Waynesville will host a daylong series of worship services, presentations and artistic offerings focused on peace, education and action in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine — along with one unique guest.
“A Day of Prayer for Ukraine and Beyond” begins with morning prayer at 9 a.m., followed at 9:30 a.m. by a presentation from Alex Drueke.
Drueke is a U.S. Army Reserve veteran from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who served two tours in Iraq before traveling to Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion to help train Ukrainian forces. Drueke joined foreign volunteer units and was captured by Russian forces near Kharkiv in June 2022 and held as a prisoner of war for more than 100 days before being freed in a prisoner exchange. Drueke returned to Ukraine after his release to continue supporting humanitarian and advocacy efforts and has spoken publicly about his captivity and the broader conflict.
At 10:30 a.m., the church will screen the film A Faith Under Siege, a 2025 documentary directed by Yaroslav Lodygin that chronicles how Ukrainian Christians endure persecution under Russian occupation and maintain their faith amid war — highlighting seized churches, tortured pastors and abducted children.
A noon Eucharist will open the afternoon session, followed from 2-3:30 p.m. by “Dances of Universal Peace,” an interfaith participatory body prayer experience.
Evening prayer is scheduled for 5 p.m., with dinner at 5:30 p.m. Western North Carolina’s Republican Congressman, Chuck Edwards, is scheduled for brief remarks at 6:15 p.m. Edwards has expressed support for Ukraine in the past, including after he visited the country in 2024.
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A 6:30 p.m. presentation by John and Donna Culp titled “Mission to Ukraine: Update,” will round out the evening. The event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required for dinner. For more information, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
The Smoky Mountain News caught up with Drueke at the church the day before the event to talk about the geopolitical importance of the conflict, the reality of being a Russian prisoner of war and national security issues in the developing field of drone warfare.
The Smoky Mountain News: Like the rest of the world, you saw the invasion of Ukraine and you decided to go and help the Ukrainians. Why?
Alex Drueke: It wasn't really a choice for me. You know, I saw what was happening in Ukraine and I just felt compelled to go and help.
I served in the Army Reserve for 12 years. I did two tours in Iraq. I saw that NATO weapons were about to be sent to Ukraine, and I figured, with NATO weapons, you're going to need to know NATO tactics, NATO doctrine. When I got out of the Army, I was a platoon sergeant, so I had 40 soldiers underneath me and my favorite thing to do in the Army was train soldiers. I just loved it. So I really felt like I had things to offer the Ukrainian people to help with this horrible invasion, this totally illegal war.
I'm divorced. I've got no kids. I had a truck and a dog to worry about. My truck would stay with my aunt. My dog would stay with my mom. And you know that way, I felt like, if you send me there, then it saves a Ukrainian from having to go to the front. It's a force multiplier.
I needed a little bit of equipment. I didn't like the body armor I had, so I had to order a few things, or else I would have been there like the 23rd [the day after the Feb. 22, 2022 invasion] but I landed almost exactly six weeks after the invasion happened in Lviv then started the process of joining the Legion.
SMN: Describe the circumstances leading to your capture.
AD: I was serving as light infantry. I was with First Battalion, and then with Third Battalion, training foreign fighters, training people that had showed up that had no military experience or just law enforcement experience. I mean, it was incredible to see the thousands of primarily men that had come from all over the world, offering whatever they had and with such varying degrees of military experience, combat experience, no experience.
There was a very small group of us that eventually ended up just being three of us, including me, that went around the country training Ukrainian units directly. We worked with everybody, national police, the army, the National Guard, you name it, but unfortunately, there's still a large degree of Soviet mindset, especially among the higher-ups in the military, and so we were having issues getting the proper paperwork to be able to stay with these units and train them. The company commanders and everybody on down would say, "We love this. We'd love to keep having you, but our battalion commander won't let us get you paperwork."
So we hopped around doing that for a while, and then we got an invitation to join a GRU unit — military intelligence — and that was the unit that was operating out of Kharkiv. So we went out on a reconnaissance mission with them, less than six kilometers from the Russian border.
This is back in the infancy of drones in warfare. We were just setting up a Mavic to spot artillery positions, radio the Ukrainians let the Ukrainians bomb it. But the fog of war is real, and just everything that could go wrong, on that mission, it did go wrong.
Myself and another American, we got separated. We spent about a total of about 12 hours evading the enemy and trying to make it back to base. We had driven for over an hour and a half to get to this location, and we were trying to make it back on foot with no maps, no radios, no nothing.
Eventually, the Russians did manage to get us in a pincer movement. There was a platoon-size element that just got around us, and to be honest, I was prepared to go out in a blaze of glory and just take as many of them with me as I could.
But the guy with me, he's 13 years younger than me. He had just gotten engaged. He had told me about his plans — that he wanted to have five, six kids. And when things really first started going south, we were running from a T-72 tank that we had fired an RPG at. We found this little hole to hide in. We jumped in that and he immediately turned to me and said, ‘I've decided I want to live.’ So when we got caught in that pincer movement, I was ready to shoot and I looked over said, ‘I can't. If I do that, my buddy dies, and I can't let him die.’ So that's the only reason that I lay down my arms and then they captured us.
SMN: Russian captivity, I'm sure, is …
AD: Not recommended.
SMN: I’m sure. Did it ever become routine? Was there ever a normal, standard day, or was it always different?
AD: It was different every single day. We were four different locations throughout the almost four months of captivity and I can tell you firsthand, the Russians are guilty of violating every single human rights violation — every single thing in the Geneva Conventions, they violate it. It's real, and if you don't believe the stories you hear on TV, you need to come talk to me.
SMN: A lot of people in the United States, especially on the political right, don't think that this should be a priority for the United States or even a concern whatsoever. Why are they wrong?
AD: I do understand that we have a lot of domestic issues and a lot of things that need to be taken care of here at home. I really do understand that, but everyone — not just the people on the right, but everyone — needs to understand this is not a Ukraine issue. It's not an Eastern European issue. It's not a European issue. It's a world issue.
This is already a world war. We know for a fact that the Russians are employing Africans, North Koreans. They're being supplied by China. You know, the current-day Axis of Evil is actively operating against the West in Ukraine, and we are still the leader of the West. So if Ukraine does fall, we know Putin is not going to be satisfied. He's been vocal about that. He has said he will take all the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. We know for a fact he'll take Moldova, and eventually he's going to go for Poland, and this will become a NATO issue, and we are still the backbone of NATO as it stands.
So, as horrible as it sounds right now, the Ukrainians are fighting with their blood, and we're just fighting with our with our equipment and our and our money, but I would much rather us be fighting this war with equipment and money than with our own blood. Everyone needs to realize, especially those on the right because I think most conservatives tend to be more pro-military and serve in the military, they have to realize we don't stop it in Ukraine, you are going to be fighting the Russians and you will be fighting China.
SMN: Drone warfare — you talked about this a little bit before. Certainly, it was in its infancy at the time, and now it seems like Ukraine and Russia are competing in the world to be the best, because they always have to leapfrog each other technologically. They have to respond to new developments, new technologies instantly. Talk a little bit about Ukraine's drone program to your knowledge, and just how you feel like they're doing in that fight to stay one step ahead of the Russians.
AD: It’s a major, major challenge. I mean, it's been so incredible to watch the evolution of drone warfare throughout this. Even when we first got released, I got home and I was contacting all my buddies that were still serving and just finding out what they were doing and during the time I'd been in captivity, we'd gone from recon-only [drones] to making their own bombs in these workshops and rigging up all these drone systems and showing me videos of them using a $300 drone with $50 homemade explosives taking out a multimillion-dollar tank. It's only increased since then.
They're constantly playing this game of cat and mouse where a new drone system comes out. It's sent in from the Russians. The Ukrainians identify how to block that electronic signal so they can stop it. The Russians then change that electronic signal back and forth, and the Ukrainians are doing the same thing. It's this, this massive evolution to where, currently, drones alone are accounting for 70% to 80% of battlefield losses. Not just personnel, but also equipment. So drones dominate the battlefield.
If you think about how this war started, it was trench warfare with drones. It’s a trench here and a trench there, and you can see your enemy, and you're shooting at them. The zero line. Now, it's no man's land. No one's there. The drones have backed up to where we have a 50-kilometer gray zone, and if you go there, you're dead.
SMN: As an infantryman, talk about the psychological terror of knowing that a drone could show up and drop molten metal on your head at any moment.
AD: It was scary. I mean, even on our capture day, when we were evading the enemy, we knew that drones were a part of the battlefield. The Russians knew where we were, and so we had artillery and mortar fire regularly coming in on us.
We had been taught in the US military, if you're facing artillery, you find a hole, you get as low to the ground as you can and you pray. That's it. So we'd start receiving fire. We'd find a hole or a low spot or anything we could jump down in, but we've got no tree cover. And honestly, I'm more worried about a drone that has eyes, that has a camera, that can see me, than I am about just random artillery that thinks they know where we are. So we would jump out of the hole and go find some spot that was out in the open, on the ground but had tree cover because we were more afraid of drones.
They're deadly especially now, I mean, the FPV drones, the first-person view drones. We have competitions in the U.S. where they race these things. They're incredibly fast. You have so so little reaction time, and anywhere out in the open is exposed. Infantry is still very valuable. You can't take a town or a city without infantry, but the vast majority of the war, it's being fought by drone operators that are hiding underground. They live underground.
SMN: How effective do you think the Ukrainians have been in exporting their tactics, techniques and procedures with drones to friendly countries?
AD: That's something that we've really seen developing over the past year or so, I would say, is when it really hit kind of a high gear.
Ukraine is doing phenomenally, considering all the challenges they have to face. In manpower alone, Russia is 10 times larger in population, and they place no value whatsoever on human life. They're willing to put everybody they can into combat. The fact that the Ukrainians have managed to stave them off this long hold the not only regain everything that was taken in early 2022 but hold the front line, it's incredible.
I just recently returned from Ukraine, my fifth trip to Ukraine this past September and October, where I was working with a defense NGO We went to several defense conferences and saw the hundreds of Ukrainian companies that are out there, most of them actually run by the soldiers themselves, that are developing new drone technology and working on new drone technology and tactics. It's huge. The things they're doing are revolutionary and so impressive.
The issue is, they have the knowledge, they have the technology, they have the capacity, but they don't have the funding. And so they've been working very closely with a lot of European countries, especially Denmark and Poland, to work out deals where they say, "Well, listen, we'll give you our drone technology if you help us produce drones. And some of those models are really succeeding."
Unfortunately, we're not seeing that kind of collaboration happen in the U.S. We really need to. We are decades behind, and if a modern war hits our doorstep. We're done. We don't know how to fight it. We don't have the technology for it. We don't have the volume of drones necessary for it.
Most importantly, every single combat sortie flown by every single drone in Ukraine is recorded, and those recordings — just petabytes and petabytes and petabytes of recordings — are being saved, and that's what's necessary to plug into AI models so the AI models can learn because autonomous systems are the next step, I promise you, that's going to be the next step in drone technology and the next major development on the battlefield.
The only way to train those models is by having those petabytes of information. And if Russia is allowed to take Ukraine, that information is gone. No one gets it, besides Russia, China, Iran, their allies, and there's no way for us to regain that. So they'll be able to train their AI models, and we'll be screwed, frankly,
SMN: And you touched on what is my last question, which is the state of preparedness in the United States. I've heard some talk about even trying to incorporate drone operation into grade school and high school curricula. Like our high schools here, they have a shooting team, where you learn gun safety, you learn hunting, you learn laws, things like that. Why don't we have drone racing teams in our high schools? Not that we want to train people solely for war, but at the same time, all the commercial applications of drones. So the American state of readiness in the drone environment, how would you grade that?
AD: As I said, we're decades behind. And there's really two facets. The Russians, in their grade schools, they do drone training, but it's specifically military. And I don't want to over-militarize our public education system by any means, but you know, I think for the kids today, learning how to operate drones is natural. I mean, they're electronic kids, they're video game kids, and most of these things are VR headsets and a game controller. It'd be so easy for them to learn the basics of drone flight, not necessarily drone combat — that's different — and I would love to see more programs like that introduced within our public education system, because then the kids that do graduate and end up joining the military, that's a major step out of the way. They are already drone pilots. You just have to teach them combat techniques.
The bigger issue is DOD procurement and implementation of drones. I'm very pleased to see that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and a lot of the rest of the administration has realized that our procurement system is fairly broken, especially if you're talking about this kind of technology.
If you look at the defense contractors, Lockheed and Northrop and all of them, if you're putting out a $35 million jet or a $4 million tank, that takes time. It takes it takes a lot of money. But for drones, it's volume. It's sheer volume, and we don't have the rapid procurement system necessary for that right now. Drone technology in Ukraine, sometimes it only lasts a month before it's out of date. It's old, it's obsolete. It can't be used because there's a counter measure created. And so our procurement system, it takes decades to field one system. At that point, that thing won't even exist anymore, much less be effective on the battlefield. We really need to start coordinating more with our NATO allies, and in particular, with Ukraine, who should be a NATO member. They should be expedited. They are the most battle-tested, battle-experienced fighting force on the planet right now. We have so much to learn from them, and so we also need to learn their technology regimen. We need to learn their procurement system. Their manufacturing system. Because that's what's going to make us effective in any upcoming war.
I promise you, drones are going to rule the battlefield for at least the next few decades, no matter where or what the conflict is.
