KYIV, Ukraine — Andrew Milburn, a former American Marine colonel and chief of the Mozart Group, stood in a cold assembly room on the second ground of an residence constructing in Kyiv about to ship some dangerous information. In entrance of him sat half a dozen males who had traveled to Ukraine on their very own dime to work for him.
“Guys, I’m gutted,” he mentioned. “The Mozart Group is useless.”
The boys stared again at him with clean faces.
One requested as he walked towards the door, “What ought to I do with my helmet?”
The Mozart Group, one of the distinguished, non-public American army organizations in Ukraine, has collapsed beneath a cloud of accusations starting from monetary improprieties to alcohol-addled misjudgments. Its struggles present a revealing window into the world of international volunteer teams which have flocked to Ukraine with noble intentions solely to be tripped up by the stresses of managing an advanced enterprise in a warfare zone.
“I’ve seen this occur many occasions,” mentioned one in every of Mozart’s veteran trainers, who, like many others, spoke solely anonymously out of considerations that the Russians would possibly goal him. “You bought to run these teams like a enterprise. We didn’t do this.”
A whole lot if not hundreds of international veterans and volunteers have handed by means of Ukraine. A lot of them, like Mr. Milburn and his group, are hard-living males who’ve spent their grownup lives steeped in violence, solo fliers attempting to work collectively in a really harmful setting with out lots of construction or guidelines.
The Mozart Group thrived at first, coaching Ukrainian troops, rescuing civilians from the entrance traces and elevating greater than 1,000,000 {dollars} in donations to finance all of it. However then the cash started to expire.
After months struggling to carry itself collectively, Mozart was tormented by defections, infighting, a break-in at its workplace headquarters and a lawsuit filed by the corporate’s chief monetary officer, Andrew Bain, in search of the ouster of Mr. Milburn.
The lawsuit, filed in Wyoming, the place Mozart is registered as a restricted legal responsibility firm, is a litany of petty and critical allegations, accusing Mr. Milburn amongst different issues of creating derogatory feedback onabout Ukraine’s management whereas “considerably intoxicated,” letting his canine urinate in a borrowed residence and “diverting firm funds” and different monetary malfeasance.
“I’ll be the primary to confess that I’m flawed,” mentioned Mr. Milburn, who acknowledged in an interview that he had been ingesting when he made the feedback on Ukraine. “All of us are.” However he denied the extra critical allegations about monetary improprieties, calling them “totally ridiculous.”