Former MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance has joined the fight against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nance appeared on MSNBC’s The ReidOut with Joy Reid on Monday night wearing full combat gear and holding a firearm. He explained how he went from a reporter to a combatant in this escalating conflict.
“I spent quite a bit of time here in the pre-war period,” Nance said, “and when the invasion happened, I had friends who were in Donetsk, who were in the Ukrainian army, who were writing to us and telling us, ‘We are not going to survive tonight. We have been hit 500 times.’ The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, ‘I’m done talking. It’s time to take action.’”
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Nance explained that he has technically enlisted in the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, which is a unit of foreign military personnel now under the Ukrainian armed forces. He said that he joined the legion about a month ago and that so far he still feels righteous in his fight.
“I am here to help this country fight what is essentially a war of extermination. This is an existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people and they are mass murdering civilians. And there are people here like me who are here to do something about it,” Nance said. He added that other people in the legion are there “for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to protect the innocent people of Ukraine from this Russian aggression. It’s not a conventional war.”
Nance served in the U.S. Navy before going into journalism. He was a counterterrorism specialist as well. A spokesperson for MSNBC told Deadline this week that he is no longer a contributor. In spite of his public notoriety, Nance said that he did not believe he would be targeted specifically by Russian forces.
“The war that is being waged here is being waged against everybody. They are not going around hunting for American flag patches or to see who’s Black, who’s Asian, who’s Latino,” he said. He added that his group is “fighting side by side, elbow with elbow” with the Ukrainian military, while the Russians are “barely” attacking troops directly. “Their emphasis seems to be the mass murder of civilians, which seems to be against all laws of war. These are war crimes,” he said. The invasion of Ukraine continues at the time of this writing with no signs of slowing down.
