U.S. Marine, Who Spent Three Years in a Russian Gulag, Gets Revenge on Country by Helping Ukraine

After three years in a Russian gulag, a gutsy U.S. marine got revenge — by battling the Russians in Ukraine.

“I knew I could never be myself again if justice wasn’t served,” Trevor Reed told the New York Post. “I knew what the Ukrainians must be going through. I had the training and experience to help them.”

Reed had served four years without deploying when he went to work as a security contractor in Afghanistan.

He met a Russian beauty named Alina online and was with her in Moscow in August 2019 when his life turned upside down.

After a night of heavy boozing, he woke up in a police station and was charged with assaulting two cops — even though he didn’t remember a thing.

Then-U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Sullivan, called the charges “ridiculous” and blasted Reed’s trial as a “theater of the absurd.”

Despite that, Reed was found guilty and slapped with a nine-month sentence.

While behind bars, Reed endured solitary confinement and “starvation rations of stale bread and salty fish and bones,” he writes in a new memoir, Retribution: A U.S. Marine’s Fight for Justice, From the Russian Gulag to Ukraine’s Front Lines.

He contracted COVID, started coughing up blood and dropped 50 pounds.

His parents spent thousands of dollars fighting for his release and in April 2022, Russia agreed to a prisoner swap.

Reed walked free after 985 days in custody, but he wasn’t the same man.

“This isn’t a metaphor,” he writes. “I had become a different man in the gulag. The drive for revenge overrode everything.”

He joined Rogue Team, an elite volunteer unit of combat veterans in Eastern Ukraine — and found what he was looking for.

“I felt that live or die, by finally making it there, I was taking my life back from the Russians. I felt an inner peace that is hard to describe,” he writes.

For months, the team engaged in direct contact with Russian troops.

While extracting through a mine field in pitch dark in summer 2023, Reed was wounded by shrapnel. He was evacuated under fire and spent weeks in Ukrainian and German hospitals recovering from severe leg injuries.

Now home in Texas, Reed says his idea of revenge has shifted.

“In spite of everything the Russians did to me, I will not be broken,” he writes. “In my own way, I have paid them back. I have learned that the greatest revenge is to survive and be free.”