Hard Drinking and Murky Finances: How an American Veterans Group Imploded in Ukraine
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Jeffrey Gettleman
Thu, February 2, 2023 at 7:28 AM EST·8 min read
KYIV, Ukraine — Andrew Milburn, a former American Marine colonel and leader of the Mozart Group, stood in a chilly meeting room on the second floor of an apartment building in Kyiv about to deliver some bad news. In front of him sat half a dozen men who had traveled to Ukraine on their own dime to work for him.
“Guys, I’m gutted,” he said. “The Mozart Group is dead.”
The men stared back at him with blank faces.
One asked as he walked toward the door, “What should I do with my helmet?”
The Mozart Group, one of the most prominent, private American military organizations in Ukraine, has collapsed under a cloud of accusations ranging from financial improprieties to alcohol-addled misjudgments....
....After months struggling to hold itself together, Mozart was plagued by defections, infighting, a break-in at its office
headquarters and a lawsuit filed by the company’s chief financial officer, Andrew Bain, seeking the ouster of Milburn.
The lawsuit, filed in Wyoming, where Mozart is registered as a limited liability company, is a litany of petty and serious allegations, accusing Milburn among other things of making derogatory comments about Ukraine’s leadership while “significantly intoxicated,” letting his dog urinate in a borrowed apartment and “diverting company funds” and other financial malfeasance.
“I’ll be the first to admit that I’m flawed,” said Milburn, who acknowledged in an interview that he had been drinking when he made the comments on Ukraine. “We all are.” But he denied the more serious allegations about financial improprieties, calling them “utterly ridiculous.”
As spring passed to summer, more Ukrainian military units asked Mozart for training. But the Ukrainians could not pay for it, leaving Mozart reliant on a small pool of steady donors, including a group of East Coast financiers with Jewish-Ukrainian roots and a Texas tycoon.
Everyone involved said it became stressful just making payroll. And several employees said that the way the money flowed into the organization, which was overseen by Bain, was opaque.
“I can’t tell you how many people would come up to me at a party and said, “Hey, Marty, I love what you’re doing. I want to give you $10,000,” said Martin Wetterauer, one of Milburn’s old Marine friends and Mozart’s operations chief. “But we would never know if the money actually came in.”
On top of that, the people Mozart hired were not the easiest to manage. Many were grizzled combat vets who admitted to struggling with PTSD and heavy drinking. When they weren’t working, they gravitated to Kyiv’s strip clubs, bars and online dating.
On Dec. 11, a Sunday morning, Milburn and a couple of employees went to the company’s headquarters, housed in a Kyiv building Bain owns, to retrieve winter jackets, body armor and some personal luggage locked in a storeroom.
When a security guard refused to let them in, one of Milburn’s men pinned him against a wall while Milburn kicked down the door. He later said they needed the gear for missions in Donbas, the eastern Ukraine region under relentless Russian attack.
Not long after that, a clip of Milburn disparaging Ukraine’s leadership circulated widely on social media. “I happen to have a Ukraine flag tied to my bag, but I’m not, ‘Oh my God, Ukraine is so awesome,’” he said. “I understand that there are plenty of screwed-up people running Ukraine.”
The clip was taken from The Team House podcast, in which guests are invited into a living room setting to drink hard liquor with the hosts. “Of course I shouldn’t have said that,” Milburn acknowledged.
But he’s not going back to the front anytime soon. He spent hours this week in front of his laptop. He’s scouting out new business, such as training courses for hostile environments. He’s writing emails to donors.
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