In April 2022, when 30-year-old Trevor Reed finally came home to Texas after three years in a Russian gulag, he didn’t want to enjoy a cushy life or start college. The Marine veteran wanted revenge — specifically he wanted to go to Ukraine and fight against the Russians.
“I knew I could never be myself again if justice wasn’t served,” he told The Post in an exclusive interview. “I knew what the Ukrainians must be going through. I had the training and experience to help them.”
It was a decision that devastated his father, who had worked tirelessly for years to free him.
“He looked at me in shock and bewilderment, utterly confused,” Reed writes in his new memoir, “Retribution: A Former US Marine’s Harrowing Journey from Wrongful Imprisonment in Russia to the Front Lines of the Ukrainian War” (William Morrow; January 27), of the moment he told his dad of his plans.
“I told him I was going to kill every one of those sons of b—–s. His face went white. His eyes sank into his skull, black rings around them. He looked like he had seen a ghost,” Reed said.
He had served for four years in the Marines without deploying and went on to work as a security contractor in Afghanistan and date a Russian named Alina “Lina” Tsybulnik he met on Tinder.
Out with her one night in Moscow in August of 2019, his life took a sharp turn. He got spectacularly drunk at a party and woke up at the police station, no memory of what transpired.
“A young female police officer came over and asked if I was all right,” Reed recalled. “She said I had been extremely drunk and slept in her office all night. I was not detained and I could have left.”
But, Reed’s Russian wasn’t good enough to navigate Moscow alone, so he waited for Lina to arrive.
Before she did, the shift changed and the police chief arrived with a “whole different attitude,” Reed said. “He detained me and called the [Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.] Soon after I was interrogated. The police began to fabricate a case against me.”
Reed was charged with Violence Against a Representative of the Government, punishable by ten years in prison. The police claimed he had assaulted two officers. There was no evidence. Even the young female investigator assigned to the case didn’t believe it.
The US ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan, called the charges “ridiculous” and said the trial that ensued was “theater of the absurd.”
At Reed’s preliminary hearing, the investigator “held up a piece of paper and started to read it before suddenly bursting into tears,” Reed writes in “Retribution.”
“‘It’s your job!’ shouted the judge,” Reed recounts. “She got up and left, tears streaming from her eyes.”
Then came the moment that sealed Reed’s fate. His lawyer presented a photograph of Reed in his Marine dress blues standing beside President Obama, for whom Reed had served as a guard at Camp David.
“If there was a picture of me with the president, then I must not be a know-nothing, worthless Marine,” Reed writes. “No. I was a very valuable personal friend of the president, someone who could be worth quite a lot as a political bargaining chip.”
Reed was sent to SIZO-5, a Moscow detention center. When guards led him to his cell, he braced for a fight. Instead, the biggest prisoner — a Chechen known as Adlan — read his paperwork and smiled.
“Apparently holding official papers that say you nearly killed two policemen is one of the best ways to make friends in a Russian prison,” Reed writes.
Over the next three years, Reed endured solitary confinement, and cells “barely big enough to turn around in” and “starvation rations of stale bread and salty fish and bones.”
He lost 50 pounds and barely kept his sanity. Reed’s parents spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting for his release as their son’s health declined behind bars. He had Covid and was later hospitalized in prison after he started coughing up blood and had what appeared to be tuberculosis.
Finally, in April 2022, Russia agreed to a prisoner swap.
After 985 days in Russian custody, Trevor Reed walked free.
But the man who came home was not the same man who’d been arrested. “This isn’t a metaphor. I had become a different human in the gulag,” Reed writes. “The drive for revenge overrode everything.”
So, he joined Rogue Team, an elite volunteer unit of combat veterans operating near Bakhmut, in Eastern Ukraine. There, he found what he was looking for.
“I remember the first day I went to the safehouse in Donbas,” Reed said. “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. I slept for nine hours.”
For months, Rogue Team conducted reconnaissance missions and engaged in direct combat with Russian troops. Then, one night in early summer, 2023, after a successful assault on Russian positions, the unit began extracting through a minefield in pitch darkness.
Suddenly, there was “a sharp, cracking boom some meters ahead, followed swiftly by a stream of curses and agonized screams,” Reed writes.
Belka, a Belarussian volunteer, had stepped on a mine and his leg was left shredded.
Two teammates, Pele and Austria, moved forward to carry Belka to safety. Then Pele stepped off the trail and another mine exploded, taking down Reed.
“Blood streamed from my legs,” he writes. He managed to apply a tourniquet to himself before shock set in. “Then things began to go numb. I felt like I was sinking into the earth. My arms, which hadn’t been hit, stopped working. I realized I was very likely going to die.”
As his face twitched uncontrollably, Reed told one of teammates to give a message to his family and make sure they knew he had died a free man.
“It was the most important thing I could tell them,” he writes. “It thanked them for helping free me from the Russians, and at the same time embodied the greatest truth of my life. I am a free man.”
Medics evacuated Reed under fire. He spent weeks in Ukrainian and German hospitals recovering from severe leg injuries, but he was able to keep his leg. Belka and another teammate, Pele, weren’t so lucky, but they got prosthetics and returned to Ukraine to fight. Four other Rogue Team members who kept fighting were eventually killed.
“I owe my life to those guys,” Reed writes. I can’t help but think I should have been there for them, as they were for me. Until Valhalla, brothers.”
Today, Reed, now 33, is home in Texas. His parents continue working with Bring Our Families Home, helping families of Americans wrongfully detained abroad.
“Although I’m proud of what we did in Ukraine, coming home alive and being with the people I love was more important than any moment on the battlefield,” says Reed.
While he initially went to Ukraine wanting to get his revenge on Russia, his idea of retribution has since shifted.
“In spite of everything the Russians did to me, I will not be broken … In my own way, I have paid them back,” Reed writes. “I have learned that the greatest revenge is to survive and be free.”
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