His "passion for skiing and the mountains" as a boy had led him to volunteer in the Alpine troops, and his desire to "feel useful for a cause" led him to fight alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga against ISIS. But the Donbass front was the last battlefield in the "soldier's life" for Alex Pineschi, a 42-year-old native of La Spezia who recently died after joining Kiev's special intelligence forces in recent months. He is the 11th Italian confirmed to have died during the war in Ukraine.
His death "on the battlefield" was announced on the Facebook profile of the volunteer association Memorial. "Please help us honor him so he is not forgotten," it read. Another post circulating on social media groups focused on foreign fighters in that country indicates that he was killed on May 23 "along with his comrades from a drone control unit heading towards Liman." This information has not yet been confirmed by official sources.
Pineschi, who is survived by his father, was well-known in La Spezia and beyond. Founder of Ap Tac, a training center specializing in "tactical firearms training" with operational headquarters in Torre de' Negri (Pavia), he himself had often shared information about himself through YouTube videos, interviews, and three books.
Like when, in a 2017 episode of the Rai program Nemo, he spoke of his time in Syria and Iraq as a fighter "against terrorists" and as a trainer for Kurds. "If someone were to ask me today why you decided to fight, I would answer: because I saw a cause worth risking," he once explained, referring to that period, which lasted about five years in total, from 2014 to 2019. Upon his return to Italy, his case was also investigated by the prosecutor, due to suspicions that he was a mercenary. But the proceedings were dismissed (at the prosecutor's request, among other things) because his role was instead classified as "volunteer."
"The war gave me the opportunity to learn" and "to understand who I was" were other reflections Pineschi, remembered by many in recent hours with condolences on social media and who would have turned 43 on October 17, shared in recalling his experiences in the Middle East. Having reached the end of a period in which he worked as a "freelancer in the private security sector in Italy and abroad," he felt he "wanted more" from his life, also to overcome the "suffering" of not having "managed to realize the dream of permanently wearing the army uniform." Initially, however, the conflict in Ukraine had not attracted him in the same way. "I don't feel that war is mine," he said in a video published in August 2024.
