At the 2 June parade, the Italian Alpine corps showed, as always, all its pride and efficiency. The white feathers of the officers, the winter uniforms, the hi-tech equipment of the special forces of the Monte Cervino mountain paratroopers. The television announcer rightly recalling their generous contribution during earthquakes and other catastrophes.

But the Alpine who should be talked about more was not in Via dei Fori Imperiali.

He had fallen in Lyman, in north-eastern Ukraine, killed by a swarm of drones last 23 May.

He was a 42-year-old man from La Spezia, with a mild gaze and sincere manners, who not only defended the Kurds against Isis for five years and then Ukraine against the Russians, but endeavoured to explain to Italian public what war really is today and with what attitude a person brought up in the West can credibly come to terms with his conscience to fight it.

Alex Pineschi, therefore, was much more than an ex-serviceman, a private firearms trainer and a volunteer in the international brigades.

He was a witness to war in its reality: he knew how to describe it with lucid professionalism in its technical and biomechanical aspects and then, a moment later, he knew how to narrate its emotional and human aspects with swollen eyes and tangled sentences.

He knew how to avoid any heroic rhetoric (easy) but above all any cynical rhetoric (much more difficult).

He knew how to scrutinise the intimate motivations of every person he met at the front – or even just on a training course – and discern between those who were there out of necessity, those out of sadistic venting, those out of existential emptiness and those, like him, out of seeing ‘a cause worth risking for: risking while I was there and risking once I was back’.

In spite of himself, therefore, from being a witness Pineschi had become an example.
An example capable of inspiring hundreds of Italian volunteers and thousands of international volunteers who are fighting for Ukraine (almost 3% of the troops, so a help without which the front would have already crumbled in several places).
But also an example capable of explaining to us Western civilians, with words not far from our sensibility, that yes, one can make a responsible and conscious use of force, and sometimes one must.

This is how a fellow soldier remembers him: ‘A soldier from beginning to end. In many years of service, he is the most complete soldier I have ever met. His public activities and his books tell only a fraction of the person he was: an exceptional man, humble and straightforward, always willing – really – to help others’.

From snow to desert

Pineschi told that he enlisted after the Twin Towers bombing, choosing the Alpine Corps because his father was a passionate mountaineer and had passed on to him a love for mountains and winter sports.

After his voluntary service in the 8th regiment, he tried to switch to permanent service but was unsuccessful. However, he did not give up and went into the private security sector, training in the USA and specialising in combating piracy (the physical one, not the digital one).

He had just turned 30 when news started to come in about the Isis offensive between Iraq and Syria.
“At the time I was on board,” he recounted, “and I was trying to document myself, I was trying to study every single article, I was watching every single video that dealt with this subject, because then it was the time of the terrorist attacks in our capitals, then in Europe.
I started to give birth to a thought: that I was in the wrong place, because a war was being fought against the enemies of humanity, against the enemies of freedom, against the enemies of my people, of my way of life as a westerner. And that led me to give birth to the idea that I had to somehow participate in that conflict’.

Many, at the time, took him for a sentimentalist seduced by the Kurdish cause. “No, not at all,” he clarified. “I supported the fight against the terrorists, who at the time were the enemies of humanity. If the Swedes had fought the terrorists, I would have gone with the Swedes.”

However, in the Kurdish war against Isis he distinguished himself to such an extent that he became one of only two foreigners to receive command roles.

Like Seneca

Once the Islamic State had been defeated in the Middle East theatre, Pineschi came back to Italy and devoted himself to his work as a trainer with the independent academy AP TAC.
His clients included not only amateurs and private companies, but also members of the police and armed forces.

Less welcoming was the judiciary: waiting for him back home was an investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, aimed at establishing whether his activities in Iraq constituted a mercenary offence.
The investigation was closed after less than five months.

‘The investigators will have done all their assessments, all their interceptions, all their proceedings to understand the truth,’ Pineschi reiterated in 2022. “And in the end what happened? What happened is that a magistrate, not the guy in the coffee shop drinking coffee, but a magistrate, as a result of the interrogation – all of which you will find online in clear – ruled that no wrongdoing had been committed.
So the answer is this: is Alex Pineschi a mercenary? No’.

Meanwhile, he was compiling his memoirs into a book, self-published under the title Peshmerga – facing death (also available as an audiobook).

Within his appeal to death, there was never any disturbing curiosity nor thrill of risk: only a profound awareness, which unwittingly recalled some of the best pages of European philosophy from Seneca to Heidegger.

“The moment you realise what you are ready to die for, in that instant you realise why you get up every morning, why you are living,” he repeated in a video from 2024.

‘At least for now I am not a father, but I imagine that a father would be ready to die for his family. That’s where you understand why you get up every day and go out there: to protect your family, to see it thrive, for your children…the war gave me the opportunity to learn and to apply what I learned for a cause that was worth it.”

Spontaneously, those who knew him in person or followed him on social media kept asking him why he did not go to Ukraine at that point.
“To this day that war doesn’t feel like mine,” he still replied two years ago. “This war between Russia and Ukraine I for now still don’t feel it mine. And if I don’t believe in something I can’t devote my life to it and if necessary my death.”

What changed afterwards we do not know, but knowing him, we are certain that when he finally chose to leave, first as a trainer and then as a soldier, he did so after long reflection and consistently with his conscience.

Media lies: a second killing?

In the digital age, physical death is not enough. For family and friends, grief is compounded by the desperate struggle to defend the memory of their loved one against haters and envious people who seek to offend it.

Usually these are just tactless and unscrupulous keyboard dogs. But with Pineschi, something much worse happened: ANSA press agency (which, as is well known, has a partnership with TASS, the Kremlin’s official one) announced his death calling him a ‘contractor’, i.e. a paid mercenary.

Following some protests, the agency corrected itself (not on X, however, where the tweet is still the original one). But the damage was done.

The editorial boards of the major newspapers, including Repubblica, Rainews, Open, la Stampa, il Mattino, il Giorno, la Nazione, il Secolo XIX, il Fatto Quotidiano and il Corriere dello Sport (to their credit, not il Foglio and il Corriere della Sera) did just copy-paste, without bothering to verify the judicial evidence nor to contact his family or acquaintances.

The original version of the tweet by ANSA press agency.

And so, through laziness, negligence, lack of time or the ‘banality of evil’, the vast majority of Italians have come to know an alternative and infamous truth about this man.
The killing of the body was followed by the killing of the memory.

“These evenings I did not fall asleep until I collapsed,” wrote Giulia Schiff, a former Air Force pilot who was also a volunteer in Ukraine. “I lost so many friends in the war, I lost count. Even if it ends or even if you walk away from it, it haunts you. After a while you run out of tears. It no longer hurts angrily and desperately as in the beginning, but it burns inside as I stare at the ceiling in the dark and the silence becomes deafening.”

“More than a brother in arms,” he continued, turning to Pineschi, “you were the only one in the world who not only understood me, but also bore the mark that I had. After serving with love for one’s Arma and Homeland, we were guillotined in the court of public opinion and the media, split in two with mud machines that branded us with the label of mercenaries… publicly.

The articles, the posts, the comments, friends who vanished in our hour of need, colleagues who turned their backs on us.

But “your support, esteem, wisdom and trust gave me strength. Your eyes scarred by what they saw in the war were a well on the inner suffering you lived.
Seeing what your friends write on social media shows how much you were loved and fills my heart… seeing what those who know no decency write tightens a knot in my throat and chokes me up.
Your example is monumental and you gave body and soul for this ungrateful world. So this is what I will try to do for you: a monument’.

It will be a tough, though necessary, challenge. For the moment, all that is monumental is the indifference and incompetence of the press, in a country that should feel represented by men like Alex Pineschi much more than by two hours of parading around in glittering uniforms.