A U.S. Air Force veteran who was facing a possession of child pornography charge when he fled the country appears to have confirmed, in a propaganda video released Monday, that he has joined the Russian Army. He insisted he is not a traitor.
“I’m Will, I’m from Massachusetts,” Wilmer Puello-Mota, who is also a former city councilman in Holyoke, Massachusetts, said in the five-minute video released by Russia’s Defense Ministry. “My call sign is ‘Boston.'”
Puello-Mota, 28, is serving as a reconnaissance drone operator with the Russian military units fighting the Ukrainians in the Donetsk region, according to the Defense Ministry, which identified him as both an “American with Russian citizenship” and a “former American citizen.”
“I don’t consider myself a traitor,” Puello-Mota, dressed in combat gear, said in the video.
Puello-Mota made no mention in the footage of the criminal charges he was facing when he fled in January to Russia, via Turkey.
Instead, Puello-Mota said, “I’m from Boston, Massachusetts, and I served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force, some years in the Massachusetts International Guard, and I did two years as a city councilor.”
Holyoke City Council President Tessa Murphy-Romboletti said she recognizes the soldier in the video.
“I can confirm that it appears to be Will in the video,” she said via email.
Puello-Mota was supposed to show up in a Rhode Island courtroom on Jan. 9 and plead guilty to possessing sexually explicit images of a child and other charges that could have sent him to prison for at least five years, his lawyer, John M. Cicilline, said in an interview with The Boston Globe.
Cicilline said that Puello-Mota told him the day before that he had other plans.
“He said, ‘I joined the Russian army,’ or something like that,” Cicilline told The Globe. “I thought he was joking.”
Cicilline also told the newspaper that Puello-Mota wanted a career in politics and thought being charged with child pornography possession had ruined his life.
“I’m sure he joined the Russian army because he didn’t want to register as a sex offender,” Cicilline said.
NBC News has reached out to Cicilline at his law office in Providence, Rhode Island, for comment on the latest development.
Puello-Mota served in the U.S. Air Force and deployed to Afghanistan in 2015, when he was 19, service records obtained by NBC News show. He later served with the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Wing as a security forces airman.
Although Puello-Mota claimed to be from Boston, records show he actually lived some 90 miles west of there in the city of Holyoke.
Puello-Mota served on the Holyoke City Council from 2021 to 2023 and was aligned with conservative councilors who supported former President Donald Trump, The Boston Globe reported.
Halfway through his term, the city tried to kick Puello-Mota off the council after learning that he had been arrested in May 2020 when police found nude photos and videos on his phone of a 17-year-old girl they said he’d gone to meet at a hotel in Warwick, Rhode Island. He was also charged with obstruction of the judicial system, forgery and counterfeiting.
Two months after he fled the States, The Republican, a newspaper based in Springfield, Massachusetts, reported that “Holyokers were abuzz” after video surfaced on Instagram of a man in a Russian uniform planting a U.S. flag in what appeared to be the wrecked Ukrainian city of Avdiivka.
His face was blurred, but the newspaper reported that people in Holyoke who knew Puello-Mota were convinced it was him.
Then, in April, according to The Moscow Times, the ministry released a video of what appeared to be Puello-Mota inside an army enlistment office and identified him only as a former U.S. soldier named “Will.”
In the newest video, Puello-Mota explained why he joined the Russian army.
“When I got involved in politics, I zoomed out into the international level of politics, and you really stop and pause and think about what’s going on here,” he said. “You feel like you have to do something about it.”
Puello-Mota also blamed the U.S. for the war in Ukraine, said he has a girlfriend, and sounded thrilled to be a member of the Russian army.
“I love these guys,” he said.