{"id":69262,"date":"2026-04-17T03:35:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T03:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/69262\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T03:35:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T03:35:22","slug":"ct-native-and-vet-honored-with-civilian-award-for-ukraine-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/69262\/","title":{"rendered":"CT native and vet honored with civilian award for Ukraine work"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Connecticut native and Army veteran who received a civilian award for his work in Ukraine said it means even more to him as it came from the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and NATO Land Command.<\/a><\/p>\n

Dan Rice, a Rocky Hill native, West Point graduate and Iraq combat veteran recently received the Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service<\/a> for his actions in Ukraine between March 2022 and March 2023.<\/p>\n

Rice was presented the honor<\/a> recently at a ceremony in Wiesbaden, Germany by Commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and NATO Land Command, General Christopher T. Donahue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t expect to get this or any award,\u201d Rice said. \u201cI\u2019m not in the military anymore. I didn\u2019t go (to Ukraine) with the objective to make money or get any awards, so I certainly appreciated them. But it means even more that it was coming from the former Delta Force commander who\u2019s now a four-star general for those words. It was very much appreciated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rice served as a special advisor to General Valerii Zaluzhnyi since Feb. 2022. Zaluzhnyi was the commander in chief of Ukraine\u2019s Armed Forces.<\/a><\/p>\n

According to Rice\u2019s friend, fellow West Point grad and Iraq combat veteran Wayne Culbreth, Rice was \u201cthe only American civilian in that role during the largest land war in Europe since World War II. Dan was instrumental in advocating for and securing cluster munitions and ATACMS missiles for Ukraine, decisions that fundamentally changed the course of the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DanDan Rice with Senator Jack Reed from Rhode Island and Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The photo was taken Sept. 2023.<\/p>\n

Rice has made 38 trips to Ukraine since Feb. 2022 and is currently the president of American University Kyiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn July 2022, I published a PowerPoint strategy for Ukraine called \u2018influencing the influencers\u2019 and that\u2019s the plan I implemented to influence the White House, Capitol Hill, Pentagon, press and defense contractors. That\u2019s how I was able to get many new weapons and systems for Ukraine armed forces,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

Rice is not Ukrainian and prior to 2022 had no affiliation to the country. His involvement in the Ukraine\/Russian war is what he called \u201ccomplete serendipity\u201d in 2022.<\/p>\n

Rice has a home in Miami as well as New York. He was at a Miami restaurant when the invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, 2022.<\/p>\n

Rice was watching CNN coverage on the restaurant television. He was sitting beside a woman who was crying. The woman was receiving messages from her mother who was in Ukraine with bombings right outside her window. The woman told her parents to go into the basement.<\/p>\n

Rice said his military instinct kicked in, and he told the women to tell her family to get in the car right away and drive west into Poland. He told her that if the Russians take Kyiv, her family would not be able to leave.<\/p>\n

Three weeks later the woman texted Rice to say her family had made it to Austria and were safe. The family was flying to Miami and had no place to stay. Rice offered his home for the family to stay at his apartment temporarily for a month or two. He said he never met the family but allowed them to stay.<\/p>\n

The woman\u2019s mother noticed the West Point representation throughout his apartment. The woman\u2019s mother texted him through Google translator and asked Rice if he wanted to meet General Valerii Zaluzhnyi.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought I was being punked Ukrainian style,\u201d Rice said. \u201cI told her, I think he\u2019s kind of busy with the invasion and all. She said \u2018No. He would like to speak to you.\u2019 We set up a Zoom call, and I talked to him for about an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of the conversation, Rice said \u201cI don\u2019t know how I can help you, but if you would like a volunteer, I\u2019d be glad to come help. And he said (through a translator), I could use your help.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI got off the phone, and my friends were on the other side of the table listening to this and they were like, \u2018You just volunteered to go to Ukraine?’\u201d<\/p>\n

Rice began calling those in his network of West Point graduates including Brigadier General Jonathan P. Braga.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI called John and told him I\u2019m going to meet with Zaluzhnyi, and we spoke for two hours, and he updated me on what was going on,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

He was picked up in Poland by U.S. Army Col. Lucas VanAntwerp, who was the commander of 10th Special Forces Group. Rice said VanAntwerp drove from Germany to pick him up.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe told me, you\u2019re all we got,\u201d Rice said. \u201cHe said, did you know that the president pulled all troops out on February 3rd?\u201d<\/p>\n

Rice had no idea. He had assumed U.S. Special Forces were supporting the Ukrainians. He was also unaware the U.S. embassy had closed.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe asked if I still wanted to go. I said, \u2018of course.\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

Rice took a bus into Ukraine after being stuck at the border for 10 hours and was picked up by the Ukrainian chief of strategic communications and the two worked together daily for a year.<\/p>\n

\"GeneralGeneral Christopher T. Donahue presented Rocky Hill native Dan Rice with a Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service last month in Germany. (Courtesy)<\/p>\n

He learned quickly that the Ukrainians said U.S. support in the war was vital.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said, can you help us keep U.S. support?\u201d Rice said. \u201cI said I would do my best and they gave me the title Special Advisor to the Commanding General\u2026Now I\u2019m responsible for keeping U.S. support for Ukraine \u2013 no small task.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first thing he did was invite the U.S. military to Ukraine and Rice penned a letter to Gen. Mark Milley<\/a> asking for the U.S. 10th Special Forces Group to advise Ukrainian forces in the field. Rice said he would get a tattoo of the Ukrainian flag crossing an American flag on his right shoulder if Zaluzhnyi signed the letter. Rice said proudly has had the tattoo since 2022.<\/p>\n

Rice reached out to defense contractors and hand delivered letters to them as well as members of Congress including Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed.<\/a><\/p>\n

Reed, like Rice, is a West Point grad. Reed was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started going back and forth between the Pentagon, General Millie, most of my friends that are very successful generals,\u201d Rice said. \u201cI would start coordinating and brainstorming with different people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was Lt. General Chris Donahue, who was West Point Class of \u201992. He flew from North Carolina to Germany on February 24, the day the invasion started. He took his command and he set it up there. I would go to Germany. I met with them. I go to the Pentagon, then I\u2019d go back to Kyiv, and I\u2019d go back and forth. And I started to realize that we weren\u2019t giving some of the most critical weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rice pushed for the U.S. to provide cluster munitions from artillery shells. Rice said as a former artillery officer he knew Ukraine needed this high explosive artillery.<\/p>\n

\"DanDan Rice shows his tattoo with the Ukraine and U.S. flags. (Courtesy)<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my opinion, cluster munitions are about 20 times more lethal and more effective because they explode in the air and they drop 88 smaller bomb lights all across the battlefield. And they\u2019re very destructive on a force that is an offensive force that\u2019s out of the trenches coming across invading,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

Rice registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department and began to lobby to get these weapons. Rice said he helped Ukraine get these weapons and they used them.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the generals have told me that they estimate the weapons that I was able to get in Ukraine have caused about a third of the Russian casualties,\u201d Rice said. \u201cOut of the 1,400,000 Russians that have been killed or wounded, about 500,000 of them were due to cluster munitions. That made a material impact on the ability of the Russians to have offensive operations. Anywhere they would take offensive operations, cluster munitions would shut them down.\u201d<\/p>\n

In February 2022, American University Kyiv<\/a> was founded, three weeks before the invasion. Rice said the university board was deciding whether to shut it down and wait until the war was over or go forward and open it as scheduled, but virtually the first year.<\/p>\n

\"DanDan Rice with General Valerii Zaluzhnyi in May 2022 in Ukraine. (Courtesy)<\/p>\n

Rice joined the university on March 1, 2023, and the school officially opened in September 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the old Riverport building It was christened in 1961 by (Nikita) Khrushchev himself. It was the pride of the Soviet Union,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

The university opened a second location in Dnipro. The two campuses have 615 students in total.<\/p>\n

Rice said he\u2019s been to countless funerals over the last five years in Ukraine. He said a woman named Iryna, who managed the campus coffee shop and her two daughters Anastasia ,13, and Alinawere, 10, were killed by a massive air attack by Russia in Kyiv last July. He added that many of his students have been wounded by windows being blown out.<\/p>\n

Rice said American University Kyiv, which is partnered with Arizona State University, is getting ready to graduate its first bachelor\u2019s degree class in June. He has already graduated two master\u2019s program classes.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Connecticut<\/p>\n

Rice\u2019s roots started in Rocky Hill. His mother Bonnie still lives in the family home. His father Jim, a former state worker for the Connecticut Department of Transportation<\/a>, died a few years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad was drafted and went to France and came back and started mowing lawns for the Department of Transportation and built his way up to Deputy Commissioner of Connecticut Highways and Airports. He helped build Bradley (International) Airport.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rice, 60, is a Rocky Hill High School graduate. He was his class president. He was a standout athlete with the Terriers. Before heading to West Point, he was an All-State and All-New England soccer player.<\/p>\n

Rice, who grew up delivering the Hartford Courant, said he\u2019s in Connecticut for every holiday and most recently for Easter.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter high school, I went into the Army and was originally in field artillery and went to Ranger School,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

Rice did a tour overseas in Turkey and finished his tour in Fort Carson, Colorado.<\/p>\n

He then went into the medical device field and after a while wanted something different, so he earned his MBA from Northwestern\u2019s Kellogg School of Management and Medill School of Journalism. From there he went into finance. He said once 9-11 happened, he rejoined the military and was deployed to Iraq as an infantry officer.<\/p>\n

He was wounded in action in Samarra in June 2005 and was awarded the Purple Heart. Since then, started multiple businesses. Most recently, he founded Thayer Leadership<\/a> in 2010.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do leader development using the West Point leadership principles and it\u2019s been a huge success. We do leadership all around the world, with companies like Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. I\u2019ve got about 100 employees. I\u2019m co-president of that company.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DanDan Rice flanked by parents Jim and Bonnie after receiving the Purple Heart for wounds in Samarra, Iraq.<\/p>\n

He said sometimes it takes him two to three days to get to Kyiv, and he\u2019s made the trip 38 times during the war.<\/p>\n

Rice spends half of his time in Ukraine and half of his time in the U.S. Rice said he\u2019s never taken a salary for his work at American University. However, Rice said American University has paid for his travel and housing the last two years. He estimates that he\u2019s spent $200,000 of his own money over the last five years in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey offered me a salary, but I wouldn\u2019t take it because I knew I would just have to be raising money to pay for my own salary and I didn\u2019t think that was right. Our investors were all Ukrainians and they\u2019re already going through tough times. Their companies are all going through tough times and I didn\u2019t think it would be right. to take a salary. I\u2019ve done it pro bono for five years,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

Rice said current U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, General Alexus Gregory Grynkewich and General Donahue have all personally told him \u201cnobody knows more about Ukraine than me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DanDan Rice met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon in January 2026. (Courtesy)<\/p>\n

\u201cI appreciate that and I try to give them the direct boot- on-the-ground kind of update,\u201d Rice said. \u201cWhen I was in Iraq or Afghanistan, we had hundreds of thousands of troops and hundreds of thousands of contractors and a huge press corp. We don\u2019t have any of that in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople don\u2019t really get the unvarnished truth. I try to bring that to a lot of the commanders and give them what I can from a soldier\u2019s perspective. I look at it through a different lens than most civilians that are there,\u201d Rice said.<\/p>\n

Rice believes Ukraine will win. He said the map hasn\u2019t changed much in the last three years and Ukrainians are gaining ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cFront lines are brutal. But Ukraine has increased the kill ratio from three Russians killed for every Ukrainian that died. It was 5-1 in 2024 and now it\u2019s about 7-1. The only way to stop the Russians is to increase the kill ratio. It\u2019s a war of attrition, but also to go deep inside of Russia.<\/p>\n

\u201cUkraine is now fighting deep inside of Russia and the precision guided weapons are taking out all of their, all of their energy sources. And that\u2019s the way to really hurt (Vladimir) Putin. On the other hand, the Russian strategy is mostly to pound the civilian cities, hoping that they can pound the civilians into appealing to the politicians to come to some agreement and give up some things that they haven\u2019t lost on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Connecticut native and Army veteran who received a civilian award for his work in Ukraine said it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[17834,25885,1725,12477,25880,25876,25879,17787,17789,25884,25877,17788,94,13222,674,17786,179,42,25881,1870,25875,25886,55,25883,25887,25882,56,36,25878],"class_list":{"0":"post-69262","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iraq","8":"tag-american-university","9":"tag-american-university-kyiv","10":"tag-army","11":"tag-austria","12":"tag-bradley-international-airport","13":"tag-civilian-award-for-humanitarian-service","14":"tag-connecticut-department-of-transportation","15":"tag-connecticut-news","16":"tag-ct-news","17":"tag-general-alexus-gregory-grynkewich","18":"tag-general-valerii-zaluzhnyi","19":"tag-hartford-courant","20":"tag-iraq","21":"tag-kyiv","22":"tag-local-news","23":"tag-max-image-preview","24":"tag-military","25":"tag-news","26":"tag-purple-heart","27":"tag-putin","28":"tag-rocky-hill","29":"tag-rocky-hill-high-school","30":"tag-russia","31":"tag-secretary-of-defense-pete-hegseth","32":"tag-soviet-union","33":"tag-thayer-leadership","34":"tag-ukraine","35":"tag-war","36":"tag-west-point"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}