Kawalchuk backstory

Alexander "Alex" Kawalchuk
Born: Mid-1980s, Saint-Georges, QC

Citizenships: Canadian, French.

Languages: English, French, Russian/Ukrainian, Dari

Career CV:
The child of Ukrainian immigrants. Bright but only moderately educated due to dropping out of CEGEP, he fled to France and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion at the age of 17 to escape a rough home in rural Quebec.

His linguistic prowess was quickly noted, and after a tour in Afghanistan as an infantryman, was reassigned to a French combat intelligence unit, acting as an interpreter for Coalition forces. After 6 years of service and a combat injury, Caporal Chef Kawalchuk separated from the Legion and gained French citizenship, which he used to attend the University of Nice to study journalism, interning and eventually finding a job at Agence France-Presse.

Kawalchuk became a war correspondent and open-source investigator for AFP due to his combat experience, covering conflicts in Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. He was later separated from the agency due to his "vigilante gonzo" reporting style and tendency to take great risks in reporting, notably being kidnapped by a gold-mining Congolese militia while off-the-grid in Virunga National Park.  On his return to France, Kawalchuk used open-source intelligence and geoscience to expose the British jewelry company that directly profitted from the conflict mining in a scathing expose, a feat which led to the INTERPOL arrest of those involved and Kawalchuk receiving a surprise nomination for a Pullitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

He returned to Afghanistan in 2012 as an freelance investigator, utilizing local trade networks to survey black market trade in the Khyber Pass on the border with Pakistan, from replica weapons to stolen archaeological items. While on assignment here, Kawalchuk observed a Georgian bushpilot using a strange material to repair an electronic component on his aircraft.

Through "fixers," he eventually learned that highly unusual materials were being smuggled out of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine and being sold to foreign buyers in international conflict zones, with some making their way to engineering firms and polytechnics in the European Union and China. Nobody seemed to be able to tell him much more, as the Ukrainian government had highly secured the area following the oubreak of the Ukrainian Civil War, and the flow of these "artifacts" had slowed to a trickle, which did not sit well with these wealthy clients.

Wanting to get to the bottom of what he saw as an unwritten story, Kawalchuk received tacit support and funding from Vice (his publisher at the time) to proceed into Ukraine, ostensibly to observe the rapidly unfolding conflict in Donbass, but secretly to smuggle himself into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.