Mineiko was born into a good Polish family and was born in Vilna (in present-day Lithuania). Poland was under the rule of Imperial Russia. He studied engineering at the Military School in St. Petersburg. When he graduated in 1861, he left for Italy where there was a revolutionary fever against the Austrians. He joined the army of Joseph Garibaldi (Giuseppe Garibaldi), the leader of the rebels, formerly of the Carbonarians.

In 1863 he was informed of the uprising of the Poles against the Tsar and immediately left for his homeland. He leads a corps of Poles but the rebels are defeated once again. Mineiko is arrested and sentenced to death. But with the intervention of liberal personalities the sentence was commuted to hard labour. After terrible suffering he manages to escape (1868) and flees to Germany.

He sought a better fortune and ended up in Paris. There he joined the French War Academy and fought with the rank of Captain in the Franco-German War of 1870-71. There he rejoined a Garibaldi corps on the side of the French army. He met democrat friends who had fought the Turks during the Cretan Revolution of 1868. Among them was the Philhellene revolutionary Gustavus Florence, a Cretan deputy. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to Morocco with the French Army, but resigned and left for Constantinople. There he was employed as an engineer on road works and was sent to Ioannina (1875). He made acquaintances and married and had two children.

He became chief engineer of public works in Thessaly and Epirus (then the Ottoman Empire). Then defence works were built by the Turks (Bijan etc.). During the Greek-Turkish Balkan War (1912) Mineiko gave the plans of the fortifications to the Greeks and thus Ioannina was occupied. Again he was captured by the Turks but with interventions he escaped with a transfer to Smyrna, he did works to settle the river Ermou. From there he resigned and in 1891 he finally came to Greece.

It was received by the Ministry of Interior, Technical Department. In 1896 he went down to Crete to take part in the revolution and meet his old comrades. Mineiko was parted by Eleftherios Venizelos who gave him Greek citizenship and recognized him as a Greek citizen and awarded him the Cross of Saviour. The Polish government for his struggles for the freedom of peoples awarded him the title of Honorary Colonel of the Polish Army. His daughter Sophia married George Papandreou.