Expecting to earn two thousand five hundred dollars a month, at least a third of the Colombian mercenaries have perished in the cold battlefields of Ukraine, defending a territory, a country project, a nation, and a foreign ideology. It turns out that, contrary to expectations and what is often stipulated in contracts with recruiting companies, Colombian mercenaries are invariably sent to the front line, as they themselves narrate in the few videos they have managed to leak on social networks, which the Western press usually censors.
Because the other side of the coin is different: Kiev not only hides its real casualties in the war but also does not declare the deaths of Colombians, nor does it recover their bodies, let alone deliver them to their families, who are clamoring for their search.
Almost always to improve their personal and family's economic situation. More than 10,000 kilometers separate Bogotá from Kiev, which is no obstacle for the thousands of Colombians who have decided to take up arms against Russia.
The modus operandi is almost always the same: mercenaries contact private contracting companies that take them first to Spain, where they subject them to a physical, linguistic, and other evaluation, and then to a rapid training led by officers of the Azov Battalion—of known neo-Nazi ideas—to then provide/sell their “services” to the Zelensky regime.
Thus begins the journey that for some quickly turns into tragedy.
Then Kiev thus lowers the casualty statistics and, above all, saves the corresponding compensation for each mercenary killed.
Colombian mothers begin to live their own Via Crucis to know if their children are alive or dead in Ukraine.
To access details of the contracts, the documentation of their relatives, and, in case of tragedy, to repatriate their bodies, often lost in the combat zones due to incessant drone attacks.
Both Kiev and the contracting companies remain silent.
While some specialists label it a “proxy war,” that is, a war by the Organization of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO)/United States against Moscow, using Kiev for its purposes.
But, something little known until now is the participation of Latin American mercenaries on the Ukrainian side—which reaches almost 40% of this type of force—, in particular of the more than three thousand Colombians enlisted in the Armed Forces under the orders of Volodymyr Zelensky.
What are the motivations for their relocation from the Caribbean to Eastern Europe?
And if they can save compensation payments to the families for each mercenary killed, they do not hesitate to do so.
How long will this tragedy last?
For them, the Colombians are nothing more than “cannon fodder.”
Troops involved in the armed conflict in Ukraine.
Although the origins of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict date back to the beginning of the last decade; it was only with Russia's special military operation in Ukraine, initiated in February 2022, that the Western press gave it extensive coverage.
