- Joined
- Jun 23, 2015
article about the Colombians who are fighting in Ukraine against the russian:
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snippet:
I remember listning to Ukraine the latest (podcast from the telegraph) that talked about why they go to fight in Ukraine and they gave the following reason:
1. Want to fight for a good cause.
2. A lot of them are former service members from their military and after the end of most armed conflict in the country, there were lack of advancemnt and sheer boredom.
3. Getting the fuck out of Colombia.
I will see if I can find more articles about it.
edit.
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here is another one.
Snippet:
url archive
snippet:
Our Colombians are insane and cool dudes.Colombians top the list by a wide margin. A UNITED24 Media report from February 2026 put the figure at approximately 7,000 Colombians serving in various Ukrainian formations, making them the largest national group of foreign volunteers in the country. They have joined the International Legion, mechanized brigades, reconnaissance units, and drone teams, and their experience fighting guerrillas, paramilitaries, and cartels in their home country translates remarkably well to the small-unit warfare being waged in Donbas.
Alongside them is a smaller but politically significant unit: the Bolívar Battalion, formally established in August 2023 and named after Simón Bolívar. It is commanded by a Venezuelan, José David Chaparro Martínez, and comprises volunteers from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and Peru, along with some Ukrainians, Americans, and Australians. Its stated mission is not only combat but also counter-narrative. As the battalion itself describes it, part of its work involves refuting Russian propaganda in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and American English media outlets, where such narratives have found unusually fertile ground. Spain has also sent its own volunteers, though their numbers are in the dozens rather than the thousands.
I remember listning to Ukraine the latest (podcast from the telegraph) that talked about why they go to fight in Ukraine and they gave the following reason:
1. Want to fight for a good cause.
2. A lot of them are former service members from their military and after the end of most armed conflict in the country, there were lack of advancemnt and sheer boredom.
3. Getting the fuck out of Colombia.
I will see if I can find more articles about it.
edit.
url archive
here is another one.
Snippet:
When reintegration fails, military labor moves
One must look beyond the label of “mercenary” to understand why a Colombian soldier ends up in the Donbas. Across the Bogotá forum, veterans, researchers, and officials converged on a shared pattern: professional soldiers with fifteen to twenty years of counterinsurgency experience retire in their late thirties or early forties, only to fail to reintegrate into an economy that has no place for them. Formal transition and retraining programs exist; however, their disconnectedness from labor-market realities leaves veterans without a credible civilian off-ramp.
typical mid-level officer earns roughly four million pesos (just over one thousand dollars) per month in active service, with that figure dropping to four hundred dollars for rank-and-file soldiers. Upon retirement, income often falls by half. With anemic transition programs and the domestic private security sector saturated, the contrast with Ukrainian frontline pay is stark. Salaries for soldiers in Ukraine participating in combat operations run from $3,000 to $5,000 a month (including any time in captivity and rehabilitation following injury), plus a potential $25,000 signing bonus and a $350,000 death benefit to families in the event the soldier is killed in combat. While language barriers and a multitude of bureaucratic hurdles have resulted in substantive challenges in obtaining death benefits and repatriating fallen soldiers’ remains, the economic arbitrage remains compelling for those feeling functionally stranded between illegal employment and economic exclusion. Ukraine becomes, as one participant of the forum in Bogotá put it, “the first real door that opens.”



