Ukraine's Colombian soldiers

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:42Welcome to the documentary podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Assignment. I'm walking through the town centre of a city in western Ukraine. The sky is blue, the roads are full of traffic, and there is a buzz on the streets as locals go shopping. This region has not been targeted, and it certainly doesn't look like a war zone.

1:10I'm with a young man who is signing up to the Ukrainian armed forces today to join the fight against Russia. He's sorting out the relevant paperwork.

1:22But this future soldier is not Ukrainian. He's from Colombia.

1:32This is Guardián. He's 28 years old. Guardián is his military callsign, and throughout this programme, that's how I will refer to the soldiers I meet. Guardián had previously been a soldier in Colombia. After paying for his own flights to travel halfway across the world, he's now committed to defending Ukraine. As he walks to the bank in his camouflage trousers, The Ukrainian passers-by cannot help but notice.

2:08He's greeted as a war hero by a group of kids. They look about 12 or 13 years old, a mix of boys and girls. Hey, Colombia, one kid shouts. He's not the only Colombian soldier to have made the long journey to fight here. There's an international recruitment base nearby, so locals have grown quite used to seeing South Americans here walking the streets.

2:35It's estimated that perhaps 7 ,000 Colombians have travelled to Ukraine to fight and defend the country since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. It's hard to get exact figures from the official sources, but the military I've spoken to confirm there are many more Colombians than any other foreign nationals fighting here. They're desperately needed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's last public announcement on the issue claimed over 40 ,000 Ukrainian soldiers confirmed dead and nearly 400 ,000 injured. I first appreciated the sheer number of Colombians when I visited Medan Nezalezhnysty Square in the capital, Kiev.

3:16A makeshift memorial to the war dead keeps growing and growing as friends and family leave flags and photos there. amidst this sea of yellow and blue a large Colombian tricolor adds a shade of red underneath I can see the bittersweet framed smiles of Colombian men who have fallen and so begins my journey to track Colombian soldiers across Ukraine I'm Marco Pereira, a photojournalist from London who's also lived with family in Bogota while I've been documenting Ukraine since the full-scale invasion of 2022. The last thing I expected was to find other Colombians here. For the BBC World Service, I'm on assignment in Ukraine.

4:05In this programme, I'll be asking why so many Colombian soldiers have come here to join the fight.

4:20I'm at an army base in western Ukraine. There are dozens of men across a range of ages and I hear Spanish spoken in the range of Colombian accents. I'm surprised that so many have turned up to enlist on a single day.

4:43Within the building, a recruitment speech is being delivered in Spanish. Sergeant Luis Ortiz is briefing new recruits on what steps to take next as they sign up officially to the Ukrainian armed forces. Colombian Sergeant Ortiz has recently been promoted to this position to make sure that everyone follows due process. Most are fully trained by the Colombian army, that he is needed as so many are arriving and none of them speak Ukrainian. Ortiz follows a busy schedule, so once the recruitment event is over, I catch up with him over a meal. I ask about the official number of Colombians in the country.

5:30This week, we're just doing a census, and easily they could have arrived in the past four months around 1 ,200. easily. Ortiz arrived to Ukraine in the summer of 2023. He'd been a Marine Corps warrant officer in Colombia, having pursued a military career since the age of 16 in Medellin. Today, I went to check on how the classes are going and stuff. And the guy in charge there was surprised by my rank. He said to me, Sergeant? And the captain who was with me said, yes. What I understood was that he thought it was really strange for a foreigner to be involved in such a thing. So why are Colombians coming here?

6:13Ortiz has one simple answer. Initially, everyone comes for money. One month's salary here is practically equivalent to a year's salary there. Ortiz initially chose to fight in Ukraine as a job opportunity and found the war here very different to fighting militant groups in the jungle. He is now a long way away from the tropics, in a country with a freezing cold winter. The scale of warfare here is something else, as Ortiz recalls from his own experience at the front line. The first time I went into the trenches, the shift started in the early morning around 4am, fighting from 4am until 7am. From the moment I stepped into the trench, my knees shook uncontrollably.

6:58At 9am, I was still shaking, but it was just something you couldn't control. And here we're fighting against Russia. We're not fighting a farmer who sold four kilos of coca, bought four AK-47s and formed a rebel group. No, here we're fighting in Russia. Despite a precarious start as a Ukrainian soldier, one heroic day changed Ortiz's path forever. When we arrived in Donetsk, they split us up into teams. I ended up in a team of just Ukrainians. So fine. But they couldn't figure me out. I felt like the smallest person on the planet. I couldn't speak. They would go to eat and they wouldn't say, hey, let's go eat.

7:41I felt tiny. And then everything changed in the first assault. The first operation we did together. Some Russians, five Russians, were going to breach a bunker. And the sergeant said to me, Ortiz, let's go. And we left. We surrounded the Russians and ambushed them. In that attack, I killed one. When they announced on the walkie-talkies, Ortiz got one, that was flipping joy. If you could only see how drastic the change was towards me at the base. They brought me food to my bed or invited me to join them to eat.

8:17In the last assault, a teammate died and we got him out. We sat down at the table after, to eat, but I sat alone. I had a thin shirt in winter in the living room. The sergeant asked, Ortiz, not freezing? He brought me the assault team's official jacket. You've earned it, he said. It had all the battalion patches and everything. How nice. He put it on me himself. The sergeant sat down to eat with me. He lit his cigarettes, brought half a bottle of vodka, and we started drinking and chatting. Ortiz had earned the trust of his colleagues, But this didn't reduce the risks of fighting at the front line.

8:55They were already closing in on us in Abditka. We were trapped for three days in a Novaposhta postal office, listening to the Russians walking above us, moving tanks in front of us. Then they took us out. That's when I got hurt. I got hurt by shrapnel. And it fractured my knee. The shockwave did. There were ten of us Colombians. And out of the ten, only three of us made it. The rest died.

9:28Many Colombian soldiers I spoke to are driven by something much deeper than money. At the mill, we're also joined by Castaño, a marine and paramedic from the Caribbean region of Córdoba. He's now a drone operator with the 37th Brigade in Ukraine.

9:47My country is a democratic country. It is a democratic country where we raise our hands and have freedom of expression. What that means is that we heard the Ukrainian president's call when he made the SOS appeal to international countries. And we, in the military, simply agree with it. We are against the ideology of mistreating a people. We raise our hands and we unite wholeheartedly to support Ukraine.

10:18Look, personally, in my country, I'm anti-leftist. I don't know if you understand what that is. I don't agree with Russian ideology. In my country, we have been fighting an internal war for more than 60 years, directly with the leftist guerrillas. We are ranked among the best armies in the world. We are trained for hand-to-hand combat. We are very tactical. We are currently engaged in a war the likes of which Colombia has never seen. Colombian soldiers are indeed very well trained, with huge support coming from NATO and the US as part of their war on drugs. They are so in demand that the official recruitment website for the Ukrainian Foreign Legion even features a Colombian soldier.

11:09Buenas tardes, me llamo Mijer Duque. Soy Colombiano. He describes his experience as a soldier here. He states that nobody forced him to come here, but that he freely followed the instructions of another Colombian to find his way.

11:30However, you must be careful which instructions to follow. Unofficial videos have been circulating widely on social media, especially on TikTok.

11:45They glorify the war and highlight the financial opportunity that Ukraine might provide. Ortiz says videos like this one can be misleading about what it's like on the front line and fail to stress the importance of signing up officially. The thing is that many people arrive misinformed. So in the rush to join a battalion quickly, they tell them not to enlist here as the process takes 20 days. Come straight to the battalion and I'll take care of the process, they say. But once they're in the brigade, they realise that many things are off, but it is too late to fix this. I wish that when I arrived, I had a Spanish speaker to say, man, don't go to that brigade.

12:28Some Colombian arrivals don't speak English, let alone Ukrainian, so they're left pretty vulnerable. For example, both Guardián and Castaño had issues with missing pay because they hadn't enlisted officially. The incorrect processing of paperwork also makes it very difficult for families to receive compensation if a soldier dies in action. This is doubly tragic, as so many came to Ukraine specifically wanting to send money back to their families. In his new role, Ortiz hopes to avoid such cases repeating. So right now, what we're trying to do with the commanders in Kiev is that every time a foreigner arrives, They can only go to a standalone battalion that is managed centrally.

13:12Then we don't need to worry about the issue of missing payments. We put this to the Ukrainian government, but they haven't responded. This is the documentary podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Marco Pereira. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet.

13:59Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:17It was two years ago now that I found myself at Superhuman Centre in the leafy suburbs of Lviv. The state-of-the-art clinic specialises in orthopaedic trauma and opened in 2023. I was documenting Ukrainian amputees undergoing physiotherapy there, patiently walking along parallel bars as they learned to master their new prosthetic limbs. So it was a huge surprise to come across 28-year-old veteran Abel. He was the first Colombian I met in Ukraine and had lost his left leg in the Russian attack in Donetsk.

14:52The weird thing is it feels like tingling, the phantom pain. It's the subconscious, like the body, the brain. It sends signals that the leg hurts, as if it were injured. Here, they do mirror therapy. You place a mirror between your legs and look at the reflection of the leg in the mirror. Psychologically, the pain goes away. Abel was very fortunate to make it into Superhuman Centre, which now has a huge waiting list. He received months of physiotherapy, as well as a basic mechanical prosthetic leg. All the care, therapies, surgery, food, everything has been free. It's been more than good. It's incredible.

15:37While Abel always felt he was treated very well by his battalion, he told me they discharged him before processing the compensation for his injury. So he's now stuck in an administrative limbo, attempting to apply via the ministry, which first requires residency, but residency requires a fixed address and he no longer earns wages. Despite all the sacrifice, Abel knows he came to fight in Ukraine out of a sense of duty. We are not killing for fun. Ultimately, we came to defend a country that's being killed for fun. For one man's ideology. Just to justify himself. To say, that's mine, it belongs to me.

16:20I don't understand how so many people around the world, no matter where, still don't support Ukraine. But he had become disillusioned with the Colombian army for a while now. Before, in Colombia, I was in the army. For nine years, I was a professional soldier. I quit because it no longer met my expectations, neither financially nor professionally, because you don't earn much. It demands too much from you. I left there and joined the French Foreign Legion. It's stationed in different parts of the world, French Guiana, for example, and also in the Middle East, in some African countries, in strategic places.

17:02They protect things like NASA facilities and so on. I didn't like it much. I left after three months. Many people from the foreign legion were leaving to come here. They heard that they were paying a bit more here in Ukraine than in France. And that here they were actually doing what they had trained for all their lives. So they quit and came here. When I left, about 14 others did too. Abel says life as a Colombian soldier had become tough under the new president, Gustavo Petro. And I got the sense that many soldiers felt pushed to leave thanks to a shift in the political climate, which seemed to value them less.

17:49In Colombia, you feel proud as a soldier, but then you get to a place where civilians turn against the military. They throw things, kick you out, threaten to burn you alive, all because of the interests of criminals, drug traffickers and all that. So you start asking yourself, what am I doing here? Honestly, I really like the army, but in Colombia, sometimes it's just not worth it. And also that president that we have now, I don't agree with the guy on many things. What he's doing today, that cannot be explained. When he was elected in 2022, Petro was the first left-wing president in over 50 years.

18:30That caused a sense of uncertainty amongst an army who had spent decades fighting a Marxist socialist militant insurgent group known as the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. It seems it's been difficult for soldiers who have spent their whole careers fighting the left to suddenly support a leftist president. This sense of losing their standings and their purpose wasn't helped by one of Petro's first acts in government, the sacking of multiple military leaders. This sent a strong message that he wanted to change how the military would be deployed. Elizabeth Dickinson is a Colombia analyst at International Crisis Group, an independent organisation involved in conflict resolution.

19:14She's based in Bogota and tells me that when soldiers didn't feel appreciated by their president, there were plenty of job opportunities for them elsewhere. So the Colombian military is, I think, far and away one of the most competent militaries in South America. They have a significant budget. And very importantly, they have a very close relationship with the United States and other NATO countries that has facilitated their training, their equipping, and really the ability for them to undertake operations with a level of sophistication that we don't see elsewhere in the region. With the rise of conflict globally, there have been a number of interests, states, parties who have sought to contract military personnel, private contractors, to fight for their own reasons or causes or to provide security.

19:59And in that context, I think it's very important to understand just how attractive the Colombians are. Colombian military personnel are as good as any soldier you can contract from a NATO country. However, the Colombian comes at a very small percentage of the price, because the kinds of salaries that can be offered abroad simply dwarf certainly the pension that retired military would get here. But often even active duty soldiers would be paid significantly more if they go abroad. Added to that, crucially, Colombian soldiers must retire at just 40, while many still feel young and fit enough to carry on working.

20:38This has created a raft of men still willing to serve without anywhere to direct their energy. So amid this sort of talent pool and these well-trained troops, some of them are active duties, some of them are retired, this has proven to be a business opportunity. A network of companies and middlemen has sprung up who connect soldiers from Colombia to offers of employment abroad. Many take jobs as security guards in Dubai, but some take work fighting in other wars, like in Yemen. I think the quality of those third-party companies also really varies. significantly. There are many who do enough due diligence, but there are others who are clearly taking Colombians into irresponsible situations that do not have the guarantees, both for the Colombians themselves and also for the civilians who are on the ground in these difficult security situations.

21:23She says Colombian soldiers have even appeared fighting in the conflict in Sudan, in northeastern Africa. The soldiers say they thought they were going to work in private security, not realising they'd be sent to a war zone until after the plane had landed. In the quiet town of Ivano-Frankivsk, I meet a young man called Arabe. He's in his mid-twenties and invited me to his apartment to eat grilled, homemade arepas with cheese, the traditional cornflour patties eaten across Latin America. Arabe is another amputee in recovery and tells me how exactly he lost his leg. We were in a trench and kamikaze drones were attacking us all day long until one managed to damage the roof.

22:13Then another drone hit and part of the explosive struck me here really hard, splitting the femur. The shards penetrated me, so the bleeding was very heavy. I put a first tornica here, but we had to keep moving, to keep fighting and stay on task. And with the movement, no matter how much I tightened, it started to slip. But I had to keep on moving, and the drones kept attacking. Then I started to feel very dizzy. You start to go numb everywhere, so I put another tornica here, and that calmed me down. It stopped the bleeding. When my friend Andres came to the trench for me, we had to run. The leg was already dead when he came for me.

23:05The leg was dead.

23:12But Arabe is better known as At Arabe Montañero, with a following of almost 140 ,000 on TikTok.