PUCALLPA, Peru — Carlos Lenski Davila Vela cannot name the Ukrainian village that Russia sent him to capture as part of a storm assault, nor a single town nearby. But with a crumpled napkin and a glass, he easily reconstructs where he was when the drones appeared, the tree line where he sought shelter and where, just meters away, one of his companions, a 19-year-old recruit from Kazakhstan, was hit and killed. Davila Vela, a 36-year-old Peruvian recruited into the Russian army, was left with shrapnel in his foot. Recreating his call for help to Puma, a 23-year-old Colombian, he holds his phone to his mouth like a radio: “Puma, Puma,” he says, using the Colombian man’s callsign. “This is Cash. I’m alive, but I’m hurt.” He had spent just four days on the frontline.As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine grinds on, Moscow is looking abroad to find soldiers to send into battle. With recruitment becoming harder in some countries it previously relied on, predominantly in Africa and Asia, its war machine is increasingly turning to Latin America — including Peru, a country of about 35 million people — where testimonies from recruits and their relatives indicate that hundreds traveled to Moscow in the first half of this year alone. The widening of the Kremlin’s recruitment drive suggests that as Russian President Vladimir Putin hesitates to launch another round of military mobilization at home, the war is reaching deeper into the Western Hemisphere — a region where U.S. President Donald Trump has explicitly sought to reassert American primacy — drawing it into the conflict. In Peru, relatives of missing recruits have staged repeated protests and pressed authorities to act, likening the effort to lure men to fight against Ukraine to human trafficking. “We are seeing a clear expansion of Russia’s recruitment network in Latin America,” said a Ukrainian defense official working with prisoners of war who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. “The number of Peruvian cases is clearly increasing.” This year, the official added, the number of foreign fighters is expected to reach a record high.“There are lots of Latinos,” Davila Vela confirmed during an interview in his hometown of Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon, describing the three military training camps where he stayed before being sent to battle as a conveyor belt of fresh foreign recruits. “Every day, some are sent on, and new… [TheTopNews] Read More.
7 days ago
