How One Peruvian Man Became Putin’s ‘cannon Fodder’

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 ones come in,” he said. “It never stops.”

During his four months in Russia and occupied Ukraine, Davila Vela — who is known to his friends as Lenski — estimates he encountered roughly 80 Latino recruits, including men from Colombia, Panama, Bolivia, El Salvador and Argentina.

Almost all of them, he said, are now dead or missing.

The pipeline

Davila Vela’s journey to the frontline began in May with a selfie at Lima’s main airport in Peru. He had only met the man beside him, another Peruvian recruit, briefly before, but they posed as if they’d been lifelong friends: locked in a tight embrace and giving the camera a thumbs-up.

According to one of their recruiters, the photo would help back up their story that they were friends on a trip, with stops in Paris and Istanbul before traveling on to Moscow as tourists. As soon as they arrived in Russia, the same person advised, they should be transparent about their real plan — to join the armed forces — in order to get through passport control without hiccups.

It worked. Waiting outside the Moscow airport were two men in civilian clothes, who greeted them with hugs and kisses and handed them a little cash in rubles.

From then on, Davila Vela’s camera reel takes on the feel of an action film, showing foreign-looking recruits in barracks and military training camps, striking tough-guy poses with rifles. In one of the last videos, recorded in June, he films himself inside a truck alongside roughly a dozen others in full military gear. Then he was sent into battle.

In the first years of the war, most foreigners fighting on Russia’s side came from Central Asia, followed by countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. Cuba and Colombia also supplied thousands of fighters.

But following diplomatic backlash and counter-recruitment efforts in many of those countries, Russian authorities have been forced to adapt. Ukrainian officials say Russian military authorities have effectively introduced a recruitment stop-list for some four dozen countries.

Latin America, however, still appears to be fair game. While Cuba and Colombia continue to account for the most recruits, Peru has grown in importance, followed by Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. In the first nine months of 2026, four times as many Latin American fighters were taken prisoner as in the entire period since the beginning of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian official said.

Peruvians are now the third largest group of Latin American prisoners of war held by Ukraine, an indication of their rising importance within Russia’s armed forces.

Ukrainian authorities estimate Russia’s ranks include some 29,000 foreign recruits. That constitutes just a fraction of Russia’s total forces, but Ukrainian officials emphasize their presence still matters, forcing Kyiv to expend ammunition, drones and personnel to counter them.

“They are not simply a statistic,” the Ukrainian defense official said.

The Peruvian foreign ministry said in a statement in August that it was aware of 459 Peruvians fighting for Russia, including 11 dead and 114 missing.

Relatives of missing recruits argue that’s a gross undercount. Public Facebook groups for Peruvians and other Latin Americans in Russia feature a steady stream of posts from relatives trying to locate loved ones or get them out.

In Peru, a private WhatsApp group, seen by POLITICO, for people looking for information about relatives fighting for Russia has more than 400 members and continues to grow every day. Most are looking for someone who’s been missing. But there are also those who are asking for help to get their loved ones out.

One of the group’s members shared a desperate voice message from her nephew.

“We signed a contract with the Russian army, but it’s all a scam,” he can be heard whispering. “I have between 20 and 30 days at most before they send me to kill. Please do everything you can. I want to come home.”

After I published a post on a Facebook page popular among Peruvians who are linked to Russia, asking for recruits or their families to get in touch, a number of anonymous accounts accused me of being a spy or trying to undermine relations between Latin America and Russia.

But Juan, a 19-year-old recruit who was granted anonymity for his safety, wrote in from a hospital bed in a large southern Russian city.

Worse than the shrapnel injuries to his hand, he said, is the damage to his nerves. Most nights, he suffers nightmares about being chased by drones on the frontline. But with his passport, money and clothes confiscated, he did not see a way out.

He said he was initially recruited through a direct message on TikTok after he responded to a war-themed video with a salute emoji.

The Russians he met while training and on the frontline had tried to protect him, he said. They told him he was brave — but that he’d made the worst decision of his life.

I asked him whether he agreed.

“Yes,” he texted.

False promises

Accounts collected by the relatives of Peruvians who went to war suggest many knew little to nothing about what they were getting into.

In their accounts, the war was an abstraction: a lucrative work opportunity and a chance to be heroes — not in a geopolitical struggle, but by paying off debts and taking care of their families back home.

In a café in Peru’s capital, Lima, three relatives trying to stop the recruitment shared a towering stack of papers containing hundreds of case files from the families of men who had gone to war and have now gone missing.

Though the details differed, there was a clear pattern. At some point, someone had approached the men with the promise of more money than they’d ever earned, or might ever earn again.

Those who expressed an interest were passed on to recruiters with names like Cracker, Poncho Pincho and Mustafa — mostly Peruvians with military backgrounds or Colombian intermediaries — who arranged plane tickets to Russia.

For some recruits, previous experience in Iraq made the offer sound like a high-paying adventure. A sizable number had worked for a U.S. government subcontractor guarding the embassy and other diplomatic compounds there, and remembered the experience fondly.

Once in Russia, though, they discovered the two situations were worlds apart.

In many cases, recruits had to use their first earnings to buy their own equipment — vests, radios and other gear — from their commanders.

In the Peruvian WhatsApp group, one relative posted a photo of shirtless men tied to a tree, their bodies covered in severe bruises which she claimed were caused by beatings.

Other recruits described similar abuses to their families. “He told me he was living in an inferno,” said Karina Huaura Chávez, whose husband, a prison guard with a military background, traveled to Russia in March.

“Those who didn’t understand the instructions would get beaten, some to the point of going unconscious.”

After Peru elected a new president, Keiko Fujimori, in July, the relatives sent her a letter asking her to intervene.

In response, they were invited in August to a closed-door meeting with, among others, the Peruvian foreign minister, Carlos Espá, and the Russian ambassador.

The Russians appeared to listen to their complaints that the recruitment constituted human trafficking, with Peruvians tricked into signing contracts. Six days later, however, the embassy issued a statement on social media saying that the men had signed up to the army voluntarily and that Moscow “highly valued” their “contribution” to the war.

To the families, it felt like a punch in the gut.

Vladimir Rouvinski, an expert on Latin American-Russian relations and professor at Universidad Icesi in Cali, Colombia, says Russia has successfully persuaded Latin American countries to remain neutral on its war against Ukraine.

“Latin American governments don’t want trouble with Russia,” he said. “They believe the best position is to stay out of it.”

Russia has also shown willingness to retaliate against governments that support Ukraine. When, in 2024, Ecuador considered transferring military equipment to the United States that could be used in Ukraine, Moscow blocked banana imports, forcing the country to backtrack. Many Latin American countries also depend on Russia for cheap nitrogen fertilizer.

After a prolonged period of political instability, Peru may be particularly vulnerable to Moscow’s influence, Rouvinski said.

Neither the Russian embassy nor the Peruvian foreign ministry responded to a request for comment.

Escape route

Frustrated with their government’s response, the relatives have sought out alternative, informal ways to help their family members.

They share hard-won contacts like valuable currency: in particular that of a man in Russia who charges $500 to establish a recruit’s whereabouts and status, with an extra fee for morgue visits; or another man who can help the injured escape from hospitals, when oversight is at its weakest.

So far, only four Peruvians are known to have escaped.

Davila Vela is one of them. I met him 25 days after he escaped from a hospital in the Russian city of Stary Oskol near Ukraine. He had to use part of his $20,000 signing bonus to pay 1.2 million rubles ($14,000) for two Russian men, one of them a former Wagner mercenary, to drive him to the Peruvian embassy in Moscow. There, the staff managed to get him on a flight to Lima that same day.

Over a meal in a ceviche restaurant, against a backdrop of salsa music, Davila Vela recounted his time in Russia, and especially his five days on the frontline in eastern Ukraine, in cinematic detail, complete with sound effects.

He said he’d been convinced by a friend to take on a role as a drone operator, far from the areas of active fighting, but found himself included in an assault unit. Alongside the foreign recruits were mobilized Russians, many of them old or sick, some unable even to break into a run. Davila Vela mimicked the drones that terrorized them with a high-pitched “eee” and hand gestures tracing their path.

The only time he seemed lost for words was when I asked what he would tell Ukrainians to explain why he’d come to their land, endangering them and their families. He stumbled over his words, fell silent, then tried again.

Eventually, he said: “I thank God for intervening and getting me injured so I could get out of there without killing anyone.”

Now, he said, he was hoping to “save lives” by telling the truth about the war on TikTok.

But he had no illusions that it would stop the recruitment efforts which, these days, include AI-generated banners and chatbots. Two days earlier, a desperate woman from his neighborhood had knocked on his door seeking information about her son, who had gone to Russia in late May.

Davila Vela told her what he learned from his own experience: that once recruits are sent into battle, many do not last more than four or five days before being injured or killed. (Speaking in July, the CIA director John Ratcliffe said the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit is between 20 and 30 minutes.)

Davila Vela himself had seen fields strewn with decomposing bodies.

“It’s true what they say about us being cannon fodder,” he said. “The commanders know you’re heading to your death, but the task is to take a village or town, even if only 50 out of 1,000 make it out alive.”