Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, thousands of foreign volunteers have traveled to the eastern front to join Ukrainian military units. However, among all participating nationalities, one stands out for a dramatic reason: Colombians have become the foreign group with the highest number of combat deaths. This is not an anecdotal or isolated fact, but a consistent phenomenon documented by international analysis that directly connects a European war with the social and labor conditions of Latin America. Everything indicates that the higher salaries offered in Ukraine are among the main incentives for Colombian soldiers to go fight.
A report by the think tank Atlantic Council estimates that between 300 and 550 Colombians have been killed in combat since the start of the war. The figure far exceeds that reported for American fighters and most Western volunteers. The same document also indicates that nearly 25% of foreign fighters from 65 countries would be Colombian, a striking proportion considering the geographic, cultural, and political distance between Colombia and the conflict.
The symbolic impact of this presence can even be seen in the Ukrainian capital: in Kyiv Colombian flags have appeared in memorials dedicated to fallen foreign fighters. In a continental European war, mourning is also written in Latin American spanish.
Recruitment: military necessity and job opportunity
Colombian participation did not arise spontaneously or improvised. Investigations cited by the newspaper El Colombiano based on a report by the specialized outlet The Defense Post indicate that Ukraine allegedly signed contracts with around 2,000 Colombian citizens to fill military personnel gaps.
After months of war, Ukraine faced a structural problem: it urgently needed experienced fighters. The conflict evolved into a war of attrition with trenches, heavy artillery, drones, and constant urban assaults. In that context, training recruits from scratch takes too long; incorporating veterans significantly reduces operational adaptation time.
Here Colombia appears as an ideal source. During more than half a century of internal conflict, the country formed one of the most experienced military forces in the Western Hemisphere in irregular and rural combat. Thousands of professional soldiers participated for years in real operations, not exercises. That experience is rare even in developed-country armies in peacetime.
For Ukraine, hiring Colombians meant rapidly increasing combat capability. For many Colombians, it meant finding work and accessing income more attractive than what was available in their country of origin.
The unpaid debt: State reintegration failures and their consequences on the Ukrainian front
The core of the phenomenon is not ideological but economic. In Colombia, a professional soldier usually retires between ages 30 and 40. At that age he still has decades of productive life ahead but faces enormous difficulties integrating into the civilian economy. Many lack higher education, business experience, or networks outside the military environment. Their main skill — fighting — has no direct equivalent in the formal labor market.
Job alternatives exist, but they are limited. Private security, the usual destination for former soldiers, offers relatively low salaries relative to the risk assumed and rarely improves family living standards. This creates a structural gap: men highly trained for war but without an economic space consistent with their capabilities. As a result, integration into civilian life after military service becomes especially complex within the Colombian labor market.
Beyond individual decisions, the phenomenon also opens a structural debate about the responsibility of the Colombian state. The massive presence of former soldiers in the war inUkraine raises the question of how much deficiencies in public reintegration policies have indirectly contributed to hundreds of veterans now finding in a foreign conflict their only viable economic alternative.
For decades, Colombia trained highly specialized soldiers to confront its internal conflict, but the transition to civilian life did not evolve at the same pace. Retirement programs usually focus on basic benefits and partial pensions without guaranteeing effective entry into the formal labor market. In practice, many service members leave the military young, with family responsibilities and without sufficient educational or technical tools to compete in productive sectors outside security work.
The result is an institutional gap: the state invested in training fighters but not in converting them. When relative peace reduced the domestic demand for armed force, thousands of men were left with highly specific skills and scarce employment opportunities. Under these conditions, external war stopped being only a personal decision and began to function as an extension of their professional trajectory.
In that sense, the deaths of Colombians on the European front cannot be analyzed exclusively as the result of individual choice or salary offers from Ukraine. They also reflect a structural failure, the absence of a comprehensive reintegration policy capable of transforming military experience into productive capital within the country. Thus, the distant conflict ends up exposing an internal problem: when reintegration does not exist, war remains a job option.
In that context, the war in Europe appears as an extreme job opportunity. Although the salary offered by Ukraine is not particularly high by Western standards, it is considerably higher than what many can aspire to in Colombia. According to figures cited by El Colombiano, soldiers may receive between US$3,000 and US$5,000 per month for front-line operations, in addition to bonuses and compensation around US$25,000, which in case of death can reach up to US$350,000 for families. The appeal does not lie only in immediate income, but in professional continuity: the possibility of continuing to do the activity they were trained for over many years.
The decision therefore becomes rational within an individual economic logic. It does not necessarily respond to an ideological search for combat, but to the choice of an available job within a limited set of options.
Volunteers, foreign soldiers or mercenaries?
The phenomenon has generated political debate in Colombia. President Gustavo Petro has publicly described the participation as mercenarism. In general terms, mercenarism is understood as direct participation in an armed conflict primarily motivated by economic benefit and without officially belonging to the armed forces of a state at war. In other words, a fighter who fights for personal payment and not for nationality, military duty, or formal incorporation into an army.
However, legally the situation is more ambiguous. In Ukraine, many foreigners sign contracts and enter official units under Ukrainian military command. They are not independent armed civilians nor private contractors, but neither are they mobilized national citizens. They fall into an intermediate zone of contemporary international law.
More than traditional mercenaries, they are foreign fighters contracted by a state at war. This model has appeared in prolonged conflicts of the 21st century, where personnel shortages force the integration of international personnel with prior experience. The distinction matters because it changes the legal framework, the responsibility of the contracting state, and prisoner-of-war status in case of capture.
The human cost: transnational mourning
The death figures — up to 550 — represent a growing social tragedy in Colombia. Families receive news from a distant continent, sometimes weeks after the death. Repatriating bodies is complex and costly; in several cases have been buried in Europe.
This has created a new form of mourning for many communities: funerals without a body, virtual memorials, and tributes organized by foreign comrades. Mothers in mid-size Colombian cities remember sons buried thousands of miles away, while in Ukraine their names appear on local monuments.
The phenomenon also transforms the national imagination: for decades Colombians were primarily victims of their own internal conflict; now they actively participate in a high-technology international war.
The Ukrainian strategic logic
From the Ukrainian military perspective, recruitment responds to concrete needs. A war of attrition requires constant troop rotation due to physical and psychological exhaustion. Each casualty means an immediate reduction in operational capacity if no trained replacement exists.
Colombian veterans provide real combat experience, adaptation to adverse conditions, operational discipline, and familiarity with patrols under fire. Although the European terrain differs from the Colombian one, operational mindset transfers quickly. Therefore, their integration is faster than that of volunteers without prior experience.
The high percentage of Colombians does not arise only because many travel, but because they are operationally useful from the first moment.
The Atlantic Council report describes much more than foreign participation in a European war. It describes a global socioeconomic phenomenon: veterans from a developing country integrating into a distant conflict because the local labor market does not absorb their capabilities.
Between 300 and 550 Colombian deaths do not represent only international presence, but an armed migration driven by structural inequality. Ukraine needed experienced soldiers; Colombia had thousands without equivalent opportunities. The result was a human flow without recent precedent.
The central question therefore is not only why Colombians fight in Ukraine, but what economic conditions make fighting on another continent the most competitive job available for hundreds of people. As long as those conditions persist, the phenomenon will likely not be exclusive to this war.