Chinese Mercenaries Spotted Fighting for Russia in Ukraine

Chinese mercenaries are fighting for Russia in Ukraine, according to a video shared by a Russian military blogger on social media.

The footage, shared by Russian military correspondent Pavel Kukushkin on his Telegram channel, shows two men sitting opposite each other at a table, communicating in Russian and Chinese via a voice electronic translator.

“There is no language barrier! A volunteer from the People’s Republic of China communicates with the commander of the Pyatnashka International Brigade using an online translator,” wrote Kukushkin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly been under increasing pressure to take a more aggressive approach to his war against Ukraine and introduce a full-scale mobilization in the country to bolster its manpower, and has for months been targeting citizens of Cuba, Armenia, and Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic bordering Russia, through various means.

Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate (GUR) has claimed that Russia has recruited mercenaries from Syria to fight in Ukraine, while the Ukraine National Resistance Center, which is run by the Ukraine government’s Special Operations Forces, said Malaysians have also been spotted fighting for Russia in the occupied Donetsk region.

“The Chinese unit in the Pyatnashka brigade is growing. More and more [Chinese] are constantly arriving. Our Chinese brothers have also come to us,” a Russian serviceman said in the video published by Kukushkin.

Newsweek couldn’t independently verify when or where the video was filmed, and has contacted Russia’s defense ministry for comment by email.

The video comes shortly after India said it was working to bring home some 20 of its citizens who say they were tricked into fighting for Russia on the front lines in Ukraine.

Some Indian citizens recruited by Russia told AFP that they were promised roles that wouldn’t involved fighting on the front lines, but when they arrived in Russia, they were trained to use weapons including Kalashnikov assault rifles and deployed to Ukraine.

“We have got some of them out and are working on getting the rest out now,” India’s ministry of external affairs told the Financial Times on Tuesday.

Last fall, British intelligence assessed that Russia was recruiting soldiers in neighboring countries, while reports emerged that migrant workers with Russian citizenship were being rounded up to fight in Ukraine.

U.K. intelligence assessed at the time that Russia likely wished to avoid further unpopular domestic mobilization measures in the run-up to the 2024 presidential elections, taking place this month.

Konstantin Sonin, a Russian-born political economist from the University of Chicago, previously told Newsweek that Putin is likely deterred from announcing an open mass mobilization because the propaganda narrative that he and his entourage are pushing is that Russia is not waging a war but is conducting a limited-scale military operation.

“This is what he is fed in the army and police reports, and this is the language that he speaks to his subordinates and the general public. Announcing a mobilization in the open will be a drastic departure from this worldview, almost like bursting from an informational bubble,” Sonin said.

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