Video shows cartel members on Ukraine's front line

A 25-second Al Jazeera video has placed Mexican cartel members on Ukraine's front line. At least ten fighters appear in a forest; one identifies himself as a member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and says the man holding the phone belongs to Los Chapitos, the Sinaloa faction led by the sons of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The group says it is coming back from a mission, and the man filming acknowledges that the soldiers are Mexican, Colombian and Panamanian. President Claudia Sheinbaum told her daily press conference that the government would investigate the alleged presence of Mexican organized crime among Kyiv's forces.

The footage confirmed what analysts had been tracking for months. Warnings in December 2025 that criminal cartels were infiltrating the conflict to learn kamikaze-style drone operations were dismissed at the time as a fringe theory. Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, now describes the infiltration as a real recruitment channel for expanding the arsenals of criminal organizations in their wars against rival groups.

Ukraine's Foreign Legion does not recruit only through official channels. Elite military groups with no direct contact with Kyiv's authorities also bring in fighters — Ernesto Zárate, whose relative, a former Mexican federal police officer, enlisted in the war and died in combat, told El País that such groups "operate like clandestine recruitment networks." Ukraine's personnel shortage makes foreign fighters a pressure valve, Ziemer says, and the tension shows in the vetting: selection processes remain deficient, and Kyiv has worked with Mexico and Colombia to identify criminal actors. In the summer of 2025, Mexican and Ukrainian authorities were already collaborating in isolated cases to monitor potential drone recruits for the cartels.

Several people are travelling to Ukraine with the intention of acquiring skills to bring home, Ziemer says, and some of those already serving are being explicitly contacted by criminal groups. The exchange is becoming an increasingly institutionalized method for moving drone expertise into the Americas, and what the groups want is specific: pilots who can fly drones through forests and urban terrain, which is harder than one might expect.

The report arrives as Mexico and the United States, which share a border, have made the fight against drugs and criminal cartels a top priority since the start of Donald Trump's second term.

The photograph illustrating the report shows a CJNG unit with a drone on a highway in Michoacán. It was taken in July 2021.