Imported Cuban soldiers fighting with the Russian army in Ukraine are posting large amounts of publicly visible war propaganda on the social network VKontakte and sharing photos of group outings to local bars, a recent report revealed.
Schemes, the Ukrainian subsidiary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), found hundreds of Cubans sharing photos from locations in Ukraine and Russia, showing off their uniforms and proclaiming themselves “Nazi” fighters. The Russian government launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 under the pretense that the government of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was a “Nazi” entity that needed to be eliminated.
Speaking to the Miami-based network AméricaTeVe on Monday, Schemes journalist Valeria Yehoshyna said it took about a week to compile social media evidence of hundreds of Cuban soldiers in the Ukrainian war theater, promoting their presence on the ground there rather than hiding it.
The content was largely published on VKontakte, a Russian social network, suggesting that the target audience for this propaganda is Russian civilians. Moscow has faced significant resistance to the invasion of Ukraine within its borders and responded with brutal crackdowns and mass arrests. VKontakte is not in widespread use in Cuba.
The Cuban government has denied any direct involvement in the war and claimed in 2023 that the appearance of any Cuban nationals in the war front were the product of an illicit “human trafficking ring” that it promised to dismantle. The ease with which evidence of a growing Cuban presence in the war can be found online indicates that the Castro regime is not fulfilling its promise to prevent its people from being “trafficked” into the war.
“RFE/RL journalists have found new evidence of hundreds of other apparent Cuban mercenaries on the Russian social network VKontakte,” the report detailed. “In many cases, their accounts were created in 2024 — seemingly the year they arrived in Russia for pre-deployment training.”
“The Schemes investigation tied many of the Cuban mercenaries with an online presence to the 106th Airborne Division,” which fought in the battle for Bakhmut, one of the deadliest exchanges between Russia and Ukraine since 2022. Russia ultimately seized the city in May 2023.
The Cuban fighters on VKontakte appear in Russian military fatigues, in some cases wearing the Russian “Z” war symbol and Russian flags along with Cuban ones. One soldier wrote on the outlet that he was fighting Ukraine because “I consider it the duty of every free person who hates Nazis.”
Other images on the social media site showed the men drinking at local bars in Russia and Ukraine or sharing Russian passports, a sign that their efforts had secured an escape from destitute, communist Cuba.
“When [Cuban] citizens join the Russian army [it is] sometimes by deception and fraud, but sometimes for money and for ideological reasons, which are obviously inspired by Russian propaganda,” journalist Yehoshyna told América TeVe.
“We have identified several hundreds of Cuban citizens in the ranks of the Russian army,” she explained, “and this amount… this is only what our data journalists have found in a week of research, so I really believe that we can identify a few more, few more hundreds of Cuban citizens in the Russian army.”
Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, co-founder of the Cuban Democratic Directorate (Directorio) and a Breitbart News contributor, told RFE/RFL that his organization estimates that 5,000 Cubans have entered the Ukrainian war theater.
“Based on passports obtained by Ukrainian hackers, our own information from Cuba, numerous videos we’ve seen, and reports of some Cubans killed in combat, we can estimate that around 5,000 Cuban soldiers are fighting for Russia,” he explained. “This network could not function without the Cuban regime’s approval.”
Gutiérrez-Boronat first published the estimate in a report for Breitbart News following a visit to Ukraine in July, in which he met with a Cuban national captured by Ukraine. Ukrainian officials reportedly captured Frank Dario Jarrosay Manfuga, a former math teacher and musician, after he accidentally ran into a Ukrainian trench believing them to be his colleagues. Jarrosay claimed to have received next to no military training and did not clearly understand his objectives; he is also colorblind, making navigating the battlefield extremely difficult.
Jarrosay told Gutiérrez-Boronat that he had accepted a job opportunity for a construction job in Russia. In Moscow, he discovered he had been duped into fighting against Ukraine.
The Cuban Communist Party’s closest international relationship for most of the over half a century after it seized power on the island was with the Soviet Union. Following its collapse, the communists continued to pursue close relationships with the Russian government. Under current strongman leader Vladimir Putin, the Cuban regime has become a valuable asset to Moscow, believed to offer intelligence aid in addition to obvious physical proximity to the United States.
Reports first began surfacing in 2023 of Cuban nationals appearing in the Ukrainian war theater. Many were initially believed to have been defrauded into joining the war by answering to Facebook advertisements promising construction jobs. Cubans who have managed to publish messages online or been captured by the Ukrainian military have stated they did not know they were going to fight in a war until they arrived in training, or sometimes in Ukraine itself.
Cubans are far from the only foreigners believed to have been forced into supporting Russia’s invasion efforts. The communist government of North Korea is believed to have sent an estimated 10,000 troops into Ukraine to support Russia after dictator Kim Jong-un signed a mutual defense agreement with Putin in Pyongyang in June 2024.
In a separate incident that appears more akin to the Cuban situation than the North Korean one, Indian media began compiling evidence of unknown Russian entities duping young Indian men into fighting against Ukraine. The Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) announced in March 2024 that it had discovered a “major human trafficking ring” that had tricked at least 35 men into fighting for Russia through a social media “talent agency” that offered jobs abroad with little information to impoverished men seeking an escape from India.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly confronted Putin about the situation in July and asked him to stop efforts to recruit Indians.
