The cartels are learning drone warfare from Ukraine

Last summer, European news outlets reported that “volunteers” from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels had infiltrated Ukraine’s military — considered the world’s “drone superpower” — to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home.

Claims that this problem is ongoing have not yet been publicly verified by the U.S. intelligence community or the media. As yet, however, they remain undisputed. They now demand further scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate action. If it’s not too late, and if the reports are correct, the U.S. urgently needs to terminate this knowledge transfer from Ukrainian soldiers to Latin America’s crime lords.

‘The drone industry has exploded, and criminals have adapted the technology for attacks, which is a major challenge to battlefield aerial supremacy.’

American military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel are deployed for clandestine work inside and around Mexico and Colombia, working to eradicate the very same criminal organizations now siphoning drone expertise from Ukraine.

This means that top-of-the-line, battlefield-proven tech and tactics could empower vengeful cartel murderers to do to U.S. ground personnel what the Ukrainian army claims it did to 30,000 Russian soldiers in July alone.

One might hope that, after the problem was made public in 2025, Ukraine quickly moved to clear out all cartel infiltrators. One would be sadly disappointed. The Financial Times reported that Ukraine has discovered yet more Colombians with organized crime connections in-country, demonstrating “unusual obsessions” about battlefield drone fighting. The exfiltration problem persists.

“Former paramilitaries, former guerrillas, and former soldiers are fighting and learning together here how to operate drones,” a Colombian aid worker in Ukraine told the Financial Times for the August 6 story. U.S. outlets, meanwhile, are largely sitting this one out so far.

U.S. lawmakers should note the bitter irony that the drone warfare knowledge America’s enemies are stealing was funded by some of the $70 billion in U.S. taxpayer money appropriated to Ukraine. Then they should use that as leverage: There are tens of billions more dollars in the pipeline, which should be withheld until the gang operatives are purged.

What we think we know

On July 30, 2025, the French website Intelligence Online first reported that Ukraine’s Security Service launched an investigation after Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned that Mexican cartel fighters had infiltrated Spanish-speaking units of the International Legion.

Their alleged intention was to learn how to fly first-person view drones, gather ideas for drone-attack tech, and study battlefield tactics that Ukraine’s armed forces have famously used to stall Russia’s invasion.

Foreign outlets keep turning up new information. Poland and Bulgaria have begun their own investigations into smuggling pipelines through their territories. Granular details seem to bolster the reports. For instance, some volunteers already accomplished in drone fighting have joined the legion’s specialized tactical intelligence combat unit, known as “Ethos,” in the combat-heavy Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, according to the reports.

Polish officials reportedly revealed that private Mexican and Colombian security companies with alleged ties to drug trafficking networks financed and smuggled the volunteers into Ukraine through neighboring countries. One Colombian security firm based in Cali and Medellín reportedly recruited former Colombian Army rangers.

One smuggled Mexican legion volunteer, operating under the alias “Aguila-7,” registered in March 2024 using fraudulent Salvadoran documentation. He proved so technically proficient during drone training in Lviv that instructors called for an investigation, which later found probable connections to Mexico’s elite GAFE air-mobile special forces. Former GAFE personnel have joined cartels, the reports said.

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HUGE PERALTA/AFP/Getty Images

Why it matters

The infiltrations coincide with President Trump’s day-one declaration of a U.S. war to eradicate the cartels, designating many as foreign terrorist organizations. If cartel leaders are out to avenge what they have suffered, their drones can find many more targetable American personnel.

No one should have been surprised, for instance, when two CIA officers died this past April in a Chihuahua State car accident while traveling with Mexican forces after a drug lab raid. They were present because Trump has surged military and CIA personnel into Mexico and Latin America, as well as naval and aircraft assets for lethal boat bombing operations that have killed hundreds of drug smugglers. The operations have included supposed CIA-facilitated assassinations in Mexico.

An “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” of 19 Latin American countries is heavily reliant on local national security forces within which U.S. intelligence community operatives are embedded. Additionally, some 9,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed along 845 miles of the U.S. southern border in expanding “National Defense Areas” intended to deny cartel drug-load entries along with illegal immigration. By many accounts, gangs in Colombia and Mexico are angry about the resulting killings, drug lab raids, boat bombings, profit disruptions, and imprisonments on U.S. terrorism charges.

By now, we would know if the cartels were killing more American personnel. They are not, likely deterred by the knowledge that crossing such a bright line would incur even more painful American wrath. But are the cartels building that capacity to get Trump off their backs in due time?

Before any reporting about cartels in Ukraine, Mexico’s cartels were already using sloppily repurposed commercial drones to drop grenades and explosives on rivals and indigenous security forces. That’s still happening in Mexico and Colombia, including the first recent attacks by FPV drones. In October 2025, a coordinated three-drone FPV attack hit the state prosecutor’s office in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, destroying six vehicles a mile from the U.S. border.

Senior Colombian officials told the outlet they are already seeing Ukraine-style first-person-view drones in recent widespread use. However, a Colombian drone pilot in Ukraine told the Financial Times that pilots still hadn’t mastered how to replicate some technology or set explosive charges.

“The drone industry has exploded, and criminals have adapted the technology for attacks, which is a major challenge to battlefield aerial supremacy,” Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez told the newspaper.

What to do now

Ukraine-style drone attacks against Americans in Mexico or Colombia could upend U.S. counter-cartel initiatives tactically and politically. Body bags returning home are a tragedy. But they also have a way of undermining public support in any war. Tactics and strategic trajectories change as a result. Just ask Moscow.

To head off this shameful outcome, the White House must forcefully leverage direct U.S. military aid to have Kyiv immediately remove cartel operatives from its formations, subject to direct verification by American investigators.

Next, the U.S. must speed up and diversify current efforts to counter the emerging drone threat along the border and to help foreign allied governments protect embedded U.S. personnel. The U.S. should do what it can to intercept drone equipment and technology imports into Latin America. And leadership should make sure American soldiers and operatives posted abroad burrow deeper out of sight.

In the meantime, if anyone wonders whether the U.S. might actually redouble its efforts if the cartels kill any Americans, the Trump administration should loudly message that they had better believe we will.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.