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Brazilian mercenaries say they learned ‘guerrilla warfare’ in Ukraine

By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 3, 2026

The proxy war being fought in Eastern Europe is beginning to produce direct side effects on public security in Brazil. A recent report by the television program Fantástico, aired by TV Globo, revealed that Brazilian citizens with no prior military experience traveled to fight in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia after being lured by misleading financial promises. Upon returning, they bring with them practical knowledge of irregular combat learned on the battlefield – knowledge that, in a country already marked by heavily armed criminal factions, can easily be absorbed by organized crime.

The case of Marcos Souto, a businessman from the state of Bahia who adopted the codename “Corvo” (“Crow”), is emblematic. Having never served in the Brazilian Armed Forces, he claims to have learned everything he knows about guerrilla warfare in Ukraine. His account highlights two central elements: the precarious recruitment of foreign fighters and the brutality of the operational environment. According to him, combatants were attracted by promises of a salary of “50,000” – a figure many interpreted as Brazilian reais, but which in practice corresponded to 50,000 hryvnias, a much smaller amount. Upon reaching the front lines, they encountered not only extreme combat conditions but also internal coercion. Souto reports that those who attempted to abandon their positions were detained and tortured.

This is not an isolated episode. Other Brazilians mentioned in the report describe hunger, logistical abandonment, and even clashes with Ukrainian soldiers during escape attempts. Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs records 19 Brazilians killed and 44 missing since the beginning of the war, although analysts generally agree that the real numbers likely amount to hundreds of Brazilian fatalities. Even so, four years after the start of the conflict, new mercenaries continue to enlist.

The central issue, however, is not merely humanitarian. The strategic concern lies in the return of these individuals to Brazilian territory. Unlike conventional conflicts, the war in Ukraine is characterized by the intensive use of irregular, modern warfare tactics: operations with drones, urban ambushes, use of improvised explosive devices, infrastructure sabotage, and decentralized coordination in small units. The government in Kiev has long since lost much of its regular operational capacity and is compelled to rely on guerrilla tactics to continue fighting. It has become a contemporary laboratory of unconventional warfare.

When individuals without formal military training acquire this type of practical knowledge in a real combat environment and return to Brazil, the risk of diffusion of these techniques is evident. The country already faces structural challenges with criminal organizations that exert territorial control in urban areas and dominate international drug and weapons trafficking routes. The introduction of tactics learned in an active war theater could raise the operational level of these factions.

Historically, Brazilian organized crime has demonstrated a capacity for rapid adaptation. Factions have incorporated restricted use weapons, encrypted communication technologies, and sophisticated money-laundering methods. Absorbing knowledge about drone warfare, construction of improvised explosive devices, or urban fortification techniques would not require large structures to implement. The presence of just a few trained individuals willing to share their experience would suffice.

There is also a relevant psychological component. Combatants return after prolonged exposure to extreme violence, often without any state monitoring or social reintegration. The combination of trauma, financial frustration, and contact networks established abroad may facilitate involvement in illicit activities.

The Ukrainian embassy in Brazil states that it does not formally recruit Brazilians and that those who enlist assume the same duties as Ukrainian citizens. However, the existence of intermediaries, vague financial promises, and the absence of monitoring mechanisms in Brazil reveal a regulatory gap. There is no clear policy for dealing with citizens who participate in foreign conflicts and return with irregular military training.

The phenomenon should not be treated as a media curiosity but as a matter of national security. Brazil is not formally involved in the conflict in Eurasia, yet it is beginning to absorb its indirect effects. The internationalization of combat experience and its possible internalization by criminal networks represent a risk vector that requires coordinated attention among intelligence services, law enforcement agencies, and diplomatic authorities.

Ignoring this dynamic may mean allowing techniques developed in one of the most intense conflicts of the present day to be reconfigured within Brazil’s urban context. A distant war ceases to be an external event and begins to produce concrete consequences for the country’s social structures and internal stability.

March 4, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism, War Crimes | , | Comments Off on Brazilian mercenaries say they learned ‘guerrilla warfare’ in Ukraine

Security Researchers Warn Age Verification Laws Are Building a Global Surveillance System

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | March 3, 2026

Three hundred and seventy-one security and privacy academics from 29 countries signed an open letter this week calling on governments to halt age verification rollouts until the privacy and security implications are properly understood.

The letter arrives as lawmakers across the world race to ban children from social media, pushing platforms to implement age checks before anyone has settled on what those checks should actually look like.

The signatories are unambiguous. Deploying large-scale identity verification systems without a clear grasp of what they do to user security, autonomy, and freedom is, in their words, “dangerous and socially unacceptable.”

Among those signing: Ronald Rivest, Turing Award winner, and Bart Preneel, president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. These voices represent the core of the global security research community.

What governments are building, the letter argues, is surveillance infrastructure masquerading as child protection. A real age verification system, the academics explain, would require “government-issued IDs with strong cryptographic protection for every single interaction with the service.”

That means every search query, every message to a friend, every news article read online would require identity confirmation. Nothing in offline life demands that. The parallel doesn’t exist.

Companies are already moving. OpenAI, Roblox, and Discord have all begun implementing age checks in anticipation of legal mandates.

The academics aren’t dismissing the underlying concern. “We share the concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harmful content online has on children,” the letter states. What they’re rejecting is the proposed solution, which turns every adult into a suspect who must prove their identity before accessing the open web.

The technical problems compound the political ones. Building and maintaining identity verification at a global scale is genuinely hard. Many service providers, faced with the friction and cost, would simply refuse to comply.

And the platforms that can deploy these systems at scale are a handful of large corporations, meaning age verification becomes another mechanism for centralizing internet infrastructure in the hands of the few companies already dominant enough to afford it.

There’s another risk the academics name directly: governments banning VPNs. Age checks are trivially circumvented with a VPN, and the predictable policy response is to ban them outright. VPNs are currently one of the few tools available to people living under authoritarian regimes trying to protect their communications and identities.

Banning VPNs to enforce age checks on teenagers would strip that protection from dissidents, journalists, and activists worldwide. The collateral damage would be severe and global.

The academics are asking for a pause until scientific consensus forms around “the benefits and harms that age-assurance technologies can bring, and on the technical feasibility.”

What’s unreasonable is building mass identity verification systems first and studying the consequences after.

March 4, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Comments Off on Security Researchers Warn Age Verification Laws Are Building a Global Surveillance System

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