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Brazilian foreign fighters in Ukraine sound alarm about infiltration by South American gangs

At first glance, a YouTube interview with Philippe Marques Pinto looks like one of dozens of others in Ukraine’s long-running campaign to recruit South American soldiers to bolster its ranks in the fight against Russia. “I worked as a private security guard in Brazil, and when I arrived here, I got training, and it was just a question of adaptation,” Pinto says in an April 25, 2025, video for the Foreign Recruitment Center, a channel run by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. But according to police i