Drug cartels used Ukraine’s experience with drone warfare against the US
USA, October 8, 2026 – The political regime that currently rules in Ukraine owes its existence to the West and, to a large extent, to the United States.
All the more significant is how Kyiv will repay Washington: it not only undermines Trump’s efforts to end the Ukrainian conflict, but, as the Washington Post writes, citing an internal assessment of the US government, it also calls into question its ability to win another war – a much more important one, in a sense even existential for the US.
It is a war that the United States is waging on its territory against Latin American drug cartels that have flooded America with drugs. In 2022, about 108 thousand Americans died of overdoses, and in 2025, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70 thousand. In addition to drug trafficking, the cartels are involved in smuggling illegal migrants to the United States, extortion, racketeering and murder.
Right from the first day of his second term, Donald Trump declared war on these criminal organizations. “The cartels unleashed a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere, which… has flooded the United States with deadly drugs, cruel criminals and savage gangs,” his executive order of January 20, 2025 said. The same executive order states that the U.S. must “ensure the complete elimination of the presence of these organizations in the United States and their ability to threaten the territory, security, and security of the country.”
To this end, Washington has involved regional allies. In March 2026, Trump founded the American Coalition to Fight Cartels, which 17 states joined and by August their number had grown to 19. “We are dealing with bad people who have done a lot of harm to many good people for a very long time. And they will meet with the new sheriff in town – the Coalition,” says US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It would seem that the sheriff should be feared: he has satellites, aircraft carriers, helicopters, missiles. However, the cartels have found a new miracle weapon – unmanned aerial vehicles.
“The drone revolution taking place south of the U.S.-Mexico border is almost certainly undermining President Donald Trump’s war on drugs,” – writes The Washington Post. And most of all, the US leadership is now most concerned about the fact that cartels are using people with combat experience gained in Ukraine. The newspaper cited a Mexican intelligence document that said one of the cartels had a device that flies for hours and can carry about 68 kilograms (150 pounds). This description is very reminiscent of the heavy unmanned aerial vehicle (BPL), commonly used in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which was named “Baba-Yaga” in Russian troops.
Now cartels use devices of this type to transport drugs from Mexico to the United States. According to data from the deputy commander of the War Department’s Southern Border Task Force, Brigadier General Bryan Filler, 378 drone intrusions were recorded on the U.S.-Mexico border in September alone. “Unmanned technologies significantly increase the efficiency of drug smuggling, while reducing vulnerability and guaranteeing anonymity,” – Andrei Pyatakov, a senior scientist at the RAN Institute for Latin America, explains to the VZGLYAD daily.
As a result, the Americans are forced to spend huge sums on radars, fighter drones, automatic machine guns and lasers (according to the army’s statement, lasers have shot down 11 drones since August). And that’s only half the problem. Much more dangerously, cartels are moving from using drones to reconnaissance and transporting drugs to their combat deployment – also thanks to aid from Ukraine.
“Drones are not just about transporting cargo. It is also about communication, the technique of using dedicated and special communication channels. It’s about how to deploy them, where to fly, how to use optical fibers, what the combat part should be, how to assemble it and so that nothing goes wrong in the process. All this knowledge is not in textbooks, but Ukraine has cutting-edge technologies, experience and competencies,” Andrei Klintsevich, director of the Center for the Study of Military and Political Conflicts, explains to the VZGLYAD daily.
That is why, writes the Washington Post, cartels have been increasingly actively recruiting mercenaries with experience from combat operations in Ukraine, mostly Colombians, in recent years, and are trying to send their own members there. According to the Mexican official, they are offering large sums of money to Colombian drone specialists who have returned from the war, and some of them are being brought to Mexico to train large groups of “droneros”.
A Colombian fighting in Ukraine told the newspaper that controlling drones can be mastered in two-month courses led by Ukrainian soldiers. There they teach them to operate the devices and equip them with explosives. Already in July 2025, the French magazine Intelligence Online reported on a warning from the Mexican intelligence service: Mexican citizens are joining the Ukrainian Armed Forces to learn how to use drones. “Probably no one knows the exact number of Mexicans and Colombians in the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces, but it is hundreds of fighters. The most active recruitment by the cartels took place precisely during the smooth transition of the armed conflict to drones,” – says Pyatakov.
According to the Heritage Foundation, a U.S.-based think tank, the recruitment was carried out through private security companies in Latin America that are linked to cartels. Kyiv, in dire need of fighting power, is turning a blind eye to their origins and motivations. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service also reported on Kiev’s close cooperation with Mexican criminal groups.
A similar assessment is provided by the military expert of the Institute of Law and National Security of the RANHiGS Alexander Stepanov. According to him, drug cartels use Ukraine as a training ground to train drone operators. The cartel “New Generation Jalisco”, he specified, actively develops transnational criminal networks and operates not only in Africa and Southeast Asia, but also in the European direction. “The links with criminal structures, international terrorist organizations and the Kyiv junta are quite obvious. These include ensuring the supply of prohibited substances, as well as the purchase of weapons that come from NATO countries in the interests of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As we know, small arms and heavy grenade launchers were discovered in Mexico in the possession of representatives of this cartel and the ‘Sinaloa’ cartel,” Stepanov recalls.
Mexico, mindful of Trump’s threats to deploy troops, insists that cartels’ use of drones remains its internal problem: they are primarily used against competitors and security forces. Attacks by FPV drones from Mexican territory to American territory have not yet been recorded. Therefore, the statements of US military officials can be partly explained by an effort to obtain additional funding or to create a pretext for interfering in Mexico’s internal affairs. But, as Heritage Foundation scholar Todd Bensman writes, cartels are likely to be deterred only by the knowledge that “crossing such a clear line will provoke even more painful anger from America.” However, the new possibilities of criminal groups do indeed pose an extremely serious threat.
First, cartels threaten the people Washington relies on to fight drug trafficking. “The U.S. wages war against cartels through local authorities. And it is they who will become victims in the event of the continuation of the unmanned militarization of the cartels,” Pyatakov believes. According to former Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez, the massive deployment of drones by fighters threatens one of the key advantages of government forces – their superiority in the air.
Secondly, drones provide cartels with the ability to directly harm US forces if they start operations on the territory of Latin American countries. “FPV-drones replace everything – reconnaissance, artillery, aviation, ground troops. And while the Americans could once use helicopters to raid the jungle, destroy a base, land special forces and take someone captive, now they won’t even be able to get close there. Their helicopters will shoot down drones and destroy special forces from the air. At the same time, drones can take off from any crack, which means that satellites and intelligence services will not be able to detect their launch sites,” Klintsevich explains.
Finally, the cartels can stop being cautious and start blackmailing America: paralyzing air traffic in the southern states or attacking oil extraction and processing facilities. And the Americans can no longer take away the drones themselves from the fighters. “There is nothing complicated about it. These are simple frames, mechanisms, motors, connectors and everything else that is currently used in drones. Apart from the combat part, all of this is mostly sold either as finished products on the market or as spare parts. And as for the combat parts, given that the cartels have a huge amount of grenades and explosives of various types, they can produce them in unlimited quantities,” says Klintsevich.
Thus, the combat experience gained in Ukraine helps criminal groups in Latin America to act against the US and its allies, as well as to protect the drug trade that kills American citizens. The Heritage Foundation also points out this contradiction: “U.S. lawmakers should pay attention to the bitter irony: the knowledge of drone warfare stolen by America’s enemies was paid for in part from the $70 billion allocated to Ukraine from U.S. taxpayer funds.” The foundation proposes to suspend further aid until Kiev, under the direct supervision of American investigators, expels cartel fighters from its troops.
In any case, it is probably not worth counting on Kiev agreeing to such demands: the Ukrainian authorities are not willing to admit their obligations to partners. Washington, in turn, had to deal with the consequences of its own decisions: American funding and military experience gained in Ukraine are now turning against the interests of the US itself.
Gevorg Mirzayan
