Por: Dr. Tássio Franchi, Pesquisador Sênior Visitante da King’s College London
On approach to land troops, a Black Hawk helicopter is struck by a First Person View (FPV) drone carrying an explosive device. The aircraft is brought down, injuring some of the troops on board and destroying the airframe.
The aircraft is brought down, injuring some of the troops on board and destroying the airframe. The scene did not take place in Ukraine, nor in the countries near the Strait of Hormuz,it happened in Colombia, in 2026. It was not an isolated attack, but a new reality now confronting South America’s public security forces and armed forces. In Colombia, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) show in a report that drone attacks jumped from 61 in 2024 to 333 in 2025, an increase of 445%. Where does this leap in technical capability, and this rise in the scale of attacks, come from? One hypothesis deserving growing attention points to an unlikely place, the Ukrainian front line.
There is a growing amount of research on Ukrainian adaptation and how civilian, military and private organisations have reorganised during the war. Researchers and policymakers are seeking to understand how Ukraine has reinvented itself to meet the challenges of the war against Russia, to carry that knowledge back to their own countries. At the same time, theoretical essays point to what emerging countries need to examine in order to rethink their national defence policies and reshaping their armed forces, as Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and Jackson Schneider argue in their own piece for King’s College London, A Realistic Defence for Emerging Countries. But there is another side to this transfer of knowledge. It is happening more quietly, from the trenches to forests, rural villages, favelas and other peripheries of South American cities.
The use of drones as a complementary surveillance tool by transnational organised crime (TOC) groups is already well established. What is new is the growing use of drones as weapons. Recent studies, including the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s 2024 report, The Hard Return, show how veterans, knowledge and weapons are gradually flowing out of Ukraine to the rest of the world. In Colombia and Mexico, the uptake of this new capability is already tangible, with objective data from UNMAS Colombia showing an increase in the use of drones against state defence and security forces. This reality still appears more timidly in Brazil, with cases recorded mainly in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, where factions have used drones to monitor and drop explosives on rivals. The use of drones to monitor security forces is more widespread across Brazilian territory as a whole, with this type of use reported in favelas and in more isolated areas such as rivers, highways, and “cabriteiras” (dirt tracks) that cross land borders, or along routes used to transport illicit goods.
It is, however, likely that Brazil’s defence and security forces will eventually face the threat of suicide drones carrying explosive devices. It is not improbable that, before long, we will see FPV drones attacking police armoured vehicles with Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPG) warheads, threatening the Army’s Special Border Platoons in the Amazon, and Navy patrol vessels in Guanabara Bay. In the coming years, the armed forces will need to think about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) not only in the context of high-intensity conventional warfare, but also in terms of the use of UAV technology by Violent Non-State Actors (VNSAs). The asymmetric David-and-Goliath struggle we see in Ukraine could be reproduced, on a smaller scale, in South America’s peripheries and borders.
Ukraine as a school for drone warfare
Ukraine has become a textbook case for learning how to operate this new weapon and its countermeasures. According to Honcharuk, Ukraine’s advantage is explained by what he calls the “Time Domain”: victory does not come from control of space, but from the speed at which one learns and adapts. While the European defence industry’s innovation cycle runs to roughly three years, Ukraine’s combat-adaptation cycle takes about three weeks to three months, as shown by Honcharuk, in a study published by LSE IDEAS. The case of the Brave1 platform, which connects front-line operators directly with tradespeople, engineers and civilian start-ups, is emblematic: more than 1,600 submissions and 186 grants awarded in its first year of operation alone, as Berthelsen’s reported showed. Ukraine is fighting an opponent that is much larger and stronger; it needs to be more agile, both tactically and strategically.
Beyond the trenches, this is not simply a war of cheap or autonomous weaponry, but a war of accelerated learning. It is this capacity for accelerated learning that tips the balance in Ukraine’s favour. It is neither the hardware nor the software. It is knowledge. That knowledge includes technical and tactical know-how, combined with the ability to adapt quickly to the demands of war.The essential piece in this process is the human being, not the machine.
An institutional research report, Crime by Drone, built on direct interviews with Ukrainian drone pilots, reaches a conclusion worth quoting in full: “Consultations with drone operators in Ukraine reveal that human expertise remains at the heart of the capability and a vital point of intervention. Engineers, workshop operators, parts suppliers and firmware modifiers are all vital for scaling up the use of drones.” If human expertise is the bottleneck, and not the technology, then the problem for neighbouring countries ceases to be merely one of arms control and becomes one of controlling people.
Who are the veterans of the international brigades and other independent battalions?
What did they learn?
What roles did they hold when they were discharged after one or two years of service?
Where are they going?
Are they returning to their home countries, or moving to new ones? Who is employing them once their contracts serving Ukraine have ended?
There are already signs that the war is creating training opportunities that criminal organisations could exploit. In October 2025, reports indicated that Mexican and Colombian volunteers serving with Ukraine’s International Legion were seeking precisely this kind of training: drone manufacturing, electronic warfare and real-time battlefield coordination, before returning to their home countries and being hired by criminal organisations. Fibre-optic-guided drones have already been found in the hands of Mexican criminal organisations. Social networks such as Instagram, YouTube and X are full of profiles of operators of different nationalities showing their day-to-day life at war and the skills they possess, a portfolio for future hiring.
Doctrine (the way to do in front lines), FPV drone piloting, counter-drone measures, and the ability to adapt parts using 3D printing are now all part of theseactors’ capabilities. This is no longer simply a problem of territorial presence along the Amazon border, in the Chaco, or in the Andes. Increasingly, it is a problem of capacity to confront a new technological reality, with veterans or trained personnel carrying the most modern doctrine for the employment of these means, brought back from a war being fought in Eastern Europe.
In Brazil, evidence is still isolated, but it does exist at least three members of the Comando Vermelho were volunteers in Ukraine to learn war tactics. Recent footage showed a drone-piloting course offered by drug traffickers and caught on camera by the police in Rio de Janeiro. Other footage shows that the Comando Vermelho already uses agricultural drones’ worth approximately R$200,000 (Brazilian reais) to carry up to twenty rifles on trips between different favelas controlled by the faction, avoiding the avenues patrolled by the Military Police, as Julia Farias says in a report for CNN-Brasil.
However, for countries such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil and Peru, there is a further, external factor worth noting. The tightening of US action against drug trafficking and against armed dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN); in Ecuador and Colombia, combined with the use of US Armed Forces in the Caribbean Sea in recent months, will force Transnational Organised Crime to seek alternative routes for its drugs, as well as shelter for its troops and members in neighbouring countries.
In Brazil, in August 2026, the Federal Public Defender’s Office (Defensoria Pública da União) called on the Brazilian government to take urgent measures in response to reports of armed groups allegedly tied to FARC dissidents on indigenous land on the border with Colombia, which suggests that this displacement is already under way. The result affects the Armed Forces, which are required to act as police within the 150-km Border Strip, under Complementary Law 97/1999. Moreover, interagency operations involving security forces are no longer sporadic, but increasingly routine. In short, the deployment of the armed forces in border-strip operations, and in operations alongside other Brazilian state agencies, is now part of everyday life in Brazil. This could increasingly become the reality in neighbouring countries too, as the military capability of Transnational Organised Crime is reinforced by knowledge acquired abroad.
The important difference this time is that those crossing the border may bring technical expertise that was simply not available during the last major wave of displacement in the 20th century.
In short, the war in Ukraine functions, in practice, as a hub for training and the developing and spreading knowledge of drone warfare and counter-drone systems.. But this diffusion does not occur solely through institutional channels directed at allied countries. It is dispersed and has been absorbed by actors linked to Transnational Organised Crime. It is essential to map out who these returning veterans are, and to make positive use of them, whether through professional resettlement programmes, or as consultants to the very institutions of these countries, which will need to adapt to the new reality of drone use for the most varied everyday tasks.
Much of the discussion about the lessons of the war in Ukraine focuses on what conventional armed forces need to change. That is understandable. Ukraine is fighting a high-intensity conventional war. But focusing only on armed forces risks overlooking another important lesson: how quickly non-state actors can absorb military technology, tactics and expertise.
Publicação original disponível em: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/from-ukraines-trenches-to-south-americas-borders-and-favelas-criminal-organizations-use-of-one-way-attack-drones
