MANILA, Philippines — There are 14 Filipinos who had been recruited in Russia to fight against Ukraine wherein one of them had been killed in the battlefield and one is a prisoner of war in Ukraine, a study on Southeast Asian mercenaries showed.
Munira Mustaffa, executive director of Chasseur Group and senior fellow at Verve Research, shared this information in an online press briefing where she discussed her report entitled "Southeast Asia's Mercenary Pipeline."
"So far the alleged count of Filipinos [recruited] is 14 and the confirmed death is one and there's is one prisoner of war. As far as I know from what I read from the records and accounts that was collected [from the victims] that they do not know that they were being sent to the frontline," Mustaffa said.
"My understanding is that they have answered a job advertisement for different kinds of roles only to discover that upon arrival their passports [were] confiscated," she said.
Mustaffa said the Filipinos "were thrown in for training with weapons for two weeks and they get thrown into the frontline [later on]."
In January 2026, the Kyiv post reported that Ukraine's Military Intelligence (HUR) said that a Filipino fighting with Russian forces was killed in the Donetsk region.
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in February confirmed the death of John Patrick, a Filipino mercenary who died in Ukraine.
The DFA also said it received "request for assistance" from the families of at least five Filipinos trapped in the middle of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The unidentified Filipinos were reportedly recruited online to work as truck drivers but ended up working for the Russian military.
In a statement, HUR said its operatives identified the body of John Patrick among Russian troops killed near the village of Novoselivka in the Kramatorsk district.
The HUR said the Filipino was wounded in a "meat assault" against Ukraine and left to die slowly after one week of training.
