Photo: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
By: EFE Posted 07 Sep 2023, 19:14 pm EDT
The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (ARC), made up of opposition organizations from inside and outside the island, affirmed this Thursday in Miami that Hundreds of Cubans are already on the battlefield recruited by Russia to fight against Ukraineciting information from the Ukrainian armed forces.
In a press conference, the leader of the ARC, Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, showed a video where Cuban passports allegedly recruited by Russia appear as military to participate in the war in Ukraine.
According to an ARC statement, the video, produced by “the cyber-Resistance and the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” shows specific details “about the participation of the Castro-communist regime with mercenary military personnel in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine“.
According to the statement, “technicians of the Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to access the accounts and files of the senior Russian military officers who direct the operation of Cuban mercenaries with the support of the Cuban communist regime.”
“Ukrainian armed forces managed to penetrate the database of Russian officers and extricated a tremendous amount of information about this operation to send Cubans to fight on behalf of Russia; the operation is so big and there are so many details that you realize that there is an involvement of the Castro regime,” Gutiérrez Boronat told EFE.
The statement distributed by the ARC says that “among what was extracted by the Ukrainian technicians are the passports of hundreds of Cubans who have been enlisted in the Russian Army, the recruitment centers and their organization in Russia, the military bases used for the use of the Cuban troops, as well as the deployment areas”.
Last monday, The Government of Cuba announced the dismantling of a Russia-based human trafficking network that recruited Cubans -both on the island and in that Eurasian country- to fight as mercenaries in the war in Ukraine.
A statement from the island’s Foreign Ministry reported that the Ministry of the Interior “detected and is working on the neutralization and dismantling of a human trafficking network that operates from Russia to incorporate Cuban citizens living there, and even some from Cuba.”
“Cuba is not part of the war in Ukraine,” stressed the Cuban Foreign Ministry.
“It is laughable to think that the communist regime in Cuba, which is a police state, cannot know about this.Boronat reacted to a question from EFE.
“It is the same story as when they talk about Cuba and drug trafficking. There was so much evidence against drug trafficking that (the government) blamed two or three officers. The evidence that exists now is overwhelming, and it is also public,” insisted the Cuban exile activist.
“Remember that there is a public agreement between Belarus and the Castro-communist regime to transfer special troops from the Minint (Cuban Ministry of the Interior) to Belarus to ‘train’ them (Boronat gestured in quotes). Some of these troops are already moving from Belarus to Russia and from Russia to Ukraine,” he asserted.
The activist sent a video to EFE, according to him, filmed yesterday on the front lines of the war in Ukraine, in Donbass, in which “a Ukrainian commando unit sends a very clear message to the people of Cuba and to those who are going to go there,” Boronat said.
“Cubans, do not be fooled as they were in Soviet times (…), do not be part of this Russian aggression of which you will be victimssays one of the fighters in the video.
According to Boronat, some 30 deputies of the Ukrainian Parliament sent a declaration to the European Union “to suspend European financing to the communist regime in Cuba,” which “in the last three years has been about 11,000 million,” he said.
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