A Chinese man fighting for the Russian Army claims his superiors locked him in a dark steel-barred pit, with barely enough room to stand, for 21 days. His offense, he said, was a dispute with his commander over lifesaving protective gear.

Michael, not his real name, said he joined Russia’s fight against Ukraine to “have a taste for military life abroad” but after a brutal year on the frontlines is now convinced enlisting in Vladimir Putin’s army was “a mistake.”

His experience in the pit, where the 29-year-old said he could barely lift his head, killed his desire to fight for Moscow and he wants to send a message home to other Chinese nationals contemplating joining Russia’s fight.

“I have to speak out some truths and warn those irrational Chinese – don’t come over here,” he said.

“The world’s number two military is a sheer joke,” Michael said, listing subpar equipment, inadequate logistics, mistreatment and “severe corruption” as issues within the military, complaints that have been widely documented since the war began.

Both Ukraine and Russia have used foreign fighters to bolster their forces. But the issue of Chinese mercenaries fighting for Russia was thrust into the global spotlight when Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed two Chinese fighters had been captured by Ukraine in early April and claimed there were “many more” in Russia’s ranks.

Zelensky demanded answers from Beijing which, in turn, denied any involvement and repeated previous calls for Chinese citizens to “refrain from participating in military actions of any party.”

Russia’s deputy foreign minister called the claims Chinese citizens were fighting in Ukraine a “complete untruth,” according to TASS, a Russian state media agency. Days later Ukraine paraded the Chinese fighters it captured in front of the media.

Macho propaganda videos

Chinese men have been targeted on social media by recruitment ads to join Russia on the frontlines fighting Ukraine.

The videos are all in Russian but come with Chinese translations. One carried Chinese subtitles saying: “Aren’t you a man? Be a real man!” It is not clear who made the translations.

Such videos caught the attention of Michael, who said he started seeing them in 2023 on Douyin – the Chinese version of TikTok. Once enlisted, he started posting regular social media videos of his time in Moscow’s ranks.

“I felt pretty pumped back then,” Michael recalled. “As a former professional soldier in China, I thought there had to be a way for me to contribute here.”

He said it wasn’t political – he just wanted to fight. “I’m just a pure soldier,” he said.

While he could’ve chosen to fight for Ukraine, he said, but it was easier to get a visa to go to Russia and he arrived in Moscow on a tourist permit in November 2023.

After being initially turned down by the Russian army because he didn’t speak Russian, he said he joined the infamous mercenary group Wagner and was sent to fight in the Donbas region. Six months later, in May 2024, he says he signed a one-year contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry which sent him to Bakhmut. Other foreign fighters have signed similar contracts.

Michael offered a reason the money mattered; describing himself and many Chinese fighters on Russia’s frontline as being “from the bottom of the heap” in his homeland’s hyper-competitive society and where economic growth is slowing.

He said he previously served as a prison guard and, like Michael, claimed fighting for Russia was not a political choice.

He chose to fight for Russia because he felt it “has the upper hand in military strength.”

That view is not uncommon in China.

Maria Repnikova, an expert on Chinese and Russian politics at Georgia State University, said state media coverage in China leans towards a pro-Russia stance. “The Chinese outlets’ coverage of the war has significant impact on public perceptions of this ongoing invasion,” she said.

But shortly after Zelensky raised the issue of Chinese fighters on the Russian frontlines with Beijing last week, many of those social media accounts were blocked.

The Russian recruitment ads, however, are still widely available on China’s tightly-controlled internet.

Michael was one of those Chinese fighters regularly sharing his experiences on Chinese social media, but he said was restricted from posting before the latest round of censorship. He believes the sweeping ban was because of his public comments detailing his mistreatment in the Russian military.

The other fighter, who returned to China in late 2024, said he discovered he was now prohibited from leaving the country last month, when he was stopped before a planned trip abroad. He suspects the travel ban is connected to his previous service in Russia.

Chinese fighters on both sides

There have been Chinese fighting on both sides of this war but those who chose to fight for Ukraine – who largely see themselves as motivated by ideology rather than finances – seem to have one thing in common: they spent time out of China.

Jason, who was born in China, moved to the United States during his high school years.

After spending four months dodging shells in trenches and foxholes, the then infantryman said he sought to be even more active in combat. He applied to transfer to an assault company, but said he was turned down because the Ukrainian commander was suspicious about his nationality.

Reflecting, a year after returning to the US, he said that was a “pity,” but he understood the suspicion because “China and Russia are pretty close.”

China’s threat to one day take Taiwan was a motivation for Jason to fight with Ukraine.

The cause of the self-governing island – which China’s Communist Party claims as its own and has vowed to seize by force, if necessary – is deeply personal for the 27-year-old. He said his great-grandfather was a Nationalist soldier who lost his life in the fight against the Communists in the late 1940s during China’s civil war. The defeated Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan.

He hopes the fact he went to fight for Ukraine would give people in Taiwan a “sense of hope that someone would come to help,” if China were to invade.

“I think most of the Chinese people are being brainwashed for a long time,” he said.

She said she was inspired to sign up for service in Ukraine after seeing a video about the only known Chinese national killed while fighting for Ukraine.

Claims of a “one-sided” narrative in China were also made by the two Chinese fighters captured by Ukraine. Ukrainian security personnel watched over the men as they spoke, likely under duress, and the fact the two men were put in front of media at all is likely a violation of international humanitarian law.

Following the capture, Zelensky has publicly said Ukraine is investigating whether the Chinese state has had a hand in encouraging its nationals to fight for Russia.

“I don’t have an answer to this question yet. The Security Service of Ukraine will work on it,” he said last week, adding: “We are not saying that someone gave any command, we do not have such information.”

China has repeatedly denied any state involvement. “These claims are groundless,” said Lin Jian, spokesperson for China’s Foreign ministry, after being asked about Zelensky’s statement “many more” Chinese citizens were fighting for Russia.

“Ukraine should acknowledge China’s efforts and constructive role in seeking a political solution to the crisis,” said Lin in a news conference on April 9.

China’s quick move to censor the social media accounts of Chinese fighters in Russia is to have been expected, according to Maria Repnikova, the Georgia State University expert. “I am not surprised by the censorship of mercenaries since the capture was a big scandal,” she said.

While social media has undoubtedly played a role in the recruitment of Chinese fighters, Repnikova said the fact the recruitment ads were not censored in China, and remain available, was likely more an “oversight” than “strategic” because the pro-Russian view in such videos is “just entwined with the narrative of Russia fighting well.”

Michael and Jason may have fought on opposite sides of this war, but they have a shared experience: the reality of war, they said, was much worse than they ever expected.

“It’s incredibly brutal, far beyond what anyone can imagine,” said Michael.

Mankind’s achievements over the millennia have been bountiful. Their evolutionary fruits – from the harnessing of fire, to vaccines, to the art of diplomacy – were never low hanging; they were imagined before they were ever grasped.

But once held, they became indispensable. Until now that is, as 100 days into his presidency US President Donald Trump seems determined to throw this painful learning to the wind, risking a world forced into reverse.

A torrent of tariffs, unleashed against the better judgement of experts, yet exalted by Trump’s acolytes as the work of a deal-making genius are a case in point. So too is his willingness to throw allies to the wind, by threatening to grab Greenland, Canada even Panama by force if necessary.

Whatever one’s view of the policies themselves, Trump’s total upending of the global status quo has sewn fear and uncertainty among America’s friends, exacerbated market volatility and normalized economic aggression. It’s a formula that over the centuries has rarely served the world well.

The president’s apparent over-arching ethos – might is right, and mine is greatest – is now demolishing geopolitical norms at speed. It is Ukraine that should give in to Russia, which “has all the cards,” Trump says. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “pretty big concession,” his US counterpart adds, is not “taking the whole country.”

Yet despite three years of “meat-grinding” war, Putin’s aim remains as contrary to international law as it was when he launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion.

It is clear then why Trump struggles to do what all his allies find easy: to blame Putin for defying the rules-based world order in a brutal campaign to swallow his smaller neighbor. The US president often even blames Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war in which at least 42,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured, according to the United Nations, saying “he should never have started it.”

The implication – that the weak should capitulate to the strong – is an upending of millennia of evolution, culminating in the post-World War II, US-inspired rules-based international order that led to an unprecedented eight decades of relative global peace, prosperity and unimaginable scientific innovation.

Trump, as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has commented, has broken the mold. “Old assumptions can no longer be taken for granted, the world as we knew it is gone,” he said.

The president’s world view was nurtured by his property-developing, landlord father Fred Trump. Poor tenants unable to pay their rent claimed they were evicted; not an uncommon practice at the time, or since, but one that advantages the powerful over the weak.

The parallels are not hard to spot: the world’s most powerful man still relies on bravado and bullying to get what he wants. Today everyone is in his firing line. America has been “taken advantage of by virtually every country in the world,” Trump inaccurately claims, “we’re no longer going to be the country that’s ripped off by every country in the world.”

But here’s the rub. Such is Trump’s braggadocio, no one he trusts appears brave enough to challenge him. Only when global markets soured, and his Petri dish economic experiment turned putrid, did he backslide on the threat to impose immediate tariffs on both friends and foes of the US, and even then, it may not be enough to avoid economic pain.

China seems ready to wait out his trade-defying tariffs, having been preparing for this moment since Trump’s first term.

Now, it seems, he must learn a costly lesson for himself that economic evolution had already taught the experts.

And while Trump’s defiant pose after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was enough to convince Putin that he was “a courageous man,” the US president is already backing down on some of his tariff bravado, chastened by his loyalists who found their voices as bond markets tanked.

In the view of both Putin and Trump, it is the tough who set the rules, and the man in both their crosshairs, Ukraine’s President Zelensky, got this message Wednesday, “the man with ‘no cards to play’ should now, finally, GET IT DONE,” as Trump wrote on his social media platform.  Trump has since criticized Putin, questioning whether the Russian leader is interested in peace and suggesting “he’s just tapping me along.”

The world Trump and Putin seem to crave is one of spheres of influence run from islands of power, where diplomacy is a time-consuming irrelevance replaced by imperial decrees.

It would be a reset harking back to a darker time, essentially overturning the rules-based order. In the aftermath of great empires, regional warlords allied, feuded and fought each other for centuries before nations emerged, and largely did the same.

By the 19^th century diplomats like Klemens von Metternich, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, spent entire careers attempting to balance Europe’s feuding powers. He famously said, “when France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches cold.”

Today it is Trump spreading a chill. The Manhattan real estate developer has said he is going to “get” Greenland “for national security reasons.” Greenland and its Danish patron, a NATO ally that is no match militarily for the USA, say no.

Canada’s prime minister says the same about Trump’s plans to make his northern neighbor the USA’s 51st state, insisting “it will never happen.” Mark Carney, a former central banker already battling Trump’s aggressive trade tariffs, knows the threat is real, telling voters ahead of Monday’s election in which his Liberal Party won a stunning fourth consecutive victory “the Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country.”

Trump’s world view is clear: he speaks as though he can reach out and take these things, and clearly believes he is working from an island of power, isolated from the negative consequences of his assumed conquests.

But no man, nor nation, is an Island.

Trump’s weakness is not just that he might buy Putin’s lie that he can conquer all Ukraine, or be outfoxed by Xi on tariffs, but that the rest of the world increasingly sees through his mantle of self-belief.

The costs of this muscle-power politics will be revealed more slowly than the near-instantaneous economic market pain to his trade tariffs. But it still marks a return to an era of dog eat dog. History has shown how that turns out.

The resurrection of Canada’s Liberal Party was as close to miraculous as you can get in modern politics. Its savior: Prime Minister Mark Carney, a political rookie but also an experienced tactician and one of the world’s most highly regarded economists.

But in a farmer’s field on the eve of the election, Canada’s Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre continued to nurture a robust political movement that won the Conservative Party its largest share of the popular vote in decades.

Both leaders promised to vigorously stand up to the threat to annex Canada that came early, loudly and often from US President Donald Trump.

To meet the moment and the menace, Canadians rallied around the flag, expressing an uncommon patriotism. But they also coalesced along the country’s traditional left-right dividing lines, deepening fractures between east and west, young and old, male and female.

Many Canadians voiced a need for strong leadership in the face of the American threat, but they are almost equally divided on who is best to deliver on that.

“We have a guy down south talking smack about Canada, I think it’s important we have a strong leader to stand up to him, he needs to show us some respect,” one voter, Elaine Forbes, said as she walked to her Ottawa polling station Monday prepared to back Carney.

It was a similar sentiment that motivated many of Poilievre’s supporters.

“You need a strong leader and you need a lot more than what’s been going on,” said Nolan Travis just before he cast his ballot in Ottawa, adding, “someone who is going to actually mean what he says.”

The buzz word of “leadership” has left Canada’s three other national parties in the cold, all of them losing ground in the popular vote. The country’s next parliament will reflect more of a two-party system, united against Trump but divided about nearly everything else.

Both Carney and Poilievre extended a hand to each other on election night, promising to cooperate, especially when it comes to defending Canada against American expansionism.

“You know, humility underscores the importance of governing as a team in cabinet and in caucus and working constructively with all parties across Parliament, of working in partnership with the provinces and the territories and with Indigenous peoples,” said Carney during his election victory speech, adding that he will be guided by such humility as he governs Canada.

In his election night speech, Poilievre pivoted to conciliatory language Canadians have not heard from him in months.

“While we will do our constitutional duty of holding government to account and proposing better alternatives, we will always put Canada first as we stare down tariffs and other irresponsible threats from President Trump. Conservatives will work with the prime minister and all parties with the common goal of defending Canada’s interests and getting a new trade deal that puts these tariffs behind us while protecting our sovereignty and the Canadian people,” he said.

As reasonable as both leaders sounded in the aftermath of the vote, key party lieutenants were already sounding more combative.

Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, who was reelected Monday, seemed in a fighting mood as he touted an alternative vision for Canada. “I don’t know what tomorrow holds – my focus though is on all the young people, all the parents, the moms, the dads who came to us and trusted us to offer an alternative a brighter future. We’re going to see that too, we’re going to keep fighting and when the next federal election comes around, conservatives will earn the trust of more voters and we will bring home a victory nationally,” he said Monday night in an interview with CBC News.

Jivani has been a close friend of US Vice President JD Vance since their years at Yale University.

Sean Fraser, a key Carney ally and a once and likely future Liberal cabinet minister, shot back at Poilievre, accusing him of adopting a Trumpian style of politics.

But Fraser did concede that Canadians are looking for his government to get beyond the political divide.

“Canadians do not want us to continually talk about what’s wrong with the other party we may be competing against, they want us to put our ideas on the table and work together to get things done,” said Fraser in an interview with CBC News after his victory Monday.

A two-party system is not the traditional makeup of Canada’s parliament, and it will be tough to navigate for Canadian leaders, especially Carney.

“When we seek unity, unity grows,” proclaimed Carney on election night, but fostering that unity could prove an unprecedented challenge.