The Central African Republic has been firmly in the Russian sphere of orbit (at France's expense) since Touadera's Presidency began, i.e. 2016. France is also losing ground to Russia in West Africa.

Those in the video aren't even rebel soldiers. They literally appear to be from the Central African Republic's own military itself. However, years ago I read that the CAR government did not control the majority of the country, which is dominated by dozens of rebel groups.

Maybe Russian involvement in the CAR has restored control to the government, and the CAR is doing this to return the favour? The CAR was, after all, one of the 35 abstention votes when this war came up in the UN. Whereas nations whose relationship to Western countries is more important (Niger in particular, due to Nigerien uranium being a massive export to France, and the country's main income source) clearly voted alongside the West.

This, I suspect, is also why Syria was one of the five voting against condemning Russia. Assad practically owes his survival to Russia and has zero reason to trust the West after their open support for most of the opposition forces. Again, the attitude is probably this: Putin helped us stabilize our country by sending men to fight for us, and so we are returning the favour by volunteering to fight for him. This logic wouldn't be unsound in either the CAR or Syria. It may well be that this war becomes a kind of anti-Western crusade/jihad with people coming from many countries to bag some of those 20,000 or so, mostly Western-based, volunteers who are effectively on a pro-Western globohomo crusade of their own. I'm sure that thousands of wannabee tough guy Americans are already in the Ukraine to fight for freeduuuuumb, just waiting to be sent home in body bags.