Following massive assaults on Saturday 15 December, Ukrainian forces released images and videos of killed Russian and North Korean soldiers in Kursk Oblast.
…explanation of the concept [near abroad] in Russian: " ‘The term originally had an ironic nuance,’ said the historian Ivan Ivanovich. ‘People spoke of nastoyashchyeye za rubezhye, “the present-day abroad.” But now the words have acquired a purely informational meaning, in order to distinguish the new states of the C.I.S. [ Commonwealth of Independent States, a title now in the dustbin of history ] from the “original” abroad.’ “
Foreign colleagues does not mean anything. It might as well be people from Mongolia or surrounding to Russia republics.
Don’t be disingenuous , even in native Russian it has distinction of worth: