cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/46040846
Russia’s enlistment numbers have begun to fall after four years of waging all-out war against Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s recruitment drives abroad seem to be ramping up — or at least attracting more attention. In early January, viral videos that appeared to show Russian officers mistreating African recruits prompted renewed warnings from Ukrainian officials that Vladimir Putin’s military views foreign fighters as “disposable.”
However, promises of high salaries and fast-track citizenship continue to lure thousands of young men, particularly from low-income countries, into the Russian army’s ranks and its grinding assault on Ukraine.
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Meduza deputy editor Eilish Hart spoke with Karen Philippa Larsen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), who is tracking this issue.
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Much of what we know about Russia’s foreign fighters has been gleaned from interviews with those who surrendered to Ukrainian forces on the battlefield … Contrary to how Kremlin propaganda tends to portray foreign recruits, Larsen found that they were anything but ideologically motivated to join Russia’s war against Ukraine. “The biggest and most common motivation was money, and then citizenship" … “Most of them describe an inability to sustain their daily lives back home and, in that sense, feel forced to migrate for work,” Larsen explains. “A Russian passport represents this gateway to work abroad, in Russia, and to secure future income.”
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That said, there is no shortage of media reports about foreign citizens who have been duped or coerced into joining the Russian army. On January 7, the Ukrainian military released an interview with a captured fighter from Uganda, 43-year-old Richard Akantoran, who claimed to have been lured to Russia by the promise of “good-paying” jobs and then forced to enlist in the military at gunpoint.
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Most foreign fighters join up willingly, and only a minority are entirely unaware of the reality of their situation when signing a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry. At the same time, many either presume or are led to believe that they’ll be working far behind the front line.
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A recent BBC investigation alleged that a Russian woman named Polina Azarnykh used Telegram to attract hundreds of recruits from countries in the Middle East, falsely promising young men non-combat roles … Russia is also stepping up its global recruitment efforts using the social network VK, according to the London-based research group OpenMinds. Based on an analysis of 19,000 military recruitment ads aimed at foreign nationals, OpenMinds found that while the majority targeted Russian speakers, specifically those from former Soviet Union countries, 38 percent mentioned countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
OpenMinds’ analysis also revealed the number of posts calling on foreigners to join the Russian army increased sevenfold between June and September 2025, accounting for a third of all recruitment ads on VK.
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Although media reports sometimes refer to Russia’s foreign fighters as “mercenaries,” many third-country recruits are not professional soldiers. “Most of them don’t have military training,” Larsen says, explaining that the POWs she interviewed received between 10 days and three months of basic training before being sent to the front.
According to the researcher, many of her interview subjects said they trained alongside other foreign recruits, specifically in groups that spoke the same language. However, these troops weren’t kept together during their deployment. Instead, individual fighters were paired with a Russian soldier as their “buddy” — and then struggled to communicate on the front line because they didn’t speak a common language.
“From the interviews, it became clear that Russia doesn’t really trust these people,” Larsen says.
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The POWs also spoke of weathering “very hard battles,” explaining that they were often sent out ahead of other Russian troops to probe or locate Ukrainian positions. Most of them said Ukrainian forces captured them within weeks of their arrival on the front line.
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These tactics suggest a tendency within the military to treat foreign fighters as expendable — much like the convicts recruited out of Russian prisons. “I think there is a tendency to see the foreigners and prisoners who fight for Russia as ‘disposable soldiers,’ in a sense, because they are most likely not very well trained,” she explains. “And I think the foreigners are especially vulnerable in this context because if and when a foreign soldier dies, there’s no Russian family that receives a coffin.”
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Ukrainian officials also maintain that the Russian army uses foreign fighters as cannon fodder. “Foreign citizens in the Russian army have a sad fate. Most of them are immediately sent to the so-called ‘meat assaults,’ where they are quickly killed,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X in November. “The Russian command understands that there will be no accountability for the killed foreigner, so they are treated as second-rate, expendable human material.”
After videos of African fighters began circulating online in early January, Ukraine’s ambassador to South Africa, Olexander Scherba, told the Telegraph that Russia is using Africans as “meat for the meat grinder.”
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Kenyan President William Ruto has also asked President Volodymyr Zelensky to facilitate the release of Kenyan nationals in Ukrainian custody. More than 200 Kenyans are believed to be fighting for Russia, including former members of the country’s security forces, Kenyan Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi said in November.
A spokesperson for Ukraine’s headquarters for the treatment of POWs, Petro Yatsenko, told the Kyiv Independent in December that Moscow has not requested to swap third-country captives because it “doesn’t need them.”
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