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Tricked Into Fighting for Russia
Russia needs a lot of soldiers. Many Africans need work.
I'm the host of The World.
About two years ago when North Korean soldiers were spotted fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine, it was a sign that Moscow was growing concerned about its shrinking reserve of soldiers.
Russia has been losing about 1,000 soldiers a day to death or injury, according to Western estimates. To make up the numbers, it has enlisted prisoners, offered cash incentives to students and expanded the age range for conscription. And it has started recruiting more aggressively abroad, most recently in Africa.
A team of my colleagues wrote a remarkable story about how many of the Africans who end up on the front line in Ukraine never actually signed up for war. Today, our East Africa bureau chief, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, explains why so many end up fighting, and dying, anyway.
Why young Africans end up on the front line in Ukraine
Russia needs troops to feed its war machine in Ukraine. Young people in Africa need well-paid work. The collision of these two needs carried Vincent Awiti, 29, from his home in Kenya to a battlefield in Kharkiv province in Ukraine last year.
As Awiti described it, he was promised a job as a shop worker in Russia by a recruiter on the streets of Nairobi. But after he arrived in St. Petersburg, he was coerced into signing a military contract. He was shipped off to an army camp and, after four days of training, was sent into battle. He had never even seen a map of Ukraine.
One morning last July, Russian commanders ordered Awiti and his squad to advance across two rivers to a frontline trench outside the city of Vovchansk. Drones armed with small bombs prowled the skies above him. Uncollected corpses littered the fields and in the rivers the dead floated “like water lilies,” as he put it. By the time he reached the second river, he said, he was virtually alone; the rest of his squad had been killed. He spent 20 days in the trench before escaping with a Russian deserter who shot himself in the leg to avoid being sent back to the front.
Africa is undergoing a demographic boom. The continent is home to 1.5 billion people with a median age of around 19. That means one of the most important challenges facing African policymakers is creating enough jobs for young people — a deluge that joins the labor market every year, often moving to cities where work is more plentiful.
The continent’s economies are growing. The International Monetary Fund projects that sub-Saharan Africa’s average G.D.P. growth will stand at 4.3 percent in 2026, though it says the war in Iran has clouded that outlook. Despite the growth, countries can’t keep pace with the demand for meaningful jobs. The vast majority of young people can’t find full-time work and have to find alternative ways to earn money, such as selling cheap goods or providing one-off services. This work is often underpaid, unregulated and insecure.
The inevitable consequence is that many young people in Africa look for work abroad. A majority head to other African countries with bigger job markets, but others go to Europe, the Gulf states, North America, Asia — and also Russia.
Many fall prey to exploitative agencies, which use social media to recruit them.
It is not just Russia. I recently spoke to a young Kenyan who, after answering a job ad for work in Thailand, found himself trapped at a Cambodian cyberscam center, where he was forced to work in abusive conditions. And some African women sent to the Gulf to work as maids find themselves locked into abusive contracts and subjected to cruel treatment from employers.
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Russian military recruitment has prompted a backlash in some countries. Kenya’s foreign minister, Musalia Mudavadi, traveled to Moscow in March for talks on the issue with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. And South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, held a phone conversation with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Afterward, Ramaphosa said 17 South Africans would be returning from Russia.
But many countries appear to have done little to protect their citizens from being ensnared. It’s also not clear how incentivized they are to do so. The Kenyan government has made sending workers abroad an explicit part of its economic strategy — a means of bringing foreign currency back into a struggling economy.
As for Awiti, he was wounded but survived his ordeal. He’s now back in Kenya, deeply scarred by what he went through. He advises friends not to answer advertisements for well-paying work in Russia. But despite his hard-won wisdom, he still has a problem: He needs a job.
For more: Read my full story about how Russia is luring Africans to Ukraine, which I reported alongside my colleagues John Eligon and Zimasa Matiwane.
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