The foreigners fighting and dying for Vladimir Putin

Lieutenant Vitalii Matvyenko, the spokesman for Ukraine’s Co-ordination Headquarters for the Treatment of PoWs, says that he sees no interest from the authorities in these men’s home countries for taking them back. For the citizens of many, fighting in foreign wars is illegal, and they could face jail if they went home. Asked if Russia was seeking the return of these men, a camp official snorts that there is no chance of that.

The POW camp in Lviv province houses 16 foreigners. There are more in other camps. There is no way to confirm the truth of these prisoners’ accounts but they echo other reports. No Ukrainian guards were present in the room when they were interviewed.

Prisoner A, from Nepal, said he had gone to Russia to study. A month after he got there he was unable to pay his university fees, because he had been cheated of his money by agents, who have lured hundreds from the poor Himalayan country to Russia. Desperate, he signed a contract with the Russian army, whose recruiters assured him he would not have to fight, “just help injured people”. Within weeks, however, he was forced to go to the front, and found himself under fire, with four other compatriots. “I don’t know what happened to them,” he says.

Prisoner B, from Slovakia, a member of the EU and NATO, tells a more eccentric story. He went to Russia in January because he dreamed of “living in nature, in the taiga, in Siberia.” His family told him he was “an idiot”. Because he needed money and wanted to get Russian citizenship to fulfil his ambition he signed up with the army and was promised he would just be digging trenches and building bunkers. “It was bullshit. They lied to us,” he says. After an attack, he stumbled through a minefield, dropped his gun and was captured. He says he does not want to go back to Slovakia because he would be jailed. He would like to go back to Russia but does not want to fight again so he says he is happy to sit out the war in the camp.

Prisoner C, from Brazil, says he was living in Australia and accepted a job offer from a Russian IT company. When he got to Russia he was told that the company worked for Russian military intelligence. He was sent to train to fly drones. He complained that he had not come to Russia for this, but every day he was told that his case would be solved “tomorrow”. When he was sent to the front, he was told that if he tried to escape, he would be arrested or shot.

One foreigner at the centre, who asked not to be identified, said he felt so angry about being sent to the front (which he also claimed he had not signed up for), that when he was captured he told Ukrainian intelligence officers “where 50 Russian positions were” and “thanks to me they killed my whole unit of 20 men”. Now he is angry again because he thought he had a deal with the Ukrainians that, after giving them this information, they would set him free.

Prisoner C claims that when training he saw Chinese “special forces” and met a Russian-speaking Iranian commander of a Russian unit. The men said that, though many foreigners had been tricked into fighting, others had indeed come to fight, and that their pay was $2,000 a month. Among the nationalities the POWs had met were Sri Lankans, Serbs, Cubans, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Moroccans, Indians and Egyptians. Sub-Saharan Africans have also been recruited. A Ukrainian intelligence source says that a high proportion of these recruits are dead, as they are deliberately sent in ahead of Russian troops “to expose our firing positions”. He added that an additional advantage of using foreigners was that no compensation was paid to their families, unlike to the families of Russian dead.

Estimates of the numbers of foreigners who have been recruited to fight with the Russians vary from the low thousands to tens of thousands. On October 17th, Ukraine’s spy chief, Kyrylo Budanov, claimed that there are nearly 11,000 North Korean troops training in eastern Russia to fight in Ukraine. There is no way to confirm this, though South Korea’s spy agency has stated some training is under way. The highest numbers of non-Russian POWs are from Sri Lanka and Nepal, says Lieutenant Matvyenko. In the last couple of months there have been fewer of them though. Stories about how those who have gone in search of big bucks have been scammed or killed have dampened enthusiasm for a Russian adventure.

© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com