The prisoners of war come from all corners of the world: Kenya, Nepal, Tajikistan, to name a few. Speaking different languages and coming from diverse cultures, they have one thing in common – they say they were deceived by Russia into joining a war they did not want to fight.
Nearly 200 foreigners from 37 countries have been captured fighting for Russia and are currently held as prisoners of war by Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Their accounts paint a disturbing picture of the deception, bribery and blackmail they say Moscow is using to lure foreigners into joining its military.
As Russia continues to struggle to recruit its own people to fight in Ukraine, it is increasingly turning to foreigners to bolster its military.
Brigadier General Dmitry Usov, who heads the POW headquarters, said Ukraine has identified more than 18,000 foreigners from 128 countries and territories who fought or are currently fighting for Russia in Ukraine – a number that does not include the thousands of North Korean soldiers sent to fight for Russia as part of a military cooperation agreement between the two countries. The actual number of foreigners fighting for Russia is likely much higher.
The rise in the number of foreigners found fighting in Ukraine has recently prompted several countries to issue strongly worded appeals to Russia to stop recruiting their citizens.
Earlier this month, Kenya’s President William Ruto said that his government was concerned “over young Kenyans who have been illegally recruited to fight in the war.”
On the same day, South Africa’s government said it would investigate how 17 of its citizens ended up fighting in the war after the men sent distress calls for help to return home from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, most of which is under Russian military control.
A day after that, Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson for India’s foreign ministry, said 44 Indian nationals were fighting for Russia, adding that the Indian government has “once again taken up the matter with the Russian authorities to have them released at the earliest, and also to put an end to this practice.” He said the Indian authorities were taking steps to prevent people from being “tricked into joining.”
The Ukrainian Defense Intelligence told CNN the number of foreigners found on the front lines in Ukraine has been growing year-on-year since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in early 2022 but has increased significantly this year. The number of foreigners taken prisoner by Ukrainian troops in the first nine months of this year was double that of the whole of last year, which was itself five times the 2023 figure, according to Kyiv.
CNN has asked the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Military for comment, but has received no answer. Moscow has previously denied coercing foreigners to enlist.
Manpower needs
Moscow is fighting a brutal, grinding war in Ukraine. Its military continues to inch forward, most recently towards the eastern city of Pokrovsk, but this progress comes at a huge cost.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine release casualty data, but Moscow stopped publishing even the most basic mortality and demographic data earlier this year, most likely to disguise the real cost of the war, analysts say.
But Western intelligence agencies believe Russia has suffered more than 1 million casualties, including more than 250,000 deaths, since February 2022. In its most recent estimate, the United Kingdom’s Defence Intelligence said that, on average, some 1,000 Russian soldiers are killed or injured every day.
This astonishingly high casualty rate leaves Russia in need of a constant supply of new manpower – at a time when all signs point to the fact that the number of Russian citizens willing to enlist is plummeting.
The Kremlin is wary of calling for another mobilization after the fiasco of the September 2022 partial mobilization, which spooked hundreds of thousands of Russian men into fleeing the country. At the same time, Russia is facing massive demographic pressures – the United Nations projects that Russia’s population could drop by between 25% and 50% by 2100.
Many Russian regions, trying to reach their Kremlin-mandated recruitment targets, have dramatically increased the amount of money they pay to new military recruits. Analysts say this is an indication that “ideological” recruitment campaigns are no longer enough to motivate Russians to fight in Ukraine.
‘New Russians’
The presence of foreigners along the front lines in Ukraine is not a secret. Ukraine has been recruiting foreign volunteers since the beginning of the war, even forming specific units for them. Kyiv does not disclose information about foreigners in its ranks, but their numbers are likely running into the thousands – despite many countries, including the United Kingdom and many European countries, specifically warning their citizens against signing up.
The difference, according to the Ukrainians, in an assessment backed by human rights watchdogs, is that while those fighting for Ukraine have most likely made their decision independently and willingly, many of the foreigners in Russia’s ranks have not.
Ukrainian Defense Intelligence officials told CNN that Russia’s foreign recruitment tactics boil down to three approaches: blackmail, bribery and deception.
Russian visas, residence permits and the promise of Russian citizenship – or the threat of these being stripped away – have become key tools for Russia as it tries to recruit more fighters.
According to the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence officials, migrants to Russia from central Asian countries, such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, are most likely to enlist for migration reasons.
The Kremlin has recently made it easier for foreigners to get visas and Russian passports in exchange for military service. Meanwhile, last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law that makes it possible for naturalized Russian citizens to be stripped of their citizenship if they fail to register for military service.
According to human rights groups, including Memorial, the Russian rights watchdog which was banned in Russia in December 2021, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, fighters from central Asian countries often say they were threatened with imprisonment and deportation unless they agreed to enlist. Ukrainian defense intelligence confirmed this.
Russia is not denying this practice. Alexander Bastrykin, the chairman of Russia’s Investigative Committee, said in May that Russian authorities had already “caught” 80,000 recently naturalized Russian citizens who were avoiding military registration, Russian media group RBC reported. He said that 20,000 of these new Russian citizens from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan were now on the front lines.
While many foreign-born men are being coerced into the military while already in Russia, many others appear to have been brought into the country in order to serve.
According to the information warfare research group OpenMinds, the number of advertisements promoting contract military service that specifically target foreigners has risen more than sevenfold since this summer.
OpenMinds’ new analysis of content on Russia’s most popular social network VKontakte showed that, by mid-2025, one in three posts advertising military contracts was aimed at foreigners, compared to just 7% of all adverts just a year ago.
The adds often include assurances that recruits will not be sent to assault units and will be assigned to specific positions with lower risk to their lives, OpenMinds said.
The data, shared exclusively with CNN, shows that about half of the adverts target Russian-speaking foreigners from post-Soviet countries, while the rest are aimed at African nations, India, Bangladesh, Iraq, Yemen and others. Only a small proportion of the adverts – about one sixth – makes no mention of a specific country.
OpenMinds said that while interest in military contracts was minimal among foreigners in the early years of the full-scale war, data from the Russian-language search engine Yandex shows that the share of searches on military contracts in post-Soviet countries increased tenfold in 2024 and continued to grow in 2025.
The messaging varies depending on the target audience.
OpenMinds said that many of the Russian-language advertisements promise social and financial benefits as well as assistance with obtaining a Russian passport.
Social media posts circulating in China earlier this year promised good pay and promoted a certain image of masculinity, with slogans like “Be a real man!”
One Telegram channel seen by CNN targets Arabic speakers, promising would-be mercenaries fast-track Russian visas, salaries of around $2,000 to $2,500 a month, free healthcare and an all-expenses-paid lifestyle. The channels mention fighters from Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, Algeria and Syria as being desirable recruits.
A Russian military contract signed by a Chinese national and seen by CNN includes some of these perks, such as a promise that the soldier will have access to free education after three years of service and that their “meals, attire and other supplies” will be paid for by Russia.
In exchange, the soldier who signed the contract agreed to “participate in combat, fulfill duties during the mobilization period, during emergencies and martial law, armed conflicts, participate in activity to keep and restore international peace and security or top international terrorist activity outside the territory of the Russian Federation.”
The Ukrainian officials who spoke with CNN about the issue said that some of the foreigners who were captured by Ukraine said they were made to sign contracts in Russian without understanding what was in them and with no translation provided.
Prisoners of war who spoke to Ukrainian investigators said their combat training lasted from one to two weeks, after which they were sent to the front lines, where they would often end up being part of the assault units forced to storm Ukrainian positions, despite the huge risks. The death toll is staggering – Usov said that of the more than 18,000 foreigners Ukraine was able to identify, at least 3,388 have been killed.
The Ukrainian government has launched a special initiative aimed at foreigners fighting for Russia and other reluctant Russian recruits, offering them a safe haven and prisoner of war status if they surrender. Pages on the program’s website can be read in English, Russian, Spanish and Arabic.
‘Construction jobs’ that don’t exist
While some of the advertisements are relatively transparent about the jobs that are on offer – the ads include photographs of Russian assault units and combat soldiers – others are not.
The Ukrainian Defense Intelligence officials told CNN some of the prisoners of war told Ukrainian investigators that they came to Russia after being promised jobs in construction, in warehouses, as security guards or as drivers. They said this experience was most often described by prisoners from far-flung, lower-income countries like Sri Lanka, Cuba, Nepal, and some African nations.
Kenya’s foreign ministry issued a statement earlier this month, saying it had uncovered a human trafficking operation that was recruiting Kenyans to be shipped into combat under the guise of overseas jobs. It said that other Kenyan nationals who had been rescued from Russia said they were misled about the nature of the work they’d be doing and ended up in dangerous jobs, including assembling drones and handling chemicals.
Also last month, Cuba’s foreign ministry said that after finding out in 2023 that its citizens were fighting in Ukraine, it had launched a crackdown on the recruitment and human trafficking networks responsible. It said that 26 people have already been convicted, with several other trials still pending.
Last year, Sri Lanka’s government held a series of top-level meetings with Russian officials specifically to address the issue of Sri Lankan citizens being recruited to fight in the war.
Nepal has said scores of its citizens were recruited under false pretenses to join Russia’s war effort and has called on Moscow to stop the practice. Last year, Nepal went as far as banning its citizens from travelling to Russia or Ukraine for employment.
Brigadier General Dmitry Usov, who heads Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said this week that the move had worked.
“In 2023–2024, almost 1,000 citizens of Nepal signed a contract with the Russian army. In 2025, as of October 1, only one person from this country joined the Russian army,” he said.
