The Kremlin has forced thousands of migrants and foreign students to fight alongside Russian troops in its war against Ukraine, adding extra personnel for its offensive in the Kharkiv Oblast, according to assessments from European officials.
Using tactics first deployed by the Wagner mercenary group, Russian officials have with increasing frequency been threatening not to extend the visas of African students and young workers unless they agree to join the military, officials familiar with the matter said.
Moscow has also been enlisting convicts from its prisons, while some Africans in Russia on work visas have been detained and forced to decide between deportation or fighting, one European official said.
Photo: The Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Some of those people had been able to bribe officials to stay in the country and avoid military service, said the official, who like other people cited spoke on condition of anonymity.
Russia’s practice of sending migrants and students into battle under duress dates back to earlier in the war, another European official said.
Those troops suffer especially high casualty rates, because they are increasingly deployed in risky offensive maneuvers to protect more highly trained units, the official said.
A Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Russia has engaged in a global recruitment drive to enlist foreign mercenaries in at least 21 countries, including several nations in Africa, reports citing Ukrainian intelligence say.
Army recruitment campaigns offer lucrative signing bonuses and salaries for those who join up as contract soldiers. Recruiters have also targeted migrants and students who previously looked for employment in Russia, and in some cases have lured others over with promises of lucrative work before forcing them to train and deploy to the front, the reports say.
Russia’s ability to mobilize far greater numbers of troops could become a significant factor in the war as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to capitalize on a shift in momentum this year.
For now though, his forces have been grinding forward only slowly in northeastern Ukraine with heavy losses, despite a shortage of troops and ammunition on the Ukrainian side.
The Russian military lost more than 1,200 people a day last month — its highest casualty rate of the war, the British Ministry of Defence said.
From the beginning of the invasion, Russia has seen about 500,000 personnel killed or wounded, the UK estimates.
Bloomberg was unable to independently verify those figures.
At a meeting with foreign media in Saint Petersburg late on Wednesday last week, Putin appeared to imply that about 10,000 Russian troops a month are being killed or wounded, and that Ukrainian losses are five times higher.
While the Kremlin has failed to achieve a breakthrough on the battlefield, it has stepped up a bombing campaign against Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
Western officials say those attacks appear designed to make the city uninhabitable.
As he seeks to maintain public support in Russia, Putin has so far resisted a full-scale mobilization and Russia says it has been able to make up a significant share of its losses — in terms of numbers if not the standard of the troops — through a voluntary recruitment drive that has attracted tens of thousands of people.
The government in Kathmandu earlier this year said that it was aware of about 400 young Nepali men who had been recruited by Russia, but many more likely signed up without the government knowing.
India’s decision to stop recruiting Nepalese Gurkhas for its army, ending a 200-year-old tradition, may have encouraged Nepalis to look for work in Russia and elsewhere.
A senior Ukrainian official said they have seen an uptick in the number of foreign fighters among the prisoners Ukraine has captured on the battlefield.
Africans and Nepalis have been particularly common, they said.
Reuters reported last year that the mercenary group Wagner had recruited several African citizens as part of a drive to enlist convicts from Russian prisons for its forces in Ukraine.
There are 35,000 to 37,000 African students in Russia, said Yevgeny Primakov head of Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization devoted to spreading knowledge about Russia abroad.
“Every year we sign up about 6,500 students from Africa to study in Russia for free,” he said on Thursday at the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum.
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