Police have smashed a people smuggling ring which was luring men from Africa with the promise of jobs in Russia – but which was actually a ruse to recruit them to fight in the war in Ukraine. Kenyan investigators said more than 20 people have been rescued from the human trafficking operation which they suspect was being used to tempt men to Russia with false promises.
The would-be recruits were all found inside a residential apartment on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, where they had handed over travel documents and signed recruitment letters of supposed job offers. It’s not the first case where foreign nationals have reportedly been duped into fighting in Vladimir Putin’s invasion against Ukraine. Hundreds of Indian nationals have also complained about being recruited under false pretences.
North Koreans have also died fighting for Russia in Ukraine, although they have been sent as part of a military force promised to Putin by their country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un.
In Kenya, police said the men who were being recruited to head to Russia were tricked into paying more around £9,000 for visas, travel and accommodation with the promise of ‘lucrative salaries’ once they arrived in the Russian Federation.
The BBC reports Kenyans have already been encountered on the front line in Ukraine, with one young man telling Ukrainian soldiers he was an athlete who had been tricked into joining the Russian army.
Kenyan news site, The Saturday Standard, reported that two Kenyans had recently returned from the fighting in eastern Europe with one admitted to Kenyatta National Hospital. The paper said many of those who come back from the war are traumatised and injured, and others don’t make it home.
The raid by the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations took place on Wednesday September 24, with detectives from the the Transnational Organised Crime Unit discovering 21 Kenyans waiting to be processed to head to Russia.
According to the BBC, a senior foreign ministry official recently said the Kenyan government was following up reports of several Kenyan nationals who had allegedly been trafficked to Russia and were now being held as prisoners of war in Ukraine.
It’s reported men from Somalia, Sierra Leone, Togo, Cuba and Sri Lanka, are known to be currently held in Ukrainian prisoner-of-war camps, Petro Yatsenko, Ukraine’s spokesperson on the treatment of prisoners of war, recently told the BBC.
However, speaking about other prisoners-of-war, he added that “most African states show little interest in the return of such citizens and do not wish to take them back”.
