Farmers, the unemployed, airline catering employees… All these Indians were recruited by Moscow to go and fight in Ukraine.
Only, it's not always their decision.
According to analysts, recruitment in India – an old ally of Moscow, which has refused to explicitly condemn the invasion of Ukraine – is part of Russia's global recruitment campaign.
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And to maximize recruitment, Russia uses “recruitment agents”.
This is the case of Faisal Khan, BabaVlogs on his networks.
From Dubai, he regularly offers “good deals” for finding work abroad.
And recently he offered a “support” position to the Russian army: “You don’t have to fight.
All you will have to do is clear out the destroyed buildings, maintain the armories and after one year of service, you will be eligible for permanent residency.”
Salary offered: $3,600 per month, or 7 times the average salary in India.
But once there, foreign recruits must sign documents in Russian, without understanding them.
“We made them write something on a piece of paper, but they couldn't understand what it was.
They wanted to do research on the Internet to understand what they had been made to write, but they could not access their phone,” Yousuf Kumar told AFP, father of Azad Kumar enlisted in the Russian army. .
For the moment, at least one 23-year-old Indian has died on the Ukrainian front, for Russia.