By Kontur | 2025-08-08

Ukrainian troops in the battered town of Vovchansk, scant kilometers from the Russian border, say the airwaves are crowded with unfamiliar tongues: Mandarin, Urdu, Swahili, Uzbek. These voices belong to foreign mercenaries, as Russia's war increasingly relies on a patchwork army of outsiders, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"The soldiers on this front are recording the participation of mercenaries from China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and African countries," Zelenskyy said in a statement after a visit to the 57th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade on August 4. "We will respond."

Vovchansk has been under fire since May 2024.

Its shattered streets and gutted homes speak to a Russian offensive fueled by whoever is willing to pick up a rifle: the desperate, the indebted, the misled. On the ground, it feels less like a military campaign and more like a grim business.

Moscow's silent draft

In past wars, foreign fighters were often outliers -- a few zealous ideologues or covert contractors. Not here. Today, Russia's full-scale invasion depends on a global patchwork of outsiders. Some join to make money, others to get out of prison. A few feel a misguided sense of duty. But none of them fights for Russia because he loves it.

Pakistan swiftly denied any involvement after Zelenskyy's statement. The allegations are "baseless and unfounded," the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said on August 5.

The "[g]overnment of Pakistan will take up the matter with Ukrainian authorities and seek clarification," it added.

Beijing, too, has disavowed the war. But the evidence keeps piling up.

In April, Zelenskyy revealed Ukrainian intelligence had identified at least 155 Chinese nationals fighting on Russian soil. Many of them responded to social media ads promising generous signing bonuses and salaries.

One captured Chinese recruit, who had never handled a weapon before landing in Russia, described training through hand gestures and confusion.

"All the documents were in Russian," he said during an April news conference in Kyiv, as cited by Radio Free Europe.

"I had no choice but to do the work that was assigned to me."

That was no isolated case. More than 1,500 foreign fighters from 48 countries joined Russia's army in 2023-2024, Important Stories reported in April.

Bought and borrowed

These mercenaries do not fit a single mold. Some are jobless young men from Central Asia promised passports. Others are African students who go into combat in exchange for release from Russian prisons.

The latter include Tanzania native Nemes Tarimo, who was killed in October 2022 in Bakhmut, Ukraine, fighting for the Wagner Group. He had been serving a prison term for drug offenses in Russia when the Wagner Group recruited him.

Yet, for some, the choice to join may not have been offered at all.

In 2022, when the Russian Wagner mercenary group was still operating, its recruiters reportedly emptied prison cells in the Central African Republic, releasing rapists and murderers to meet Moscow's growing demand for front-line bodies.

"Nobody can stop them," one military officer in Bangui told the Daily Beast at the time, "because the government has given them so much power to act the way they want."

Around the same time, in Afghanistan, the Wagner Group and Iranian and Russian officers ran a back-channel pipeline to sweep former elite commandos into the Kremlin's war.

Recruiters offered the former Afghan troops pay, visas and relocation for their families.

"They will ... be sacrificed," Abdul Raof Arghandiwal, a former Afghan National Army general now living in the United States, told Caravanserai in 2022.

Denial and desperation

Russian authorities lure these fighters into a trap. When the war ends, many will not be able to go home, where they may face prosecution for fighting illegally in foreign wars.

Russia denies that these recruits are official, or even that they exist. But listen closely to the babel of languages on the front, and they are there.

"They need [men], and they're sending them to the front lines -- wounded, crippled and barefoot. Everyone is going," Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), told RBC-Ukraine in April.

"Mikhail," a former Wagner Group mercenary from Central Asia, deserted after witnessing the state of the Russian army up close. He described units drowning in corruption and fatigue: stolen fuel, ghost vehicles, bribes for leave.

"I realized this war is just wrong," he told Current Time in April. "Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is being lied to."

The war in Ukraine has become a global meat grinder into which Russia is feeding its citizens and the world's poor and powerless. In exchange, it offers bare survival, and only if you are lucky.

For the Kremlin, the mercenaries of Vovchansk are collateral: They do not speak the same language, follow the same orders or even understand the land they are dying on. But they die just the same.