Stephen Oduor was looking forward to starting his new job as a plumber in Russia to support his family after months of unemployment. But soon after landing in St Petersburg from Nairobi with six other Kenyans one afternoon last August, he started feeling something was off.
The man who received them at the airport drove them to a house where their luggage was taken away and they were given black clothes and shoes to wear. Afterwards, they were taken to a police station where they were fingerprinted and forced to sign documents written in Russian, a language they did not understand.
When they were taken the next day to a large military facility in the city for processing of military IDs, it began to dawn on the 24-year-old that he had unknowingly enlisted in the Russian armed forces.
His fear was confirmed when he asked one of the Russians why they were processing the cards. He recalled the Russian telling him: “You travelled all the way from Kenya and didn’t know what you were coming to do?”
Oduor – not his real name – is one of more than 200 Kenyans and hundreds of other Africans who have been trafficked to Russia with promises of ordinary jobs, only to end up on the frontline in its war with Ukraine.
Oduor, who eventually managed to escape and returned to Kenya in November, spent three days at the military facility. After getting their IDs, the Kenyans were put on a train and travelled for two days to the city of Belgorod in south-western Russia near the border with Ukraine. At a military camp in the city, they were handed military uniforms, assault rifles and other weapons in order to go straight to the battlefield without training.
“I didn’t know how to shoot anything,” Oduor recalled.
For the next three months, his main job was to shoot down Ukrainian weaponised drones. Hiding for hours on end inside foxholes in forests across the border in Ukraine, he listened keenly for any signs of drones to bring them down. Every day alive felt like a miracle – if a drone spotted him first, it would strike him.
Allegations of racist mistreatment
A growing number of people from Africa – including Kenya, Uganda and South Africa – and elsewhere have been lured to the frontline as Russia seeks manpower to sustain its war.
Late last year, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said more than 1,400 citizens from 36 African countries were fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Many are being held in Ukrainian camps as prisoners of war.
Kenya’s ministry of foreign and diaspora affairs said more than 200 of its nationals may be in Ukraine, having been tricked by recruitment networks that post fake job adverts online.
Footage recently posted to social media gives an apparent glimpse of the conditions facing Africans in Ukraine and their racist mistreatment by Russian soldiers.
One purports to show a black man with an anti-tank mine strapped to his chest, being ordered at gunpoint in what appears to be a trench to move to Ukrainian positions. A Russian speaker calls him a “piece of coal” and says he’s going to be the “opener today”, implying that he will be made to detonate the mine in order to “open” a Ukrainian bunker. The man reluctantly lurches ahead. “No, no, no,” he says as the Russian speaker prods him with the tip of his gun.
Another purportedly shows armed black men in military attire singing a Ugandan revolutionary song in the snow in the woods, while a Russian speaker in the background laughs and describes them as “disposables”.
It has not been possible to verify the videos, but Russia’s military in the war in Ukraine has a history of deliberately sending soldiers to their deaths. Testimonies from Russian troops have described being dispatched on what amounted to suicide missions. Earlier media reports also documented cases in which soldiers were deployed as “mayachki” (“beacons”), ordered to walk ahead of assault groups, sometimes without proper equipment, to draw enemy fire.
The recruitment networks, which include local employment agencies that promise Kenyans foreign jobs, are capitalising on the east African country’s high youth unemployment rate and its push to send its citizens to work abroad.
Denis Muniu, a security and foreign policy analyst, said the networks target unemployed youth who qualify for general labour and infantry roles and former security personnel who can be deployed with minimal training. They leverage what he termed weak oversight of employment agencies. “It’s a very strategic way of recruiting these people,” he said.
Russia’s foreign affairs ministry and its embassy in Nairobi did not respond to a request for comment. Its government has in the past denied involvement in schemes to recruit foreigners into its military.
Kenya’s ministry of foreign and diaspora affairs did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, the ministry said it was engaging the Russian government and Ukrainian authorities in a repatriation effort. On 22 January, the foreign affairs principal secretary, Abraham Korir Sing’Oei, said the government had repatriated 28 Kenyans since December.
‘I just saw death’
Oduor trained in plumbing after secondary school but never got a steady job. When a friend told him about employment agents offering job opportunities in Russia, he asked for an introduction. The agents promised him a plumbing job paying 100,000 Kenyan shillings (£567) monthly. He paid them a fee of 25,000 shillings and they said they would cater for everything else, including air fare and visa fees.
Oduor’s path to return home had a bloody start. At about 6pm one day, he and three Russian soldiers were in a forest heading in a pickup to a location for their night shift to shoot down drones when he suddenly heard one of his fellow passengers screaming.
Oduor looked up and saw a drone flying towards them. It was the moment he’d dreaded – a kamikaze drone had spotted them. “I just saw death … I knew this was the end of us,” he said.
The driver accelerated the vehicle through the forest, trying to lose the drone, but in less than two minutes, it had caught up with them and exploded. Oduor’s fellow passenger in the back had his head blown off, while Odour and the driver suffered injuries from the fragments. “We were lucky. God was with us,” he said about the survivors.
Oduor was taken to a hospital in Belgorod where he underwent first aid, then transferred to another one nearby before being taken to a hospital in the western city of Pskov. He spent a few days there receiving treatment but also – knowing he’d be taken back to the frontline upon recovery – plotting his escape.
He regularly asked a security person to let him walk to a supermarket and always returned, but one morning he instead took a taxi to the Kenyan embassy in Moscow, more than 400 miles (644km) away, where officials helped him get an emergency passport for a flight back home.
Having sold his belongings to relocate to Russia and having returned empty-handed, Oduor is trying to restart his life just outside Nairobi by looking for jobs in plumbing and other areas. He underwent surgery in Kenya to remove a fragment and is still recovering, meaning he can do only light work.
The trauma from the war zone lingers. “The experience seriously hurt me,” he said. “When you see someone dying and his head falling off, that disturbs you. It disturbed me a lot.”
‘I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive’
Most Kenyans who end up in Ukraine have not managed to return home.
Susan Kuloba hasn’t seen her eldest child, David, since he left Kenya for Russia in August. Kenyan employment agents told him he would get a job as a security guard but in fact he was conscripted into the Russian military.
The 22-year-old, who used to work as a construction worker in Nairobi, kept his mother constantly updated on WhatsApp, sending her messages, photos and videos of his time in Russia.
On 30 September, a day before his second mission to fight Ukrainians, he sent her a copy of his military contract and a disturbing voice message suggesting he may not survive the mission. “In case of anything, you’ll get a call to inform you whether I’ll have died or I’ll be alive. If I’ll have died, take the documents to [the Kenyan] Immigration or to the [Russian] embassy. If you take them to the embassy, tell them I’m your child. When you do that, they’ll give you a pay cheque … I love you all very much.”
They chatted for three more days, then he went quiet. After a week, a friend of David’s who had gone to Russia but escaped told Susan that he learned from a WhatsApp group for Kenyan fighters that her son had been killed.
For three months now, Susan has been trying to get answers about what happened. She has visited and written to the foreign affairs ministry, which she said only confirmed that David landed in Russia. She has also gone to the Russian embassy in Nairobi, which she said told her it does not deal with military affairs.
“What hurts is I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive,” she said. “All I have is a claim by someone that he died, but I don’t believe it. But it’s been long. The government should just help us.”
