For average wage earners in Russia, it’s a big payday. For criminals seeking to escape the harsh conditions and abuse in prison, it’s a chance at freedom. For immigrants hoping for a better life, it’s a simplified path to citizenship.
All they have to do is sign a contract to fight in Ukraine.
This desperate recruitment drive is part of Moscow’s strategy to replenish its forces in the nearly four-year conflict, while simultaneously avoiding an unpopular nationwide mobilisation. The bloody war of attrition has also seen foreign combatants join the fray. Following a mutual defence treaty in 2024, North Korea reportedly sent thousands of soldiers to help Russia defend its Kursk region against a Ukrainian incursion.
Furthermore, men from South Asian countries, including India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, have reported being duped by recruiters who promised legitimate jobs, only to find themselves conscripted for combat. Officials in Kenya, South Africa, and Iraq have confirmed similar instances of their citizens being misled into fighting.
President Vladimir Putin told his annual news conference last month that 700,000 Russian troops are fighting in Ukraine. He gave the same number in 2024, and a slightly lower figure – 617,000 – in December 2023. It’s unclear if those numbers are accurate.
Still hidden are the numbers of military casualties, with Moscow having released limited official figures. The British Defense Ministry said last summer that more than 1 million Russian troops may have been killed or wounded.
Independent Russian news site Mediazona, together with the BBC and a team of volunteers, scoured news reports, social media and government websites and collected the names of over 160,000 troops killed. More than 550 of those were foreigners from over two dozen countries.
How Russia gets new soldiers
Unlike Ukraine, where martial law and nationwide mobilization has been in place since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Putin has resisted ordering a broad call-up.
When a limited mobilization of 300,000 men was tried later that year, tens of thousands of people fled abroad. The effort stopped after a few weeks when the target was met, but a Putin decree left the door open for another call-up. It also made all military contracts effectively open-ended and barred soldiers from quitting service or being discharged, unless they reached certain age limits or were incapacitated by injuries.
Since then, Moscow has largely relied on what it describes as voluntary enlistment.
The flow of voluntary enlistees signing military contracts has remained strong, topping 400,000 last year, Putin said in December. It was not possible to independently verify the claim. Similar numbers were announced in 2024 and 2023.
Activists say these contracts often stipulate a fixed term of service, such as one year, leading some potential enlistees to believe the commitment is temporary. But contracts are automatically extended indefinitely, they say.
The government offers high pay and extensive benefits to enlistees. Regional authorities offer various enlistment bonuses, sometimes amounting to tens of thousands of dollars.
In the Khanty-Mansi region of central Russia, for example, an enlistee would get about $50,000 in various bonuses, according to the local government. That’s more than twice the average annual income in the region, where monthly salaries in the first 10 months of 2025 were reported to be just over $1,600.
There also are tax breaks, debt relief and other perks.
Despite Kremlin claims of relying on voluntary enlistment, media reports and rights groups say conscripts — men aged 18-30 performing fixed-term mandatory military service and exempted from being sent to Ukraine — are often coerced by superiors into signing contracts that send them into battle.
Recruitment also extends to prisoners and those in pretrial detention centers, a practice led early in the war by the late mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and adopted by the Defense Ministry. Laws now allow recruitment of both convicts and suspects in criminal cases.
Foreigners also are recruiting targets, both inside Russia and abroad.
Laws were adopted offering accelerated Russian citizenship for enlistees. Russian media and activists also report that raids in areas where migrants typically live or work lead to them being pressuring into military service, with new citizens sent to enlistment offices to determine if they’re eligible for mandatory service.
In November, Putin decreed that military service was mandatory for certain foreigners seeking permanent residency.
Some reportedly are lured to Russia by trafficking rings promising jobs, then duping them into signing military contracts. Cuban authorities in 2023 identified and sought to dismantle one such ring operating from Russia.
Nepal’s Foreign Minister Narayan Prakash Saud told The Associated Press in 2024 that his country asked Russia to return hundreds of Nepali nationals who were recruited to fight in Ukraine, as well as to repatriate the remains of those killed in the war. Nepal has since barred citizens from traveling to Russia or Ukraine for work, citing recruitment efforts.
Also in 2024, India’s federal investigation agency said it broke up a network that lured at least 35 of its citizens to Russia under the pretext of employment. The men were trained for combat and deployed to Ukraine against their will, with some “grievously injured,” the agency said.
When Putin hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for talks in 2024, New Delhi said its nationals who were “misled” into joining the Russian army would be discharged.
Iraqi officials say about 5,000 of its citizens have joined the Russian military along with an unspecified number who are fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. Officials in Baghdad cracked down on such recruiting networks, with one man convicted last year of human trafficking and sentenced to life in prison.
An unknown number of Iraqis have been killed or gone missing while fighting in Ukraine. Some families have reported that relatives were lured to Russia under false pretenses and forced to enlist; in other cases, Iraqis have joined voluntarily for the salary and Russian citizenship.
Foreigners duped into fighting are especially vulnerable because they don’t speak Russian, have no military experience and are deemed “dispensable, to put it bluntly,” by military commanders, said Anton Gorbatsevich of the activist group Idite Lesom, or “Get Lost,” which helps men desert from the army.
This month, a Ukrainian agency for the treatment of prisoners of war said over 18,000 foreign nationals had fought or are fighting on the Russian side. Almost 3,400 have been killed, and hundreds of citizens of 40 countries are held in Ukraine as POWs.
If true, that represents a fraction of the 700,000 troops that Putin said are fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
Using foreigners is only one way to meet the constant demand, said Artyom Klyga, head of the legal department at the Movement of Conscientious Objectors, noting Russian recruitment efforts appear to be stable. Most of those seeking help from the group, which assists men in avoiding military service, are Russian citizens, he said.
Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia researcher at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, said the Kremlin has gotten more “creative” in the last two years with attracting enlistees, including foreigners.
But recruitment efforts are becoming “extremely expensive” for Russia, which faces a slowing economy, she added.
