By Dr Lulu Brenda Harris
I must make this clear from the start: our reporting on the recruitment of Zimbabweans and other African nationals to Russia is not about taking sides in the Russia-Ukraine war. It is not an argument about whether Russia or Ukraine is right. It is a Zimbabwe-centred accountability story.
Our investigations at CITE have sought to establish what happened to Zimbabwean citizens, how they were recruited, what they were promised, who facilitated their movement, whether they gave informed consent to military service and what happened when they were injured, went missing or died.
There is a fundamental difference between a person who knowingly and voluntarily chooses to serve in a foreign army and someone who travels believing they have secured a civilian job only to find themselves undergoing military training. Our main concern in our investigations were with Zimbabweans dubiously recruited to serve in the Russian army against Ukraine.
On this topic
Most of the people we interviewed told us that they responded to advertisements for civilian jobs, including driving and security work, only to find themselves caught up in Russia’s military system. Recruiters used WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and other digital platforms to reach people looking for work. Our story ceases to be about blaming Russia when we consider that some said they travelled because they were desperate for an opportunity to change their lives. Here, the story becomes self-referential and points back to Zimbabwe: the grinding man-made poverty that drives people to such desperation.
When desperation becomes a resource
Parallel to digital platforms harvesting human attention and engendering senseless doomscrolling, human desperation has become something to be exploited, globally.
In his era, French military and political leader, Napoleon Bornaparte, said a leader is a dealer in hope. In our era, the global crisis of leadership drives many people into hopelessness and desperation that it then harvests and harnesses for nefarious ends.
In our case here in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa, we quickly learnt that a young person without a job and unable to support a young family can be profoundly vulnerable to an offer of a salary capable of transforming their life, although that salary is offered at a possible cost to their life.
Clearly, every person who accepts such an offer is not without any agency nor are they not individually responsible for the choices they make. However, it presents us with an uncomfortable question: What has happened to our economies and societies when the possibility of dying in a foreign conflict can appear, to some young Africans, to be a better economic option than remaining at home?
It should be clear now that our work is not simply about Russia but about our own realities as Zimbabweans and Africans. Specifically, about the conditions at home that make such recruitment possible.
Zimbabweans’ migration to South Africa is as old as the discovery of diamonds and gold and the birth of Egoli. Throughout the history of this migration, one thing is for sure, Zimbabweans have long migrated to South Africa because of economic necessity. Men had to leave the barren land that seemed to grow more stones than vegetation that Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSAC) had pushed them to and trek to Wenela to be able to survive and feed a family under the new realities of a colonial capitalist economy. This is despite the many security challenges that lay in that journey and in the new emerging city of Johannesburg. Today we know that these security challenges are xenophobic violence and precarious employment making life extremely uncertain for migrants in South Africa’s major cities.
A Zimbabwean migrant who is unable to secure stable employment, fears xenophobic attacks, lacks documentation or lives from one temporary job to another is already navigating a precarious existence. When an apparently legitimate opportunity abroad promises substantially better income, the risks in this new promised Russian Eldorado, can become easier to overlook.
Xenophobia, therefore, is not simply a social problem separate from recruitment. It can become part of the structural conditions that make people more willing to take extraordinary risks to leave the continent. The same desperation that pushes someone from home, across the border, can push them further afield and into the hands of recruiters who understand precisely what they are selling: a job, a salary and a way out. While here we are talking about a Zimbabwean migrant further drifting along this path that desperation seems to have carved for them; we are aware that South Africa has also been battling this scourge of young people recruited into this Russian/Ukraine war. While there can be similarities and differences in the conditions that drive South Africans to the Russian war from those that drive Zimbabweans; the only constant is desperation especially among young people who dream of a better life for themselves and their families.
From extracting resources to extracting people
Under slavery, Africa had to endure the extraction of labour and under the colonial and neocolonial age, the Mother continent has endured the extraction of both labour and natural resources. The value captured from both this labour and natural resources is captured outside the continent. As a result of unbearable conditions in the continent, today we have gone back to the slavery days and have to confront the extraction of the human, the people: their labour, their skills, their hopes, their desperation and in the most extreme cases, their lives.
From the question of who controls Africa’s resources, it morphs into who benefits when African economic vulnerability becomes a source of manpower for conflicts beyond the continent. International investigations have now begun documenting the same recruitment patterns that we have explored as CITE.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has reported cases in which foreign nationals were lured with promises of lucrative civilian employment, taken to Russia and subsequently compelled to sign contracts with the Russian Defence Ministry.
Amnesty International’s September 2026 report went further, documenting what it described as deceptive, coercive and exploitative recruitment practices amounting in many cases to human trafficking. These findings place the experiences reported by Zimbabweans in our investigations within a wider global pattern.
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 23 September 2026,
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the governments of 47 countries, including Zimbabwe, to protect their citizens from recruitment into Russia’s war against Ukraine. He highlighted the international scale of a recruitment operation already documented by our investigations. Zelensky named Zimbabwe alongside India, Nepal, Ghana, Cuba, Yemen, Kenya, Belarus, Sudan, South Africa and Tajikistan among countries whose citizens have been recruited into Russian military units.
“I want to speak directly to every representative of these 47 countries… you know what Russia is doing with your people, your citizens. Take care of them,” he said.
He further accused Russia of using financial incentives, deception and trafficking networks to recruit foreign nationals as it seeks additional manpower for the war.
Zimbabwean President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has also acknowledged the problem. In his State of the Nation Address on 29 September 2026, Mnangagwa said, under the proposed Trafficking in Persons Amendment Bill, his government would target transnational syndicates advertising non-existent jobs abroad.
Earlier in April, Zimbabwean Minister of State Security, Lovemore Matuke, told the Senate there is no agreement between Zimbabwe and Russia to send Zimbabweans to fight in that country’s war with Ukraine.
Governments in Africa, including the Zimbabwean one, must go beyond the technocratic political rhetoric and commit to protecting their citizens by creating conducive conditions for them to reproduce their lives.
The families left behind
There are human faces behind the numbers and the technical rhetoric. In our investigations, the most urgent stories we heard from families are not about geopolitics, but about the pain caused by the uncertainty around a relative recruited into the Russian war.
“Is he alive?” “Where is he?” “Who is responsible for finding out?” “And if he is dead, when is his body coming home?”
In the cases I have reported, communication can suddenly stop after a recruit is deployed or sent towards the frontline. Families then become investigators, as they search Facebook and WhatsApp. They also contact fellow recruits. They call Russian numbers. They approach the embassy and Zimbabwean authorities. Sometimes they approach journalists because they do not know which institution can tell them what happened to their relatives.
One family that contacted CITE was still trying to establish the whereabouts of a man who had last told them he was going on a “mission”.
Another family received conflicting information from different Russian numbers about the condition of a relative.
For families, “missing” which is an administrative category in the military, is one wasteland of pain, a desert of prolonged grief. They cannot mourn because they do not know whether their relative is dead. They cannot plan because they do not know whether he is coming home. They cannot move on because there is no knowledge to do so. When death is eventually confirmed, another ordeal begins.
As part of my work, I documented a case in which the remains of a Zimbabwean recruit were reportedly held in a Moscow morgue while his family moved between government departments trying to complete the documentation required to bring him home. The family was confronted with an estimated US$16 000 repatriation bill. Here, the economics of the crisis become particularly disturbing. People may have been recruited because they were economically vulnerable. Their families or friends may then have paid recruitment or travel-related costs. If the person dies, the family can face another financial burden simply to recover the body. In this way, death itself can become another point at which vulnerable families are required to pay. There has emerged informal brokers extracting money from desperate recruits and grieving relatives. There are families trying to navigate expensive and opaque repatriation processes. There are government departments discussing who should pay for bringing remains home.
What responsibility looks like
Zimbabwe cannot control what happens on a foreign battlefield. However, it can investigate recruiters operating within its jurisdiction, identify victims, and assist families searching for missing relatives. The Zimbabwean government can establish clear mechanisms for repatriating remains and legally pursue those who profit from fraudulent recruitment. South Africa faces a related responsibility, particularly where its citizens and migrants living within its borders are targeted. Both countries have a responsibility to confront the conditions that make people vulnerable in the first place.
Warning desperate people not to take dangerous jobs is not enough especially if unemployment, poverty, xenophobia and economic exclusion remain unchanged. Another sophisticated recruiter will emerge; another social media account will appear, another WhatsApp message will circulate, another promise of a life-changing salary will be made and sadly, another desperate person may take the risk.
That is why this story cannot end with arrests, legislation or the repatriation of bodies.
The deeper question is why African lives have become so economically precarious that they can be recruited, transported, exploited and, in some cases, lost in a war thousands of kilometres from home.
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