Dozens of anguished families of Kenyans tricked into fighting for the Russian Army in Ukraine held a vigil in Nairobi to demand government action. Some called for the safe return of their kin. Others just wanted information or remains.
Bibiana Wangari said her 31-year-old son, Charles Waithaka, was among those killed in the fighting after he was lured to Russia with false promises of a lucrative job as a mechanic. Upon arrival he was given a Russian-language contract to sign and sent to a military base. Recounting his last message home, Wangari told France 24 television: “He said, ‘As we speak, I’m in combat training. It doesn’t look good for me. Pray for me.’”
Charles Ojiambo Mutoka, who lost his son, Oscar, had a message for Russian President Vladimir Putin: “You should be ashamed to take somebody in the front line, because that war does not concern us Africans at all,” he said at a January 27 news conference in Nairobi. “So why take our people?”
The Russian Army has sent waves of small infantry attacks into Ukrainian lines, a costly tactic designed to win a war of attrition. Since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s fatalities through January 2026 were five times higher than in all Russian and Soviet wars combined since World War II, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The stark estimates by the center — 2.1 million Russian casualties, including dead, wounded and missing troops — explain the reason for recruiting Africans.
“The Kremlin will likely attempt to enlist more Africans in 2026 as Russia struggles to find sufficient numbers of domestic recruits amid mounting battlefield losses,” Atlantic Council analyst Katherine Spencer wrote in a February 19 article. “Foreign recruitment is increasingly popular with the Putin regime as it allows Moscow to avoid another round of politically risky mobilization, which could easily destabilize Russian society.”
As hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Africans have fallen victim to Russian recruiting schemes and unwittingly ended up on the front lines of its brutal war, anger is rising across the continent and governments are responding.
The Nairobi protests coincided with the release of a report by the National Intelligence Service, which said that 1,000 Kenyans were duped into Russian military service by a sprawling network of officials, embassy and cultural center personnel, intermediaries, and front companies that collude with trafficking syndicates and work with Russian and local profit-driven recruiters.
According to a February 11 report by Swiss-based investigative group INPACT, more than 1,400 Africans from 35 countries signed contracts with the Russian Army from January 2023 to September 2025, including more than 300 who were killed within months of arriving at the front.
“The recruitment of African nationals is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather the core of a deliberate and organized strategy,” the report said.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on February 25 that it had identified more than 1,700 citizens from 36 African nations among the Russian ranks but strongly believes the actual number of fighters could be significantly higher.
“We noticed a growing number of African people on the front lines,” Ukrainian Ambassador to Kenya Yurii Tokar told France 24. “It’s a pity to say that they are sent as cannon fodder.”
After a wave of formal demands from countries to stop recruiting their citizens for the war against Ukraine, Russia reportedly is restricting the scope and scale of its foreign enlistment efforts. A February 23 investigation by independent Russian news website Important Stories revealed a “blacklist” of 36 countries in which Russian recruiters are no longer allowed to operate.
The list included Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. In February, an Iraqi blogger who exposes Russian recruitment networks in his country cited a Russian officer who said the list had expanded to include Cameroon, Libya and Somalia.
Russia’s recruitment scheme is a tragedy for Africans across the continent, said Lou Osborne, an analyst with investigative journalism collective All Eyes on Wagner.
“Families actually have no idea what’s happening,” she told France 24 in a February 16 interview. “There is no mechanism to repatriate bodies. They don’t know to whom to turn to get information. Not only are they used as cannon fodder, but the families have no idea what’s happening to their loved one.”
