Sajad Ahmad Kumar, right, holds a photo of his brother, Azad Yousuf Kumar, who left his village in Indian-administered Kashmir in December after being lured by a false job offer to fight the war in Ukraine. Credit – Faisal Bashir—SOPA Images / Getty Images
Ravi Moun was excited to travel to Russia from his small village in the northern Indian state of Haryana in early January. The 21-year-old, one of three siblings, had dropped out of school after 10th grade and was looking for work when he was approached by a local agent with the promise of a lucrative transportation job in Moscow, according to his brother Ajay. To cover the cost of the trip to Russia, Moun’s brother sold the family’s one-acre land for 11.5 lakh rupees, or nearly $14,000.
However, once he arrived, Ajay said Moun was instead conscripted into the Russian army to fight in the war in Ukraine, which has been going on since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. Moun last spoke to his family on March 12, telling them he had been digging trenches to bury the victims in Ukraine, which was steadily losing ground to the larger Russian army. Four months later, after his family contacted the Indian embassy on July 21 to ask where he was, learned He had been killed at the front.
Moun’s death came days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the issue of Indian mercenaries with Putin during a visit to Moscow on July 8. After Modi’s visit, an Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson said that at least 50 Indian nationals had contacted the ministry requesting them to leave their service in the Russian military. “The Russian side has responded positively to our request. Both sides are working on early discharge of Indian nationals and hopefully they will come back soon,” Randhir Jaiswal said at a press conference.
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The news that Indian men were fighting in Russia was the first reported in early March when India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said it had uncovered a “large human trafficking network” stretching from the Indian capital New Delhi to the southern state of Tamil Nadu. According to the CBI, Russia used social media platforms and local agents to lure people into the country by offering them jobs, admission to “dubious private universities” and “free discounted” visa extensions. Once the men arrived, their passports were taken away and they were “trained in combat roles and deployed against their will to frontline bases in the Russia-Ukraine war zone,” the CBI said.
Among the detainees was a Kashmiri man named Azad Yousuf Kumar, a 31-year-old engineering graduate from Pulwama, who left in December last year after a YouTuber offered him a job in Dubai. “They are now building bunkers in the forests. They are further away from the Black Sea,” said his brother Sajad told the Press Trust of India in March, saying Kumar could only call his family for a few minutes in the evening. “He has a two-and-a-half-month-old son whom he has not even met,” he continued, pleading with the Indian government to intervene.
On social media there is one video showed another seven Indian men in Russian uniforms screaming for help. They claimed they had been forced to fight for the Russian army after being threatened with a 10-year prison sentence for illegal entry if they refused.
Later that month, the MEA published confirmed the deaths of two Indian nationals killed on the front lines, followed by two more deaths in June. Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar raised the issue during a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Astana in July. In Moscow’s first comments on the issue after Modi’s visit, the Russian embassy in India said said Russia was determined to find the “swiftest possible solution.” (Neither Indian nor Russian officials responded to TIME’s request for comment.)
India is not the only country whose citizens have joined the Russian army to fight against Ukraine. Several Sri Lankan and Nepalese Citizens were also drawn by what experts from the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation (ORF) to describe as a set of “push-pull” factors that fuel “this foreign fighter phenomenon.” These include “the demand for foreign labor in Russia, economic incentives, and the militarization of South Asian societies,” ORF said. “The prospect of higher wages and an easy path to citizenship entices people to immigrate to countries like Russia, where there is a huge demand for labor and a demographic crisis,” ORF expert Rajoli Siddharth Jayaprakash tells TIME.
Migration from South Asia has increased in recent years, following the 2022 economic crisis in Sri Lanka, a recession in Nepal and rising unemployment in India, where the unemployment rate rose to 9.2% in June 2024, up sharply from 7% in May 2024. according to to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy. In Russia, this migration is filling the urgent need for foreign workers after the country shortage of 4.8 million employees in 2023.
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Still, Jayaprakash says Modi’s visit to Russia has been seen as a success in India. After the issue was raised with Russian authorities at various levels, the number of Indians serving in the Russian army has dropped from over 100 to 63, and 12 Indians have been discharged so far.
But the case is far from over: “When you consider that the Indians signed a legally binding contract with the Russian military, which may even include a clause for obtaining Russian citizenship, the case is quite complicated,” says Jayaprakash.
Despite efforts to secure the release of Indian nationals from the frontlines, India has refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and abstained from voting of all related resolutions at the United Nations. Instead, Modi has opted for a softer approach to the conflict, narrate Putin said “the current era is not an era of war” on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan in 2022. The comment is in line with the close relationship New Delhi and Moscow have had for decades, with India recently increasing its purchases of cheap Russian oil despite protests from the West.
But in Moun’s village in Haryana, his family is still in mourning. His cousin, Sonu Mator, told Reuters that the family had to ask the Indian government to help repatriate Moun’s body back to India after his death, as they had no money to do so. “If he had known he would have to fight, he would not have gone…why would he go where death is waiting for him?” Mator said.
Write to Astha Rajvanshi at astha.rajvanshi@time.com.
