More than 1,000 joined Putin’s Army

This was announced by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kenya, Stay Mudavadiafter holding a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrovin Moscow. Intelligence in Nairobi had revealed last month that more than 1,000 Kenyans had been recruited to join the ranks of the Russian Army.

With promises of a salary of about $2,715 per month and bonuses exceeding $9,000, Moscow had set in former soldiers, police officers and unemployed in this African country an easy target to convince to reinforce its weakened war machine after four years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties. According to Lavrov, they had all enlisted voluntarily.

However, a report presented in February highlighted that a network of corrupt officials had facilitated human trafficking groups recruit Kenyan citizens to fight in the Russian Army. The calculations then showed figures of more than a thousand, five times higher than what the local authorities estimated.

The new soldiers of the Kremlin’s armed forces They left their country on tourist visas and they traveled to Russia with a stopover in Türkiye or the United Arab Emirates. Following increased surveillance at Nairobi airport, they sought alternative routes through Uganda, South Africa or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Recruitment agencies collaborated with corrupt kenyan airport staffimmigration officials and other state workers, as well as staff from the Russian embassy in Nairobi and the Kenyan embassy in Moscow to facilitate the travel of the recruits, as detailed in the report presented to Parliament.

“I want to make it clear that we have agreed that Kenyans They cannot be recruited through the Ministry of Defense [de Rusia]they will no longer be able to enlist,” Musalia Mudavadi confirmed in a statement. “We do not want, under any circumstances, for our alliance with Russia to be defined solely by the special operation [en Ucrania]it’s much broader.”