India seeks return of citizens from Russian front line in Ukraine

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India is working to bring back about 20 of its citizens who ended up on the Russian side of the front line in Ukraine, after their families said they were lured there under false pretences.

The men’s plight has made national headlines in India, discomfiting a government that has good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin but says it has “strongly taken up” the issue of the men unwittingly conscripted into Moscow’s army. 

“We have got some of them out and are working on getting the rest out now,” the ministry of external affairs told the Financial Times.

In a statement last week, the ministry said it was “actively pursuing” all the relevant cases involving Indian nationals for an early discharge from the Russian army. 

In interviews, relatives of some of the men said they had been lured to Russia by promises of work with the army away from the war’s front line and of permanent residence in Russia on the borders of the EU, which is a coveted destination for job-seeking Indians.

In September, a social media influencer started posting about jobs in Russia on his Hindi-language YouTube channel Baba’s Vlogs. In one video he posted about demand for food delivery boys in Russia; in another he spoke about jobs for “helpers” for the Russian army.

Strolling on the streets of St Petersburg, the YouTuber spoke about the wonderful climate in Russia, the prospects of a Rs100,000 ($1,206) a month job with the Russian army, and free food and accommodation after three months of training. 

Mohammed Imran, from Hyderabad in south India, said his 30-year-old brother Mohammed Asfan “got trapped” after watching a Baba’s Vlogs video which claimed he would be able to work for the Russian army in Moscow, and become eligible for permanent Russian residency in less than a year. 

The missing man’s brother said he planned to travel to Russia this week to search for him. “The boy became trapped,” said Mohammed Imran. He said his brother reached Moscow in November, and was given an agreement to sign in Russian, then taken to the front line in Ukraine in December, after which he lost track of him. 

Mohammed Imran said that in January, one of his brother’s colleagues who was also working for the army told him that Asfan had been injured by bullets in the leg. 

Separately, a group of young men from India’s northern Punjab and Haryana states who went to Russia around the new year sent a video to relatives on Sunday appealing to authorities for urgent help. In the video, one of the men claimed they were misled by a man who offered to show them around and that they ended up in Belarus, where they were “handed to the Russian army” for entering the country without a visa.

“They are about to send us to the front line, please help us return to India urgently,” one of the men, Gurpreet Singh, told his cousin Balraj Singh Sandhu, who spoke to the FT.  

“The government of India has good relations with Russia and we are very hopeful that they will do whatever they can,” he said. “But we want the boys to be evacuated out of there quickly.” 

Using funeral announcements and social media posts, journalists and volunteers tracking Russian casualties have counted just over 250 foreign nationals killed fighting in Ukraine with Russian forces as of December 2023. 

They included citizens of Nepal, Iraq and Zambia, but the vast majority came from countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Many people from central Asia travel to Russia as migrant workers, and a scattering of reports have appeared of men from these countries being coerced into signing contracts with the Russian army.

Russia has also sought to entice foreigners to join its military by offering a simplified path to citizenship for anyone who signs a one-year contract with the army — a law introduced in September 2022, six months into the full-scale Ukraine war. 

The salaries offered to Russian contract workers are higher than the country’s minimum wage, and can appear lucrative to people from some developing countries. The ambassador of Nepal to Russia was cited by BBC Russian as saying that 150-200 of the country’s citizens had signed up to fight with Russia in Ukraine.