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Authors: Max Hender and Anastasia Malenko
KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine on Friday urged countries in the Global South to do more to prevent their citizens from being recruited to fight for Russia in its war against Ukraine, displaying to the public eight prisoners of war it said were from those countries.
The men included five men from Nepal and one man each from Cuba, Somalia and Sierra Leone, said Petro Yatsenko, a representative of the Ukrainian government’s headquarters for the coordination of the treatment of prisoners of war.
“By showing these captured citizens, we want to say that perhaps more radical and effective measures are necessary so that dozens, hundreds of people are not deceived by agitators,” he told reporters in Kyiv.
“If we choose a country with a lower level of per capita income, then it is very likely that some of its citizens will be recruited by Russia and used as stormtroopers and cannon fodder,” Yatsenko said.
Last week, India said it had uncovered a major human trafficking network that it said lured young people to work in Russia and then sent them to the front lines.
In December, Nepal said it asked Moscow not to recruit its citizens into the Russian army and to repatriate any Nepali soldiers serving in the force.
At a press conference in central Kiev, prisoners wore military uniforms and sat in two rows.
“As long as the court does not convict them of being mercenaries, we will treat them like other prisoners of war,” Yatsenko added.
He added that as traffic in Russian prisons dropped, the number of foreigners fighting for Russia appeared to be increasing.
The Wagner Group is a large private military group in Russia that recruited heavily from prisons before its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a mutiny last year and subsequently died in a plane crash.
Russia has yet to comment on accusations from southern hemisphere countries that it recruits its own citizens to fight.
Moscow often accuses Kiev of having “foreign mercenaries” on its side, but Ukraine denies this.
(Reporting by Max Hunder and Anastasiia Malenko; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
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