Kenya’s Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi was in Moscow last week with a twelve-member delegation. His visit to his counterpart Sergei Lavrov was a complicated mission. At home in Kenya, he had promised that he would prevent Russia from recruiting any more Kenyans for the war in Ukraine in the future. And that he will try everything to bring the Kenyans who are already deployed there home.
Specifically, according to Mudavadi, 252 Kenyans are still in Russia or Ukraine. The Russian side admitted that ten were missing or dead; 44 have already been repatriated home.
“We cannot go into a war zone and just take the people out of there,” said Musavadi, emphasizing: “This is something that our people have to understand.” The only way to achieve this is through “dialogue”. In the end there was a success story: the governments in Moscow and Nairobi decided that Kenyans would no longer be recruited by Russia for operations in Ukraine.
Lavrov promised that the Russian authorities would help “enable the evacuation of those on the front lines,” Musavadi said after the talks. In addition, the consular service of the Kenyan embassy in Moscow should be allowed to visit injured people in Russian military hospitals in order to arrange their return home.
Who will bring the prisoners of war home?
However, Mudavadi explicitly emphasized to the Kenyan families at home: There will be no compensation payments because the Kenyan government is not responsible for these recruitments. Hiring yourself as a mercenary in a foreign army is illegal in Kenya. Kenya’s government said it would grant amnesty to recruits now returning from Russia.
Most recently, the Russians promised that they would also help bring Kenyan prisoners of war back from Ukraine, explains Mudavadi. A sensitive issue, because so far Russia has only asked for its own citizens and North Koreans to be returned in prisoner exchanges – but not Africans. The Ukrainian military intelligence service confirmed this to taz. The African corpses and prisoners of war remain with the Ukrainians so far.
A total of around 1,780 mercenaries from 36 African countries would fight in the Russian army, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha announced in February. He had previously warned that most of them “won’t survive a month.”
The issue is “sensitive” for South Africa
South Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana are now also trying to bring their compatriots home. The negotiations with Moscow are very “tricky,” emphasizes Pauline Bax, Africa analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG) to the taz. Most African governments have very close relations with Moscow – especially South Africa. Against this background, it is “delicate,” said Bax, “to denounce Russia.”
But there is growing evidence, says Bax, that the Russian embassies were “involved to a certain extent” in these recruitments or at least had “knowledge of them”. Investigations are currently underway in Kenya and South Africa to dismantle the recruitment networks. Also in his sights is Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former President Jacob Zuma and a member of parliament until November 2025. She resigned and now has to stand trial.
A total of 17 South Africans were recruited through Zuma-Sambudla’s recruitment networks, the prosecution said in court. President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone in February. Four men have already returned to South Africa and more are to follow, the government assures.
In South Africa, similar to Kenya, a law expressly prohibits the recruitment of mercenaries and their recruitment abroad. It is not yet clear whether South Africa’s returnees will also receive amnesty. In South Africa, migrant workers from neighboring Zimbabwe were also hired to work as taxi drivers in Johannesburg.
316 fallen Africans are known by name
Cameroon is the country most affected by recruitment. A report published in February by the INPACT investigative team listed 316 names of fallen Africans, most of them – almost 100 – from Cameroon. The reason for this is apparently a military agreement agreed with Russia in 2022.
Ghana, which lost at least 55 citizens in the Ukraine war, took a different approach. His Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa met with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv in February to seek the release of two prisoners of war from Ghana. “We talked in detail about how Russia is recruiting citizens of Ghana and other African countries for the war against Ukraine and how we can counteract this,” Zelensky said afterwards.
According to the independent Russian investigative medium “Important Stories”, Russia’s government responded by sending a list to all recruiting networks worldwide, according to which they would no longer recruit from “friendly” countries. The list was expanded from 36 to 43 states in February. Including Cameroon and Kenya.
