Several African countries have asked Ukraine to return their citizens who were captured fighting for the Russian side in the war, Bloomberg reports, specifying that the request came from Kenya, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. Kenyan Foreign Secretary Musalia Mudavadi said Nairobi demands that five of its citizens held in Ukrainian captivity be recognized as “victims of international human trafficking” rather than prisoners of war.
According to Mudavadi, President William Ruto phoned Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the issue. The Kenyan foreign minister insists these individuals, the youngest of whom is 23, cannot be considered prisoners of war because they were “recruited under false promises of employment.”
Besides Kenya, the authorities of Botswana and Zimbabwe have also reached out to Ukraine to discuss the return of their citizens. All three countries insist that Africans who ended up at the front on the Russian side were promised civilian jobs before being coerced into military service.
According to Bloomberg, Ukraine holds at least 213 foreigners in captivity from countries other than Russia and North Korea — of them, 37 are Africans. The agency stresses, citing Ukrainian statistics, that over the course of the full-scale war Russia has recruited more than 28,000 foreigners from 135 countries to fight; more than 5,000 of them have been killed.
The Kenyan Wall Street reported that the authorities in Nairobi have official records on 354 of their citizens who ended up fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Of them, 84 were killed or went missing, and 62 were brought back. Local human rights activists, however, insist the real number of recruits could be as high as 841 Kenyans who ended up in the combat zone.
