Two and a half years of full-scale war in Ukraine have devastated Moscow’s invading forces. As many as 500,000 soldiers — 2% of Russian men between the ages of 20 and 50 — may have been killed or seriously wounded. Russian social media networks are alight with stories of terrible conditions at the front, where troops with cursory training and substandard equipment are tossed into battle. Comparisons are drawn with the life expectancy during the Second World War, when at some times the average soldier survived mere days. Receiving the dreaded povestka — the Russian army’s enlistment paper — is all but a death sentence.
Despite all this, Moscow by means fair and foul continues to find soldiers to cover its losses. The Russian state’s biggest challenge remains not replacing men but equipment, and its army continues to hold a significant manpower advantage over its Ukrainian opposition. But the Kremlin’s recruitment strategy is not limited to forcing its own citizens into uniform. It has found a way to marry an imperial Soviet tradition and 21st-century global capitalism to make joining the Russian army an appealing choice for many foreigners. Soldiers from Somalia, Syria and other friendly nations are an occasional sight at the front, but the largest contingent of foreign fighters hail from the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Russia has long been a draw for Central Asian immigrants. As many as five million Central Asians may currently be residing in Russia compared to 1.3 million in the next most popular destination, Germany. The history of Russia-Central Asian military enlistment, moreover, is a long one. Prior to the collapse of the USSR, when Moscow ruled the entirety of Central Asia, millions of soldiers from the region served in conflicts on behalf of their Soviet masters. From the Second World War to Afghanistan, Soviet Russia used its Central Asian population as a source of disposable military material. And Central Asian soldiers tended to die more often than their Russian peers: Kazakhs were one and a half times more likely than Russians to be killed in the Second World War, a fact never mentioned in today’s jingoistic Putinist war propaganda.
After independence in 1991, post-Soviet Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Georgia had to be fought without troops from its neighbours. But since February 2022, Moscow has been seeking to bolster its ranks with Central Asian immigrants. Terrified migrants received povestki on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and many sought help from all but powerless local lawyers and NGOs. Media reports — and heavily publicised scandals back home in Central Asia — have drawn attention to the Russian army’s brutal press ganging of new arrivals and to numerous cases of workers tricked into enlisting.
And yet, foreign soldiers tend to cause less trouble politically. While the Kremlin’s mass mobilisation of its citizens in September 2022 was successful in terms of recruitment numbers, it sparked disquiet among privileged and hitherto “safe” residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Since then, efforts to recruit Central Asians have become more frequent and more violent. Any migrant who sets foot on Russian soil risks being hastily rounded up and packed off to the front in Ukraine, ready to join the ranks of the fallen in an early grave.
The irony is that Russia’s war is portrayed in propaganda as an ethnonationalist crusade to reunite Muscovites with their Ukrainian “brothers”. It is, according to the rhetoric, a war fought to save white Russians from the “epidemic” of Westernism — with all its connotations of queerness, blackness, and other “non-traditional” values — emanating from Ukraine. The heroes of the war feted on television and at official ceremonies are, almost to a man, white Russians. Meanwhile, ethnic minorities — Muslims recruited at home and abroad — bear the brunt of the worst fighting. Yet despite it all, Central Asian migrants keep coming to Russia. And, more bizarrely still, they keep choosing to enlist in the Russian army.
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