The number of Africans caught up in Russia's war against Ukraine may be far higher than many people realise. According to Ukraine, nearly 3,000 fighters are alleged to have been recruited by Russia from across the continent to take part in the conflict. The figure suggests that what was once seen as a marginal phenomenon has grown into a steady flow of men drawn from many different African countries into a war being fought thousands of kilometres from their homes.
The human cost of that recruitment is already heavy. Ukraine says that of the roughly 3,000 fighters brought in this way, more than 300 have been killed. Behind that number are men who travelled or were brought far from home and did not return, and the toll underlines how dangerous the front line has proved for those who ended up there, often with little real understanding of what they were signing up for.
Some of those recruited describe being pushed into the fighting against their will. The recurring theme in their accounts is coercion, with men saying they were made to put their names to contracts that ultimately sent them to the front. The sense that consent was manufactured rather than freely given runs through the testimony of families who later learned where their relatives had ended up and what had happened to them.
One mother gave a wrenching account of her son's experience. She recalled that, three weeks after he first left, he called her again in tears, telling her that they were being sent to the front line. He asked her what he was supposed to do, saying that he had been forced to sign the contract and that they were going to kill him. In that phone call, unable to change anything, the two of them simply cried together.
Her fears were borne out in the cruellest way. According to her account, her son died on his birthday, turning a day that should have marked his life into the day it ended. The detail captures the grief of relatives who followed their loved ones' fate from a distance, helpless to intervene once the men had been pulled into a foreign war from which there was no easy way back.
Not all of the recruited fighters have been killed. Many questions remain over those who have been captured and are now held in Ukraine, where they face an uncertain future. Their status is unclear, caught as they are between the country whose army they were sent to fight and the governments back home that may or may not act on their behalf, leaving them in a kind of limbo far from their families.
At the official level, the response across Africa has so far been limited. A few countries, including Kenya and Ghana, have raised concerns about their nationals being drawn into the war. Yet for many of the families affected, those expressions of concern have not resolved the central questions of how their relatives were recruited, what will happen to those still held, and who will be held to account for the men who never came home.