The advert for a job in a Russian shampoo factory looked like just what Jean Onana needed. Out of work in the Cameroonian capital of Yaounde and struggling to support a wife and three young children, he leapt at the chance to earn a solid pay packet, he later told Ukrainian interrogators.
The 36-year-old saved up for his ticket and flew to Moscow in March, joining many young Africans who end up in Russia to study or seek work.
However, far from offering the answer to his financial predicament, his trip instead pitched him into the crucible of Ukraine’s eastern front, an ordeal he only narrowly survived.
Mr Onana had barely arrived when he was detained along with 10 others from Bangladesh, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and Ghana.
The men were told they would not be working and instead would sign a one-year contract to join the Russian military and serve on the front lines of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mr Onana is only one of what are estimated to be hundreds, or even thousands, of Africans who have found themselves fighting on the front lines.
Many more have been recruited into factories to keep the Kremlin’s war machine running.
Africans and others from developing countries elsewhere are being pressed into service as Russia looks for huge numbers of recruits to sustain horrific casualty rates in its grinding three-year offensive.
Nearly one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the assault began, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a US-based think tank, said last week.
While the great majority of recruits are still poor Russians, the relentless need for new manpower has led the Kremlin to recruit elsewhere, as well as import 10,000 soldiers from North Korea.
Africans have been lured by the promise of money or have been duped or forced into signing contracts, according to accounts and intelligence reports seen by The Telegraph.
Suicidal infantry tactics
Cameroon’s government is so worried about the numbers of soldiers thought to be deserting its army and travelling to Russia that in March it tightened restrictions on military personnel leaving the West African nation.
Many African recruits have not returned, becoming victims of suicidal infantry tactics which are currently seeing Russian forces take an average of more than 1,100 casualties each day for only small territorial gains.
One tally of Cameroonian social media obituaries suggests the country has already seen more than 60 men killed in the war.
Promised a hefty wage and pressured to sign, Mr Onana was then given five weeks of training in Rostov and Luhansk. There were around 10 other foreigners in his training unit, from Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and Brazil.
During training he was able to call home, but on his way to the front his phone and documents were taken away.
His military career ended almost as soon as it began when he and eight others were told to occupy a bunker at the front in early May. The bunker was shelled and everyone killed except Mr Onana, who lay wounded in the debris for six days. He eventually made his way out and was soon captured.
Another recently captured African, 25-year-old Malik Diop from Senegal, this week told a Ukrainian military interviewer that he had been studying in Russia when he met recruiters in a shopping centre. They told him he could sign up to wash dishes in Luhansk, away from the front, for $5,700 (£4,215) a month.
After only a week, however, he was given a weapon, grenades and a helmet and then driven to the front near Toretsk. Recalling the walk to the front line, he said: “We started to see dead people in the forest. Lots of dead people in different buildings. It really affected me.”
As soon as he could, he threw away his uniform and weapons, and deserted. After two days of walking, he was captured.
Many are not so fortunate.
Cameroonian social media channels have in recent months seen many posts purporting to be from people seeking information about relatives who had joined the Russian military and then stopped communicating. The messages are often accompanied by photographs of African men in Russian uniforms.
“My friend went to Russia to join the Russian army, and for nearly four months we haven’t heard from him,” explained one typical recent request. “We’d like to know if he’s still alive or dead.”
Some posts are then updated to explain that the missing relative has been killed. One prominent account collating tributes to soldiers this week estimated 67 Cameroonians had been killed.
Messages also gave accounts of relatives being detained at the airport and forced to sign military contracts.
The gap between Cameroon’s meagre military wages and the promise of hefty Russian pay is thought to have worsened a long-standing problem with desertion in the Cameroonian military.
A second-class Cameroonian private’s basic monthly salary is around £67, while Russia is said to be offering Cameroonian recruits around £1,500 per month.
In one recent social media post, a Cameroonian soldier held up his pay slip and said “here’s why we prefer to go die in Russia”.
Raoul Sumo Tayo, who has researched the issue for the Institute of Security Studies, a Pretoria-based think tank, said: “They say it’s better for us to go to fight where we earn enough money to save something for our families.
“I don’t think it’s about supporting Russia, it’s more about what they earn.”
Africans recruited by Russia are not only fighting on the front.
Last month, a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime said a Russian firm was recruiting hundreds of young foreign women, mostly from Africa, to manufacture Iranian Shahed drones.
The women had been recruited to the company in the Alabuga special economic zone, an industrial park in Yelabuga, east of Moscow, with promises of good salaries and educational opportunities.
They were not told the nature of the work, the report said, nor that the factory had been a military target.
Several African workers at the factory are reported to have been wounded in an attack by Ukrainian drones in April 2024.
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