African prisoners of war captured while fighting for Russia in Ukraine say they want to return to Russia rather than be sent back to their home countries, complicating Kyiv’s efforts to portray Moscow’s recruitment campaign as exploitation of vulnerable foreign citizens, POLITICO writes.
One of the captured fighters, a man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo using the call sign Avatar, said he considers Russia his home and hopes to be included in a prisoner exchange that would take him back there. “I have family in Russia, why should I want to go back to Congo?” he said. “Ukraine just thinks we will return to war.”
For Ukraine, the presence of African nationals among Russia’s forces has become part of a broader diplomatic message aimed at the continent. Kyiv argues that Moscow is bringing Africans into the war as expendable soldiers and attempting to shift the human cost of the conflict away from Russian citizens.
“They want the blood of this war to be more African and less Russian. We tell Africans not to allow Russia to use them as a meat grinder,” Ukraine’s ambassador to South Africa, Olexander Scherba, told POLITICO, arguing that Russia spreads false narratives about the war.
