Wagner recruits African inmates from prisons to fight in Ukraine

Wagner recruits African prisoners for the Ukrainian front

What was a Zambian nuclear engineering student doing on the Ukrainian front? Lemekhani Nyirenda travelled to Moscow to study. On 9 November, according to reports, the Kremlin announced his death in combat in the neighbouring country. The case has been linked to a scheme that the British press had been documenting: the private military company Wagner takes inmates out of African prisons to send them to Ukraine. The pattern repeats itself in the Central African Republic and in Tanzania, where another recruit, Nemes Tarimo, is said to have accepted freedom in exchange for a rifle.

From nuclear engineering to a refrigerated wagon

The Zambian student's journey sums up the logic of the system. He arrived in Russia on a student visa. He ended up, according to the account circulating, in an assault unit. His body, like those of so many others, is nowhere to be found: at best it lies in a refrigerated train in western Ukraine alongside thousands of unidentified corpses; at worst, it fertilises the countryside. Wagner's dead do not appear in official counts.

The figure the Kremlin works with is 144 million inhabitants when, according to some demographic analyses, the country should have 800. Russia's demographic winter is not caused by the war alone: there are more than one million abortions a year. Against that backdrop, every casualty at the front becomes a hole that domestic recruitment cannot fill.

Why the Russian army is looking for fighters outside Russia

The short answer: it cannot find them at home. The Chechens, the first recruitment pool invoked, are disappearing from the battlefield as casualties mount. Recruiters have moved on to Palestinian refugee centres, where 350 dollars a month is reportedly being offered for signing up and heading to Bakhmut. And to African prisons, with the promise of freedom or Russian nationality for the one percent who survive.

The result is a tower of Babel of mercenaries with the mission of "denazifying" Ukraine. A pattern that recalls the collapse of the Syrian army in 2015, when it was replaced by foreign militias. The comparison is not reassuring.

The other side imports mercenaries too

Here it is worth keeping some perspective. Ukraine has taken in foreign fighters from day one: Europeans, Americans, Colombians. The asymmetry some point out is one of composition, not of existence. On both sides there are people who are paid to shoot.

The discussion then drifted into less edifying territory: comparisons about which nationality of women appears in which audiovisual productions, theories about repopulation and demographic replacement. Dinner-table material that does not survive even the slightest contrast with migration data. The reality is more prosaic: a country with 144 million inhabitants and a war of attrition does not have enough soldiers, and buys the ones it can wherever it finds them.

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In the end, the last hope of the white race turns out to be a Zambian with a freedom-for-hire contract and a one-way ticket. That's geopolitics for you.