Mercenaries From at Least 48 Countries Are Participating in the War on Russia’s Side

Vladimir Putin claims that Russia does not need foreign mercenaries: “We do not have such a need — to invite people from the outside for combat operations,” he said in September 2023. But in Moscow alone, more than fifteen hundred foreign mercenaries could have been recruited for the war with Ukraine in a year, IStories found out. We established their names using a leak from Moscow's medical database (EMIAS), which covers a period of just over a year — from the opening of the recruitment center in April 2023 to the end of May 2024. This story is about those who go to fight for Russia and what awaits them at the front.

“Rubber apartment” on Yablochkova Street

In April 2024, the hacker group DumpForums announced that it had hacked several systems of the Department of Information Technologies (DIT) of the Moscow Mayor’s Office. According to the hackers, they penetrated the DIT system a year earlier and during this time downloaded several large databases. Among other things, the hackers gained access to the personal data of Muscovites from the unified medical information and analytical system (EMIAS).

As IStories found out, as a result of this leak, information about hundreds of foreigners who passed through the selection point for military service under contract in Moscow was made publicly available.

More than 1,500 foreign citizens who appear in the EMIAS database have the address of the unified recruitment point listed as their residential address — 5 Yablochkova Street, Building 1. Sometimes the data also includes an apartment number. According to the leak, almost three hundred foreigners “live” in apartment number 302. The medical examination room at the recruitment point has the same number.

The center for recruiting contract soldiers began operating on April 1, 2023. Signs of preparation for receiving the first volunteers can be seen in the EMIAS leak about a week before the launch of the center. At that time, data on two “namesakes” — “Testovy Test Testovich” and “Testov Test Testovich” — were entered into the system. Their address was listed as the building on Yablochkova Street. Both Moscow’s authorities and pro-government media reported that the recruitment center staff had access to the EMIAS system.

At the Yablochkova Street location, applicants wishing to sign a contract submit an application form, photographs, and other documents, and at the entrance, one needs to obtain a ticket. We found a photo of such a document package in the TikTok account of one of the Nepalese mercenaries — Rabin Rai. The photo shows that Rai received the ticket on September 16, 2023, at 12:34. According to the leaked data, Rabin Rai’s data was entered into EMIAS about half an hour later. It can be assumed that during this time, the mercenary made his way from the first floor, where candidates fill out applications, to the third floor, where the medical examination room is located.

There, on Yablochkova Street, bank cards were issued to foreigners. This was recounted in a TikTok account by another mercenary from Nepal, Binod Bahadur Sunuwar. Following their visit to the recruitment center, foreign mercenaries were handed a summons to report to the Avangard training center in the Moscow region, where contractors awaiting orders for enlistment in the Russian Armed Forces are stationed. 

Such a document was posted by another Nepalese citizen — Durga Prasad Neupane. According to the EMIAS leak, the summons was issued on the same day he visited the center on Yablochkova Street. The very next day, October 19, the Nepalese man published a photo from Avangard in military uniform.

Foreign mercenaries spent about two weeks at the Avangard awaiting orders to enlist in the army, after which they were sent for training and then to the front.

Using open sources, we confirmed that dozens of foreigners with the Yablochkova Street address participated in the war in Ukraine. Some of them were killed or captured, but there are also those who served the entire contract term and were able to be discharged from the Russian Armed Forces. However, not everyone who visited the Moscow recruitment center for a contract began serving in the Russian army. We found at least 13 cases where foreign volunteers left Russia the next day or a few days after their visit to Yablochkova Street.

Probably, some of them refused to go to Ukraine because they realized what they would face in the war. A deserter from Nepal, Khakendra Khatri, realized he would become “cannon fodder” when fellow recruits at the training center added him to a WhatsApp group. There, they exchanged information and posted videos from the front.

“In these videos, a bunch of Russians and Nepalese were lying dead on the battlefield,” said Khatri in an interview with Novaya Gazeta Europe. Some without legs, some without arms, turning blue. I got very scared.” After that, the Nepalese man fled the unit, hitchhiked to Moscow, and flew home without ever having been to the front.

Nepalese tourists

We established the country of origin of more than 1,300 out of 1,500 foreigners who went through the Moscow recruitment center for contracts over the year. The countries of South and East Asia took first place in the number of volunteers who went to Russia — 771 people. In second and third place are the countries of the former USSR (523 people) and Africa (72 mercenaries).

The largest number of mercenaries went to Russia from Nepal — at least 603 people from this country visited the recruitment center in Moscow. The first Nepalese appeared in the Russian army no later than May 2023, according to the leak.

At first, they came in small groups of 2–3 people, but by August their flow had grown to 30 people per month, and in October more than 370 people passed through the selection point on Yablochkova Street. On some days, the flow of Nepalese exceeded the figure for the entire month of August.

In the first half of November, the recruitment of volunteers from Nepal came to a halt. At this time, the media began to report on the recruitment of Nepalese for the war in Russia, and the authorities of this country asked the Kremlin not to recruit Nepalese citizens into the Russian army. 

Nevertheless, their recruitment continued until at least December 20. By the beginning of January, when Nepal stopped issuing work permits in Russia, residents of this country had not appeared on Yablochkova Street for two weeks. According to reports in the Nepalese media, residents of the country joined the Russian Armed Forces even after the ban by the authorities. This is also confirmed by data from the leak: we found four Nepalese citizens who passed the selection for a contract in January and February 2024.

Russia does not inform the relatives of Nepalese who went to war about their fate. Families are trying to get help from the Nepalese authorities, but not everyone can cope with the loss. Thus, a few months after the disappearance of Ronal Mishra in Ukraine, his father committed suicide.

In March 2025, several families of deceased and missing Nepalese came to Moscow to demand compensation from Russia for the dead and to search for the missing. According to the Nepalese embassy, about 12 million rubles should be transferred to the relatives’ accounts.

By this time, the Nepalese government confirmed the deaths of 48 mercenaries. In the fall of 2024, it became known that the Russian authorities also requested DNA samples to identify the bodies of 57 people, so the death toll may exceed one hundred servicemen. In open sources, we found the names of 55 Nepalese who died in the war in Ukraine or are on the DNA testing lists, which we found in the EMIAS database.

IStories compared the list of Nepalese volunteers who came to the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street with other leaks. We found two Nepalese whose deaths were not reported by local media — Ram Krishna Adhikari, 43 and Mahendra Malla, 22. Their names are contained in documents that the Ukrainian project Hochu Naiti [“I Want to Find”] calls lists of evacuated bodies and remains of Russian Armed Forces servicemen. The authors of the Telegram channel claim that the lists cover the period from February 1 to 14, 2025.

Likely, another 35 Nepalese contract soldiers may have deserted: we found their names in the leaked lists of those who left their unit unauthorized. This data indicates that criminal proceedings were initiated against one of the Nepalese soldiers for desertion (part 5 of article 337 of the Criminal Code), and six more were detained, but there is no other confirmation of this information.

After the end of their one-year contracts, many mercenaries from Nepal returned home, however, some remained in the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces at least until April 2025, according to their social media. Quite recently, in March 2025, Nepalese soldiers could be encountered not only in Ukraine, but also in the Kursk Oblast.

From Western values to Orthodoxy

Not only residents of Asia are going to fight for Russia, but also representatives of Western countries. IStories discovered several dozen citizens of the European Union and two from the USA in the leak.

One of them turned out to be the full namesake of a former US serviceman from the 82nd Airborne Division — Matthew Kyle Dubron, 30, from Nevada. His name and age, indicated in the EMIAS leak, match the data from the open database of American voters. Dubron dedicated several years to army training: as a teenager, he attended a summer cadet camp at an airbase in California, and received his education at a military college. The Moscow medical database indicates that Matthew Dubron underwent a medical examination at Yablochkova Street on February 15, 2024. His further fate is unknown.

At least 34 citizens of European countries went through the capital’s recruitment center for contract service. Three-quarters of them come from countries that Russia considers unfriendly because of their support for Ukraine. For example, citizens of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Austria tried to join the Russian army.

On February 26, 2024, Frenchman Jean Clement, 21, appeared at the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street. As IStories discovered, his mother, Helene Clement-Pitiot, is regularly invited as an economic expert to appear on the French branch of RT and the French-language version of Sputnik, a subdivision of the state-owned Rossiya Segodnya media group.

Back in 2018, Clement-Pitiot spoke at a conference alongside the ultra-conservative philosopher Alexander Dugin. As the organizers noted, the event with Clement-Pitiot’s participation was part of a project to “actualize Russia’s soft power in the Eurasian space.”

Collaboration with Russian propaganda did not hinder her career in France. At least until July 2024, she taught at the prestigious School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. In recent reports, Russian media call her a researcher at the Paris Economic Warfare School (EGE).

Jean Clement attended school in central Moscow and speaks Russian fluently. Since childhood, he has participated in Orthodox-patriotic camps. In 2016, Clement went to a children’s Orthodox camp on the Greek island of Lemnos; the trip was organized by the Nasledie [Heritage] charitable foundation. It is headed by Lieutenant General of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and chairman of the supervisory board of Tsargrad TV, Leonid Reshetnikov. “I will remember Lemnos for the rest of my life!” Clement shared. “Here I learned what true Orthodox faith is.”

Six months after visiting the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street, Clement appeared in a photograph taken in southern Russia. He read IStories’ message requesting a comment but did not respond.

Another European from our list is Dane Nicklas Hoffgaard, 34, known in Denmark as rapper Stanley Most: according to his words, Danish soldiers who fought in Iraq listened to his music in the trenches. 

Nicklas Hoffgaard appeared at the Moscow recruitment center in September 2023. A year later, in August 2024, he secured the termination of his contract with the Ministry of Defense through the court. Hoffgaard supported Vladimir Putin and opposed Western values, and with the help of a contract with the Ministry of Defense, he hoped to obtain Russian citizenship. He believed he would choose his place of service himself, but ended up in the war in Ukraine and complained about bullying from his colleagues — according to him, he was beaten, forced to drink vodka, had his phone taken away, and was suspected of spying for the U.S. and Denmark.

“He found himself in this situation against his will, he did not intend to participate in the work of such units,” his lawyer Roman Petrov tells IStories. — “This is a violation on the part of the recruitment center. He doesn’t speak Russian, they didn’t familiarize him with the contract, didn’t translate it verbatim. He was very surprised when he was sent there [near Luhansk]. There were always translators at the recruitment center, it’s just that no one bothered to explain everything properly to the person, they have a constant flow of people.” 

As Petrov told IStories, two months after the court ruling, the decision was executed, the Dane was removed from the unit’s roster and dismissed. “He received all due payments, is legally entitled to veteran status and all veteran benefits. He lives and works in Moscow, he is not going home yet because he fears persecution [mercenary activities are prosecuted by law in Denmark — Ed. note.],” says Petrov. — “He has the right to obtain Russian citizenship, but he is still considering this issue.”

Among European countries, the absolute leader in the number of foreign mercenaries is “friendly” to Russia Serbia, whose volunteers fought on the Russian side since the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. At least eight Serbs went through the contract recruitment center in Moscow in 2023–2024.

Among them is Miodrag Berić, 26, the son of Serbian sniper Dejan Berić, who was engaged in recruiting Serbs into the Russian army. Miodrag Berić appeared at the Moscow recruitment center at the end of October 2023.

The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel [now the post has been deleted — Ed. note] reported that in January 2024, the younger Berić was dismissed from the ranks of the Russian army. This happened after his father complained about the command of the 119th Airborne Regiment, where Serbian mercenaries served.

Middle East: escape from their army to the Russian one

Another 71 people from our list are from the Middle East (Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Turkey, Algeria, and other countries in the region), many of which are also engulfed in armed conflicts.

Syrian Omaran Hadak, 26, moved to Russia before the start of the war with Ukraine. He was born into a large family in the Syrian city of Hama, and while studying at school, when he turned 18, he received a summons to the army. In 2019, “not wanting to serve,” he left Syria for Russia on a single-entry business visa, began working as a loader in Moscow markets, and requested asylum from the Russian authorities, justifying this with the “threat of arrest for evading military service,” follows from the documents of the court proceedings, in which in 2021 Hadak tried to challenge the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ refusal to grant him refugee status.

The court did not side with the Syrian, but Hadak did not leave Russia. In October 2023, a Moscow court fined him for violating migration laws — he could only stay in Russia on a single-entry visa until 2020 — and sentenced him to expulsion from the country: Hadak had to leave Russia within five days. In court, he could not communicate without an interpreter, did not understand Russian, and could not state his full date of birth, mentioned in the case documents. Three weeks before this, employees of the Moscow recruitment center entered Hadak into the database of contract soldiers: probably, with the help of military service, he wanted to obtain Russian citizenship, although a few years earlier he had fled his native country, trying to avoid this service.

Almost half (44%) of those who appeared on Yablochkova Street from the Middle East are from Egypt. The first Egyptian volunteers began appearing at the Moscow selection point as early as April 2023, as soon as it began operating.

Egyptians are likely being persuaded to sign a contract already in Russia: three-quarters of those recruited, for whom border service data is available, lived in the country for more than a month before going to the capital’s recruitment center, 39% for more than a year.

Among them are former students of Russian universities (the number of students from Egypt in Russia is increasing in recent years) and husbands of Russian women in the process of divorce.

Among the top three Middle Eastern countries whose citizens went through the Moscow recruitment center are also Iran and Algeria. Some of these mercenaries have already received Russian citizenship. 

Iman Raisiwanani, 40, from Iran came to the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street at the end of December 2023. He was sent to the motorized rifle troops in the territory of the Luhansk Oblast. Within a few months, Raisiwanani came under mortar fire and received a shrapnel wound to his leg. After treatment in the hospital, he applied for Russian citizenship and received it in October 2024 under a simplified procedure — “as a participant in a special military operation.” The Iranian became a Russian citizen without having served on the front lines for even a year — the period for which the first contract is signed with foreigners. “The first home is Iran, the second is Russia,” said Raisiwanani, whose parents and daughters are waiting for him in Iran, in a propaganda TV report.

Kamel Letaief, 24, calls himself “the first Algerian in the history of Russia to join the ranks of the Russian army.” He came to the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street in October 2023 — before that, at least two Algerian citizens had applied there, according to our data. At the same time, he shared his first photo in Russian military uniform on social media, and from 2024 he began posting photos and videos geotagged Chervony Prapor (a settlement in the Perevalsk district of the Luhansk Oblast of Ukraine): some of them show decomposed bodies of soldiers. Already in April 2024 — that is, less than a year after signing the contract — Letayef was photographed with a Russian passport and the Constitution of the Russian Federation in his hands under a portrait of Vladimir Putin.

Africa: Joining the army from a “pro-peace” forum with Putin’s participation

Foreigners from disadvantaged African countries are also being recruited into the Russian army: 72 people who passed through the Moscow recruitment center are from African countries with high unemployment and poverty rates. The top three countries whose citizens passed through the Moscow center are Ghana, Cameroon, and Senegal.

People from African countries did not immediately go to sign a contract, according to border crossing data: 11 out of 12 people for whom such data is available were in Russia for more than a month before coming to the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street. Joseph Désiré Pokam, 25, from Cameroon arrived in Russia in July 2023 — on the first day of the Russia-Africa summit, which was organized by the Roscongress Foundation and held under the slogan “For Peace, Security and Development” with the participation of delegations from African countries and Russia. Vladimir Putin spoke at the summit.

After the summit, Cameroonian Pokam stayed in Moscow and three months later — in November 2023 — went to the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street. Later, Pokam said that in his native country he was engaged in growing tomatoes and came to the Russia-Africa summit on a tourist visa. 

“I left my country because there are many problems there. But I had a temporary visa. To work in Moscow, you had to have a stable document. Friends told me that since there is a war, you can join the army,” says Pokam. According to him, he spent a year on the Kherson front and is now in the process of obtaining Russian citizenship. “Papa Vladimir Putin, he must be respected. I would dream of seeing him and shaking his hand or at least raising my hand and saying hello,” says Pokam in a propaganda story on Russian television.

At least two other participants of the Russia-Africa summit also wanted to sign a contract with the Russian army: IStories found their names by comparing the leaked list of forum attendees with the database of the Moscow military recruitment center. These are Pape Mohidine Mbaye, 22, a marketing manager at a company from Senegal, and Cyrille Donfack, 33, from Cameroon, who worked as a driver for a tourism company. He arrived in Russia on the day the Russia-Africa summit began on the same flight as Pokam, who called Putin “papa.”

Not all foreigners who signed contracts are as lucky with legalization in Russia as the Cameroonian Pokam. At least two citizens of African countries who went through the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street were tried in Russia for staying in the country without the necessary documents.

Ghandi Osei Akoto, 26, from Ghana arrived in Russia in December 2023 on a visa issued for one month. When the visa was about to expire, Akoto went to the Moscow recruitment center for contract service. A year later, after the end of his service, Akoto was tried for violating migration rules — he did not have documents allowing him to stay in Russia. The court took into account that Akoto had signed a one-year contract with the Ministry of Defense and sentenced him to a fine of 5 thousand rubles without deportation.

Another Cameroonian contractor appeared in the leaked database of deserters from the Russian army: Rodrigue Tchounfang Ngobeu, 32, came to the recruitment center on Yablochkova Street in December 2023. Before the expiration of his one-year contract — in August 2024 — a Moscow court found him guilty of violating migration rules and sentenced him to a fine and deportation from Russia.

Migrants from post-Soviet countries

The recruitment of labor migrants from the former USSR into the Russian army became known in the first year of the full-scale war. In just over a year, at least 523 people from post-Soviet countries passed through the Yablochkova recruitment center alone. 

Most are from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Some arrived in Russia from their home countries on the same day or the day before appearing at the recruitment center, but most of those for whom border crossing data is available lived in Russia for more than a month (82%), and often more than a year (36%).

Among them is Kyrgyzstani Askar Kubanychbek, who had been living in Russia since 2012. Back in June 2022, he volunteered for the front, where he spent five months. After that, Kubanychbek was detained in Kyrgyzstan and tried for mercenarism. For participating in the war in Ukraine, he was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was released, with three years of probation. Already in May 2024, Kubanychbek came to the Moscow recruitment center to sign a new contract for service in the Russian army. As Kyrgyz media reported, in August of the same year, Kubanychbek became a Russian citizen.

IStories is ready to share data from this material for further investigations into the participation of foreigners in the war on the Russian side. Send requests to efeoktistov@istories.media.

Editor: Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya