Lima – Donbas Express. How Russia Recruits Peru Nationals to Go to War

“Please, Karina, don’t tell my mum about this — I don’t want her to get even more worried. I’m just asking you to pray — just like we do — for our safe return home, because only a miracle can put an end to this war between the two countries,” wrote Jesús Chiarella, a Peruvian, to his wife shortly before he went missing in action in the war against Ukraine.

In March 2026, Jesús, along with other Peruvians, found himself at the frontlines fighting for the Russian army. According to the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a total of more than 450 Peruvian citizens joined the Russian Armed Forces. Before travelling to Russia, many were unaware that they would be taking part in combat operations.

Jesús Chiarella, like several other Peruvians, signed the military contract in the Bashkir town of Meleuz. Local authorities there pay recruiters for every new enlistee.

IStories and La Encerrona, a Peruvian podcast, have retraced the route used to send people from Latin America to the war against Ukraine by a network of traffickers. Its main hub was found to be the Russian city of Ufa, where a recruitment centre specialising in foreigners is still operating.

Jobs in Russia

Arturo Rengifo, 55, learnt about the opportunity to earn money in Russia from a friend. At the time, Arturo was working as a security guard at a mining facility, but the work was unstable, meanwhile in Russia he would be offered 2,800 euros a month and 20,000 euros upon signing the contract. Arturo told his wife that the job for the “Russian government” involved nothing but “guarding containers.”

Arturo, like many Peruvians who applied for the job in Russia, had experience working in Peru’s security forces. His unit in the national police specialized in mine clearance, including the mines left from the conflict between the Peruvian authorities and the “Sendero Luminoso” Maoist group in the 1980s and 1990s.

Arturo and his friend were recruited by Iván Díaz, a Peruvian national nicknamed VIZIO. According to the documents shared by their relatives, Díaz was involved in the recruitment of at least seven Peruvians who ended up in the Russian Armed Forces. According to a source at La Encerrona, Iván Díaz is wanted by the Peruvian authorities.

In his tax return documentation Díaz stated that he was involved in “maintaining public order and security.” On his WhatsApp profile, however, Díaz would describe himself as a military lawyer and explicitly state being involved in recruiting Latin Americans into the Russian army. He was active on social media — Instagram, Facebook and TikTok — where he urged his followers to travel to Russia as volunteers. Some of Diaz’s videos had tens of thousands of views. All his social media accounts have now been deleted.

Arturo’s wife claims that Diaz deceived the Peruvians: “This man gave our relatives completely false information, as the contracts they signed state something entirely different.” The Peruvians were forced to sign their military contracts in Russian, a language they did not understand.

Relatives of other Peruvian citizens have also complained about being deceived by the recruiters: some of those who ended up at the frontline had been promised security guards positions at military facilities without taking part in the combat, whereas some had been promised work as drone operators far from the front line, or even a job of a cook.

Jesús Chiarella, 45, flew to Russia with two other Peruvians just two weeks after Arturo’s departure. Before travelling to Russia, he had worked in the prison system for more than ten years. In the 2000s, Jesús served in the Peruvian army, guarding the US embassy in Iraq. In Russia, according to his wife, he was offered a similar job — an embassy guard. When his friend told him about the opportunity to earn some extra money, he agreed without a second thought.

Lima to Istanbul to Moscow

At least two groups of Peruvians flew to Russia from Lima. One, which included Arturo, departed on February 17; the other, which included Jesús, on March 3. The first group’s route passed through Amsterdam and Istanbul, whilst the second’s went via São Paulo, Rome and Istanbul. To ensure the future recruits passed through border control successfully, the traffickers bought them return tickets and devised a cover story, according to which Peruvians were travelling to Europe as tourists.

The group Chiarella was in was detained at São Paulo airport for two days due to not having return tickets. The agents had to buy those at short notice, and only then were the Peruvians allowed to board a flight to Rome. By the time the group reached Turkey, a detailed itinerary of their tour of the country had already been prepared to be shown to the local border officials. The tour included a visit to Hagia Sophia and a hammam in Istanbul, a helicopter flight across the Bosphorus and a romantic hot-air balloon ride in Cappadocia — all of it for the group of three men.

In Moscow, the volunteers from Peru no longer needed to maintain their cover story. The FSB border service at Vnukovo Airport knew in advance that the Peruvians were travelling to Russia to be selected for military service. This is evident from a request sent to the airport’s border control by Sergei Rodinko, the head of the contract recruitment centre in Ufa. The basis for entering Russia was cited as the presidential decree which lets foreigners obtain a Russian residence permit and citizenship via a simplified procedure after contracting with the Russian Armed Forces.

Sergei Rodinko told the IStories journalists he had never heard about any documents sent to the Vnukovo border control. A similar request from the Ufa recruitment centre — but this time to the border guards at a different airport, the Zhukovsky — has been made public in an investigation by RCN, a Colombian television company. The published request reportedly includes the names of two Peruvians and eight Colombians.

The same border control request from Ufa mentions the name of an ‘authorised representative for recruitment assistance’, Azamat Ashkhotov, a resident of the town of Terek in the Kabardino-Balkaria region who was due to meet the Peruvians at the airport. Another group was accompanied by yet another native of Terek, Alim Gidov. The leaked documents we were able to find contain no information about their links to the Russian army, but they indicate that Gidov had previously worked for a utility company in Terek, whilst Ashkhotov has been working as a taxi driver in recent years.

When a family member of a Peruvian recruit asked Gidov about what had happened to their relative, he replied: “I just met them and put them on a plane! <...> The man they were going to see rang me, and [I] put them on a plane. That’s all I know, brother.”

Alim Gidov and Azamat Ashkhotov did not respond to our questions.

A tutor from Ecuador

The tickets to Istanbul for the group that included Jesus were booked through Euro Talent Solutions, a Colombian company which also has a registered legal entity in Poland.

Euro Talent Solutions’ main area of business is helping South American nationals secure jobs in Poland and other European Union countries. On the company’s website and its social media pages, one can find such jobs as a driver in Lithuania, a warehouse assistant in Poland and a tiler in Montenegro. The agency has been operating for over two years and publishes photos of people who have found work in Europe with their help.

A representative of Euro Talent Solutions, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed that the company had worked with Ivan Díaz and, at his request, purchased tickets for 18 Peruvians. It had also booked hotels, arranged insurance and prepared its clients for their flights. However, the representative claims that the company had been “initially unaware” that the final destination on their itinerary was meant to be Russia.

Far more than 18 people may have been sent to Russia via Diaz. According to our source, Diaz would also work with other travel agencies and send “30–40 people a month.”

The Euro Talent Solutions representative explained that at one point he realised that the company’s clients were being sent to join the Russian army from some details in a chat group discussing travel preparations. He then decided to contact the Colombian law enforcement authorities.

The main organizer of this recruitment scheme is an “Eduardo from Ecuador”, a “translator for the Russian government,” the Euro Talent Solutions representative says. Eduardo was the one who paid Iván Díaz and other intermediaries to recruit Latin Americans.

According to the Euro Talent Solutions employee we spoke to, Eduardo soon began threatening him: “I received death threat calls from various numbers: they said I should just do my job — sell tickets, and that’s it — and that there was no need for me to say anything.” According to them, the company had terminated its collaboration with Iván Díaz and Eduardo by May 2026.

Díaz himself told the company what he was actually doing. On one occasion, he complained about Eduardo because he had “let him down over money and commissions.” “I asked: ‘What commissions are you talking about?’ — ‘Well, to be honest, I’m working here as a recruiter for the army. I’ve got an Interpol warrant out for me at the moment,’” recounts the Euro Talent Solutions employee.

According to Diaz, the “Russian government translator” would pay him $400 for each person recruited, as revealed by correspondence available to IStories. Euro Talent Solutions also received money from Eduardo, but not at a fixed rate — it depended on the cost of the “tour package,” which was constantly changing.

IStories has identified the organizer behind the scheme used to recruit Colombians and Peruvians. His full name is Eduardo Jaime Torres Jara, he is 29 and is from Ecuador. He is now residing in Belgorod, Russia, where he graduated from Belgorod State University with an international relations degree.

Photos of Eduardo Torres match the image of the scheme organizer obtained by IStories. A WhatsApp account nicknamed “Interpretación y traducción Logística internacional Logística bélica (Interpreting and Translation, International Logistics, Military Logistics)” is registered to Eduardo Torres’s number. “Join the Russian army today!”, the profile description reads. A user with the same nickname was distributing instructions in the group chat Jesús Chiarella was in.

Based on Eduardo’s messages in public Telegram groups, he began recruiting for the Russian army in June 2025. He posted his first messages in the chat groups for Latin Americans living in European countries; later, he tried to find people willing to go to war in a chat group for Africans living in Russia.

As early as May 2026, Eduardo was looking for “people living in Madrid who know the city well — for work (nothing illegal!).” He offered 1,000 euros a month for this work. It is not known how much Eduardo himself received for each person he brought to Russia. Alongside his war recruitment activity, he continued to search for language students.

Eduardo did not respond to IStories’ questions.

Moscow to Ufa to Meleuz to Ukraine

On February 20, 2026, the first group, consisting of four Peruvians, landed in Ufa, the capital of a relatively remote Russian region of Bashkortostan. That same day, they underwent a medical examination and traveled by car to Meleuz, a city three hours’ drive from Ufa.

There, all the Peruvians were registered at the same apartment in a nine-story building and enrolled in the migration and military registries. The unusual route may be explained by how much money the recruiters were getting in Meleuz for each person sent to war: the amount of money the recruiters are paid depends on the regulations in each region.

Back then, several places in the Republic of Bashkortostan were offering recruiters a reward of 400,000 rubles (about $5,000) per person, while its regional capital, Ufa, didn’t introduce the same measure until late March. In 2025 alone, 84.7 million rubles (about $1 million) from the Meleuz District budget were spent on the payments to the recruiting intermediaries. For 2026, the authorities had allocated another 64 million rubles (about $800,000) for the same purpose.

It is unknown who exactly received the payment for the soldiers from Peru. IStories obtained the photos of blank application forms the Peruvians had signed. It is likely that the recruiters would fill in their own details later in order to claim the bonuses for organizing the process.

The groups from Peru would stay in Meleuz for several days, and they received their bank cards there. Arturo Rengifo’s group returned from Meleuz to Ufa and checked into the "Defender” center. This is a mobile recruitment center for contract soldiers which was established in 2024 at a children’s health camp called “Cheremushki.” It offers a streamlined process for all the checks and procedures needed to go to war — a “one-stop shop” check completed within 24 hours. In addition, recruits are promised a cafeteria, a checkers club, a barbershop, and a photo booth there — all designed to create “the most favorable atmosphere possible, so that this important stage in every soldier’s life proceeds with minimal stress and maximum benefit.”

There, the Peruvians passed medical examinations and took an intensive 16-hour Russian language course from the Center for Advanced Professional Training (TSOPP) of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The center received 12,000 rubles (about $150) for training the three foreign contract soldiers.

They were not the first foreigners at the “Defender” center. A year before they arrived in Ufa, “Gorobzor”, a local newspaper, reported on a native of Ghana who went to the center to sign a military contract as well: “I’ve been in Russia for about three years now. I have family here. <...> Russia has been good to me all the time I’ve lived here. The Russians I worked with were very kind, so it’s time for me to support Russia, too,” he said.

The Peruvian recruits did not stay long at the training center: by early March, Arturo Rengifo was already in the Rostov Oblast, in Novoshakhtinsk — a city 1,700 km from Ufa very close to the border with the Luhansk Oblast, a Russia-occupied region of Ukraine. From there, he informed his wife that he was “in a bunker, guarding weapons, and preparing to undergo training.” This was the last location known to his family. That was the point the contact with him was lost.

Jesús’s wife, Karina, also lost contact with her husband just as quickly. Jesús described his route in detail and told her that he had received 400,000 rubles (about $5,000) for signing the military contract. He sent his wife all the necessary documents in case he died. “Go to the Russian embassy and demand, first of all, my remains if there is no news of me within three months. Second, demand the death benefit, which you can use to buy a house or anything else you want,” he wrote to her shortly before he went missing

In mid-April, Jesús stopped responding; prior to that, his phone had been in Kozhevna, a border village in the Donetsk Oblast. As Karina learned later, her husband had been listed as missing in action since May 4, 2026. He had spent less than three weeks on the front lines.

Human traffickers

Arturo and Jesús are not the only Peruvian citizens who ended up on the front lines in the spring of 2026. According to the local Ministry of Foreign Affairs, more than 450 people joined the ranks of the Russian army, and 31 of them have been successfully evacuated from Russia. One of the lawyers representing the affected families believes the scale of recruitment is much larger, and more than 1,000 people from Peru are fighting as part of the Russian Armed Forces.

In May, the Peruvian prosecutor’s office specializing in combating human trafficking began investigating these cases. Currently, Peruvian prosecutors are conducting 21 investigations into Russia-related human trafficking cases, with another investigation related to organized crime allegations. More than 300 people are listed as victims in these cases.

Two alleged traffickers have already been arrested in Peru. One of them, a 54-year-old retired military officer Pocho Pinto, offered his compatriots jobs guarding a Russian military facility and promised that the recruits would not be sent to the front lines. “If they signed a contract in a language they do not understand, that constitutes grounds for a crime, namely, fraud,” said Luisa Kispé, the prosecutor.

Russian authorities deny the fraudulent recruitment for the war allegations. In August, the Russian Embassy in Peru claimed that all the Peruvians who had signed the military contracts had been “informed of the terms of the document, the conditions of military service and the associated risks, as well as of the rights and obligations of the parties.”

Amnesty International proposed that foreigners fraudulently recruited into the Russian army should be considered victims of human trafficking. “There is no doubt <...> that the Russian authorities have at the very least created and facilitated an enabling environment for the abusive recruitment practices — and knowingly benefited from these to boost their armed forces,” the report states.

The recruitment campaign is still on 

The recruiting campaign is going on in Ufa. It is run by the “Central Headquarters for the Formation of Volunteer Battalions” (TSSCHFDB). It targets Latin America (Peru, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines), Africa (Botswana, Zimbabwe), and the CIS (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan) nationals.

Until the summer of 2026, one of the websites featured an offer for intermediaries: “If the candidate pays for their own ticket, you receive $1,000. If you simply arrange for a person to participate, and we have to cover all expenses (including the ticket), your bonus is $150. It’s easy to work with us—you bring in people, and we take care of everything else.” This announcement has since been removed.

In January 2026, the headquarters also distributed a blacklist of countries whose citizens were prohibited from joining the Russian army. Several sources reported on this ban, including a British national Ben Stimson, who trains foreign mercenaries for the Russian Army, as previously noted by IStories.

Until March 2026, the organization's Telegram channel would publish photos and videos of the foreigners who had arrived in Ufa to sign contracts with the Russian Armed Forces. We were able to identify some of them using open sources.

Edwin Díaz, a Colombian, appeared in a video released by the headquarters in late January 2026, and was taken captive a month later. Then he explained that he had come to Russia for work but was later forcibly sent to fight in the ranks of the Russian army.

Relatives were searching for another Colombian, John Velez, after they lost contact with him in September 2025. In a photo taken at least a month earlier, he is standing near the airport in Ufa.

Several photos of foreigners were taken near the “Defender” center — the same place where a group of Peruvians, including Arturo Rengifo, were living. In one of the photos, the recruits are sitting in a classroom. “Every day they study the Russian language and the history of our country, study the military disciplines, and train at sports facilities,” the organization’s Telegram channel states. The sports facilities where the foreigners exercise are also located on the premises of the “Defender” center, as confirmed by IStories.

While the Central Headquarters’ Telegram channel is inactive, its TikTok account — with nearly 5,000 followers — is still attracting the attention of potential contract soldiers from Latin American countries. Although the channel is called “Central Headquarters Siberia,” it also posts photos of Latin American contract soldiers at the “Defender” center and other locations in Ufa. The most popular videos get tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments, including from those claiming to be interested in coming to Russia.

However, not everyone welcomes this kind of ads. “No, thanks, I’d rather stay alive,” a popular comment reads under one of the videos.