(June 11, 2025 at 5:18 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: Russia hired African farmers to make shampoo, then sent them to war
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.
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.
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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...ront-line/
It was me and a hundred more to Americay sailed o’er,
Our fortunes to be made we were thinkin’.
When we got to Yankee-land, they shoved a gun into our hands,
And said, ‘Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln.’ - from Paddy’s Lament
The more things change…
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
