Ravi Moun was excited to travel to Russia from his small village in the north Indian state of Haryana in early January. One of three siblings, the 21-year-old dropped out of school after 10th grade and was looking for work when he was contacted by a local agent with the promise of a lucrative job in transportation in Moscow, according to his brother Ajay. To cover the cost of travel to Russia, Moun’s brother sold the family’s one-acre land for 11.5 lakh rupees, or nearly $14,000.
Once he arrived, however, Ajay says Moun was inducted into the Russian military to fight in the war in Ukraine instead, which has been ongoing since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. Moun last spoke to his family on March 12, telling them he had been digging trenches to bury the casualties in Ukraine, which has steadily lost territory to Russia’s larger army. Four months later, after his family contacted the Indian Embassy to inquire about his whereabouts on July 21, they learned he had been killed on the frontlines.
Moun’s death came days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the issue of Indian mercenaries with Putin during a visit to Moscow on July 8. Following Modi’s visit, a spokesperson for the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said that at least 50 Indian nationals had contacted the ministry with requests to end their employment in the Russian army. “The Russian side have responded positively to our request. Both sides are working for an early discharge of Indian nationals and hopefully they will come back soon,” Randhir Jaiswal said during a press briefing.
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The news that Indian men were fighting in Russia was first reported in early March when the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said it had uncovered a “major human trafficking network” extending from the Indian capital of New Delhi to the southern state of Tamil Nadu. According to the CBI, Russia used social media platforms and local agents to lure people to the country by offering them jobs, admissions to “dubious private universities,” and “free discounted” visa extensions. Once the men arrived, their passports were taken away and they were “trained in combat roles and deployed at front bases in Russia-Ukraine War Zone against their wishes,” the CBI said.
Those entrapped included a Kashmiri man named Azad Yousuf Kumar, a 31-year-old engineering graduate from Pulwama, who left last December after a YouTuber offered him a job in Dubai. “They are constructing bunkers in the forests right now. They have moved further from the Black Sea,” his brother Sajad told the Press Trust of India in March, saying that Kumar could call his family only for a few minutes in the evenings. “He has a two-and-a-half-month-old son whom he has not even met so far,” he continued, pleading with the Indian government to intervene.
On social media, one video showed another seven Indian men in Russian uniforms crying for help, claiming that they were forced to fight for the Russian army after being threatened with a 10-year jail sentence for illegally entering the country if they refused to do so.
Later that month, the MEA confirmed the deaths of two Indian nationals killed on the frontlines, followed by another two deaths in June. India’s Foreign Minister, S Jaishankar, raised the issue during a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Astana in July. In Moscow’s first comments on the matter following Modi’s visit, the Russian Embassy in India said Russia was committed to finding the “earliest possible solution.” (Neither Indian nor Russian officials responded to TIME’s request for comment.)
India is not the only country whose nationals have joined the Russian army to fight Ukraine. Several Sri Lankan and Nepali citizens were also drawn in by what experts from the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation (ORF) describe as a set of “push-pull” factors that are fueling “this foreign fighters phenomenon.” That includes “the demand for foreign labor in Russia, economic incentives, and the militarization of South Asian societies,” according to the ORF. “The prospect of higher wages and an easy pathway to citizenship lures people to immigrate to countries like Russia, where there is a huge demand for labor and a demographic crisis,” ORF expert Rajoli Siddharth Jayaprakash tells TIME.
Outward migration from South Asia has especially increased in recent years, following the 2022 economic crisis in Sri Lanka, a recession in Nepal, and soaring unemployment in India, where the unemployment rate shot up to 9.2% in June 2024, a sharp increase from 7% in May 2024, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. In Russia, this migration fills the urgent demand for foreign labor after the country saw a shortage of 4.8 million workers in 2023.
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Nevertheless, Jayaprakash says that Modi’s visit to Russia has been seen as a success in India. After the issue was raised with Russian authorities on various levels, the number of Indians serving in the Russian army has declined from over 100 to 63—and 12 Indians have been discharged so far.
But the affair is far from over: “Considering that the Indians signed a legally binding contract with the Russian army, which may even entail a clause for attaining Russian citizenship, the matter is quite complicated,” Jayaprakash says.
Despite attempts to secure the release of Indian nationals from the frontlines, India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and abstained from all related resolutions at the United Nations. Instead, Modi has opted for a softer approach to the conflict, telling Putin that “today’s era is not an era of war” during the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan in 2022. The response is in line with the close relationship that New Delhi and Moscow have enjoyed for decades, with India recently stepping up its purchase of cheap Russian oil despite protests from the West.
But in Moun’s village in Haryana, his family is still grieving. His cousin, Sonu Mator, told Reuters that the family had to ask the Indian government to assist with repatriating Moun’s body back to India following his death, as they didn’t have the money to do so. “If he knew he would have to fight, he would not have gone…why would he go where death could be waiting?” Mator said.