India Busts Russian human trafficking ring for military recruitment

Agents recruiting men for money

First Cuba. Then Nepal. Now India.

Who is next?

I think we are barely scraping the tip of the global mercenary recruitment iceberg that is hunting gullible men to fight Putin’s war.

On February 21, Ukraine fired an artillery round from the U.S. supplied HIMARS system into a Russian training ground in Donetsk region. An estimated 60 soldiers were killed in the attack.

Among the dead was an Indian national, 24 year old, Hemal Ashwinbhai Mangukiya. There was another Indian in the group, 23 year old, Mohammed Sufiyan.

Somehow he found a phone and called his parents in India, asking for help. His parents went to the media asking for help. Slowly, the information that Indians are dying in Ukraine started spreading like wildfire in India, because both men did not sign up to fight for dictator Putin and took a vow to destroy Ukraine.

They were lured in the pretext of a job offer.

Almost a week after the death of the Hemal Ashwinbhai Mangukiya in Ukraine, India’s premier investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) started a probe into human trafficking networks that “lured these Indians to the war zone by promising them lucrative jobs”.

Officials told an Indian media house that CBI has “registered a case against various visa consultancy firms and agents on allegations of hiring and sending youths to the Russia-Ukraine war zone in the guise of lucrative jobs. The human trafficking network of these agents is spread over several states across the country”.

According to CBI, “these traffickers have been operating in an organized network and were luring Indian nationals through social media channels and through their local contacts or agents for highly paid jobs in Russia. CBI has so far established at least 35 cases of victims being misled and sent abroad. The current round of searches and questioning is being done to establish the number of victims lured into the trap and to prevent any more trafficking from India to the Russia-Ukraine war zone”.

India is not the only country targeted by the Russian human traffic ring. There are many.

On 4th September 2023, the government of Cuba announced that it dismantled “a Russian-based human trafficking network that recruits Cubans to fight as mercenaries in the war in Ukraine”.

In December 2023, Nepal, a country that is bordered by China in the north and India to the other three directions, asked the Kremlin to stop recruiting its citizens into the Russian armed forces. They even asked the Russians to compensate the families of six Nepalis who died in Ukraine.

CNN says the Kremlin has recruited as many as 15,000 Nepalis.

After analyzing the TikTok profiles of 10 Nepali men who travelled to Russia to join the army, CNN used satellite imagery to geolocate them to the Avangard training center, a military academy outside of Moscow.

The academy was designed as a youth military academy and describes itself as a “patriotic education” center. It has been re-outfitted into a training academy for foreign mercenaries entering the ranks of the Russian army.

The Russian octopus has spread its tentacles all over the world siphoning gullible and economically struggling humans under any pretext to join the Russian armed forces. Some men know what they are getting into and some have no idea. Does Putin give a fuck. Nope. One more meat that can be grinded to keep his cushy chair.

How is this possible?

For men both inside and outside of Russia, the Kremlin utilizes money as a motivating factor to enlist in the Russian armed forces. The average monthly salary in Russia is slightly less than $800. However, the starting salary for military contracts is $2,200. Additionally, Russia offers a sign-off bonus: a one-time payment of $195,000 at the end of their contract.

It is highly likely that some of those working within the Russian human trafficking ring are concealing the truth about what these men are expected to do once they reach Russia. Some Indian media houses have speculated that the Indian nationals were lured under the pretext of a job offer.

$2,200, is a significant amount of money for men who are still struggling to find employment. Consequently, they sign up and board the plane with the expectation of engaging in some form of work, only to discover themselves on an army training ground. From there, they are dispatched to the frontline, a place where Putin himself will never set foot.

But why are they running around trafficking men?

“As of December 2023, 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, according to declassified intelligence shared with Congress. With a ground force of 360,000 prior to the invasion, Russia has expended almost 90 percent of its prewar troops, an unimaginable loss for a country that has claimed to be the world’s second-strongest military.

Russia’s highly attritional tactics, which often include pushing troops forward to the point of inoperability before being rotated out, have also included the use of human wave attacks, in which Russia engages in offensive efforts around places such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka by throwing masses of poorly trained and poorly armed Russian soldiers onto entrenched Ukrainian positions.

To put these numbers in context, Russia’s losses in the recent four-month campaign for Avdiivka, according to figures provided by Ukraine’s military, were greater than the Soviet Union suffered in its decade-long war in Afghanistan”.

Russia’s man power losses in Ukraine are staggering. The current replacement rate is closer to 1,000 lives every day to sustain troop capacity.

We have so much men, we can fight forever

No you can’t.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu once boasted that the Russian military could continue recruiting hundreds of thousands of soldiers every year. Yea, only if he wants to transform a quarter of Russia into the largest graveyard in the world.

This is not the 19th century.

What worked in the past, sending millions to fight a war without collapsing the economy, is unlikely to occur again. The world consists of extremely connected pieces, as do the various components within a country.

Given that Russia is losing around a thousand soldiers on the front line every day, they are poised to lose at least another one million to the war this year. This won’t be the final number, as people are still leaving Russia permanently.

A demographic disaster is unfolding behind the scenes, yet Putin doesn’t give a damn about it. He needs the war machine to keep running, and he also has to ensure that the economy doesn’t collapse due to a shortage of workers.

A human traffic ring makes perfect sense for the evil empire.

I hope and pray that the Indian courts send these human traffickers to jail forever.

They do that sometimes.

The way Western media covers the war against Ukraine has gone off-track. As a result, I have decided to make my Ukraine stories public, without placing them behind the paywall.