By: Charles Mafa, Samuel Baker Byansi, Elizabeth BanyiTabi, Eric Mugendi, William Moige, Josephine Chinele, Emmanuel Mutaizibwa, Beloved John and Evelyn Groenink

International reports have addressed Russia’s recruitment of young African women for its Alabuga military-industrial zone, 1,000 km east of Moscow, as a ‘trap,’ based on false information and fake promises. Our recent investigation confirmed that much of the content in campaigns that reached tens of thousands in our countries was indeed false. Alabuga is not a school, but a tough working environment; it is not full of love and happiness, but military-style, tightly controlled and disciplined, with limited freedom of movement. Salaries are subject to deductions, and savings are difficult, if not impossible, to transfer back home. It is also not just about study and work, but about supporting Russia’s war industry; the site includes an Iranian Shahed-136 attack drone factory.

We also interviewed young men in the recruitment channel. Their destiny was even darker: they are either recruited directly into the army or funnelled from the factory floor straight to Ukraine’s battlefields.

The Russian system appears designed that way. Recruitment networks in African countries systematically target both young men and women, using the same legitimate-looking websites and cultural centres, channelling women to ‘new families’ in the Russian military environment and men toward a military endpoint that recruiters deliberately obscure.

But false information and fake promises were not all there was to the recruitment phenomenon. Among our interviewees, several said they would rethink their plans after being informed of the true nature of the place they had thought of travelling to. But—and this is our main takeaway—there were even more who insisted they would still go. “This is my only escape” and “Better to be exploited in a developed country than where I am now” are just some of the many, many comments we encountered from passionate young women and men, who either held on to the false information they had been given, desperately hoping the warnings were only ‘Western propaganda’, or who went in with their eyes open, intent on making something of themselves elsewhe