Russia sends migrants to war

Thirty thousand “foreigners” recently granted Russian citizenship, most of them labour migrants from Central Asia, have been “caught” and forcibly registered with the Russian military, according to the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. Ten thousand of them have already been sent to the war zone in Ukraine to dig trenches and create fortifications, the committee’s chairman says. Russian law enforcement units in search of military conscripts regularly raid businesses where migrants work, from Belgorod near the Ukrainian border to as far east as Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. The migrant workers are promised fast-tracked Russian passports if they sign on with the Ministry of Defence, which despite Russia’s four-to-one population advantage over Ukraine is struggling to reinforce frontline troops. Ukraine estimates Russia has lost more than 500,000 killed and wounded since February 2022. A recent analysis of excess male deaths put the number killed in action at 64,000.