Three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin faces a crisis it refuses to admit: it cannot sustain the war using Russian soldiers alone without courting political upheaval or economic collapse. Western and Ukrainian sources assess Russian casualties at over one million since 24 February 2022, with daily losses estimated at 1,000 per day.

Russia has been replenishing these losses by generating 30,000 to 40,000 recruits to offset these casualty rates. Russian sources cited in an October 2025 assessment claimed hundreds of thousands of Russians signed military contracts in 2025 alone, with Moscow reportedly building up reserve forces since mid-year. But the financial burden has become crushing. Russia’s volunteer recruitment system, dependent on ever-increasing cash incentives, is draining state coffers and destabilising the domestic labour market through wage inflation. Mass mobilisation as an alternative remains political suicide after the September 2022 call-up triggered an exodus of over 261,000 Russians.

Putin needs a third option. Previously, only Russian Federation citizens were allowed to serve in the Russian army. In July 2025, Putin signed a decree allowing foreigners to serve during mobilisation periods, a significant expansion of Russia’s existing foreign recruitment laws. What the decree doesn’t specify is how those foreigners will be recruited. Western analysts often argue that Russia is losing the economic war, with oil infrastructure crippled by Ukrainian drone strikes and refining capacity decimated. But this misses the darker reality. Economic pressure on Moscow doesn’t end the conflict; it metastasises the human cost.

Unable to risk another unpopular domestic mobilisation, growing evidence reveals that Putin has instead built a global trafficking pipeline that externalises casualties to the Global South. A sprawling network reportedly stretches from Kathmandu to Dhaka, Colombo to Moscow, luring desperate men with false promises of construction work, warehouse jobs, or any legitimate opportunity.

Russia has been concealing this manpower crisis by recruiting from its poorest provinces and ethnic minority republics, keeping the war’s true cost distant from Moscow. The turn to external recruitment was not improvisation born of desperation but strategic evolution. Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechen paramilitaries provided the blueprint. Marketed as loyal Muslim fighters projecting Russia’s strength, the Kadyrovites suffered catastrophic losses at the Battle of Hostomel. Their reluctance to engage in sustained combat earned them the moniker ‘TikTok warriors’, a PR disaster that nonetheless proved a principle: Moscow could wage war through expendable proxies.

The Wagner Group escalated this model into industrial practice. Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenaries had already carved inroads across Africa through covert military operations, mining ventures, and arms deals. When Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu failed to capture Kyiv within the expected timeframe, Putin unleashed Wagner in Ukraine, too. The enterprise offered Russian prisoners a grim bargain: fight as expendable assault troops in exchange for reduced sentences. Wagner’s mercenary mystique cultivated public popularity that only grew after Prigozhin’s June 2023 mutiny in Rostov-on-Don. Two months later, Prigozhin’s plane exploded mid-air. The model, however, survived him.

Russia’s recruitment networks thrive where western influence has waned. Across the Global South, many nations have refused to join western sanctions or condemn the invasion. The reasons are complex. US credibility had already cratered under President Biden due to Washington’s complicity in Israel’s documented war crimes in Gaza, generating widespread anger. It declined further under President Trump’s second presidency. Many Global South nations also cite their Non-Aligned Movement membership and commitment to neutrality in their foreign policy pursuit.

Moscow exploits this neutrality without hesitation. Recruiting from third countries is, in fact, not at all unusual in warfare, and many foreign fighters have joined both sides. Ukraine’s International Legion operates through transparent government channels; though it has faced mismanagement, vetting failures and allegations of poor conditions and limited accountability. But Russia’s model relies on systematic deception, human trafficking, and exploiting populations with no agency in the conflict’s causes or outcomes. The distinction is structural: Ukraine’s problems can be attributed to poor organisation. Russia’s, however, is deliberate exploitation.

The scope is staggering. North Korea has deployed over 10,000 soldiers to Russia, each issued with false identities and Russian uniforms before deployment. The June 2024 Russia-DPRK treaty formalises this arrangement through mutual-defence provisions that revive Cold War-era military alliances. Russia hosts approximately over three million people, predominantly from Central Asia, who face workplace raids, followed by a stark choice: military service or deportation. Across South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, men are lured by promises that will never be met.

Syria was reportedly the earliest major source, with recruits sent to Russia for training following the 2022 invasion, while Bashar Assad was still in power. The recruitment pool extended the following year to Cuba, with men lured by the promise of citizenship. By late 2023, Cuba’s foreign ministry acknowledged uncovering a human trafficking ring recruiting Cubans for Russia’s war. Reports then surfaced from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Somalia, Sierra Leone, South Africa and beyond. Some signed up voluntarily, others were deceived by promises of money and false jobs. Many died on the frontlines. Some became prisoners of war.

What these nations share are vulnerabilities that Moscow systematically exploits: economic desperation combined with weak institutions. Governments struggling with political instability cannot adequately protect citizens from predatory networks operating under the veneer of legitimate employment agencies. For instance, many African states reportedly showed little interest in repatriation.

This trafficking model shares structural parallels with another exploitation system run by organised crime through Southeast Asia: cyber-scam compounds. In Myanmar, these operations flourish under the cloak of civil war, where state collapse provides perfect cover for trafficking networks. Both systems weaponise forced criminality, transforming victims into perpetrators under duress. This cycle is the trap. When victims become perpetrators, prosecution becomes nearly impossible and rescue efforts collapse. The scammed lose their savings. The abducted lose their freedom, or worse, their lives. Meanwhile, those who conceived and orchestrated the exploitation remain untouchable, hidden behind jurisdictional gaps and the legal ambiguity surrounding coerced participation. Whether it’s a scam compound in Cambodia or a trench in Ukraine, those deceived and trafficked pay the price while the architects walk free.

This is comparable to grey-zone warfare: operating below the threshold of formal conflict, while achieving strategic objectives through deliberately ambiguous means. Are these men mercenaries under international law? Volunteers? Trafficking victims? The legal fog of war makes prosecution nearly impossible and allows Russia to claim legitimacy while running trafficking networks. By using third-country nationals, Moscow obscures responsibility, complicates international legal responses, and exploits diplomatic blind spots in non-aligned states.

Russia’s foreign recruitment pipeline fits perfectly with its broader grey-zone toolkit: sabotage operations in European infrastructure, disinformation campaigns, and subversion efforts against western institutions. It sustains a war of attrition without triggering the domestic political crisis another mobilisation would cause. Foreign casualties don’t register in official statistics. And it weaponises the economic desperation across the Global South, deepened by the war’s food insecurity and energy crisis, now compounded by Trump administration tariffs and USAID cuts that decimated many lives, turning poverty itself into a recruitment tool.

The question is no longer about whether Russia can afford to keep fighting. Moscow has shown it can lure foreigners into the meat grinder to avoid another domestic mobilisation. The actual question is how many more will die before the international community acknowledges this moral catastrophe. As economic pressure mounts on Russia, the temptation will grow to escalate the exploitation of vulnerable populations. The grey-zone will expand, not contract, as Putin seeks new sources of expendable manpower, while maintaining the domestic fiction that the war remains under control.

For the Global South, the lesson is stark: non-alignment offers no protection from great-power competition when poverty makes populations exploitable. The trafficking networks operating from Kathmandu to Havana demonstrate that neutrality becomes vulnerability in an era of grey-zone warfare. Russia needs soldiers. The Global South has desperate men. The rest is exploitation.