The "I Want to Live" project is consistently raising the issue of Russia’s illegal recruitment of foreigners...

The "I Want to Live" project is consistently raising the issue of Russia’s illegal recruitment of foreigners for the war against Ukraine.

The Kremlin is trying to wage war with other people’s hands, sending people from different countries to kill Ukrainians and die themselves. Many of them do not even understand where exactly they are going. In the Russian army, such “volunteers” are treated as expendable material and thrown into “meat assaults” without hesitation.

The best way to fight evil is to make it visible. Practice shows that the more people talk about Russian recruitment and its methods, the harder it becomes for it to operate. When the media gets involved, when the relatives of deceived people take to the streets in protest, when politicians raise the issue, it ultimately produces results.

Over the past year, we made more than 100 publications about how Russia sends foreigners to their deaths. Thirty-two lists have been made publicly available, containing more than 14,000 foreign nationals recruited into the Russian army.

We also worked with dozens of international media outlets and investigative teams, sharing data on recruitment schemes in different countries. Many journalists visited prisoner-of-war camps and personally spoke with foreigners from 48 countries who ended up in captivity in Ukraine.

This is major work and real pressure, both public and political. It forces countries to respond and counter recruitment, and forces Russia to roll back its practices. According to our information from sources in the Russian army, by order of the Russian General Staff, the recruitment of citizens from 39 countries has already been suspended.

We are sharing the most notable investigations and materials prepared with the assistance of the "I Want to Live" project:

1️⃣ “The Russian Trap” (Masrawy) is a series of investigations into the recruitment of foreigners in Egypt and Yemen. The author is journalist Sarah Abo Shady, who has received international awards. The materials expose a network headed by Polina Azarnykh and show the schemes used to recruit citizens of Arab countries. After the publication, Egypt tightened its travel rules for trips to Russia.

Parts:

2️⃣ Truth Hounds is a global study showing that Russia has moved from “volunteers” to deceptive and coercive recruitment of vulnerable people from more than 130 countries. These practices are viewed as exploitation and a violation of human rights.

3️⃣ OCCRP is an investigation into the scale of and tools used for the recruitment of foreign nationals.

4️⃣ All Eyes On Wagner is a project describing the recruitment of more than 1,400 Africans through fake agencies and social media; at least 316 of them were killed.

We will continue documenting, publishing, and making these practices public. This directly affects their scale and effectiveness.

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