Indonesia: Russia is said to have lured people into the Ukraine war with fake jobs

A job abroad, a generous salary and a high bonus to get you started: With such promises, recruiters are said to have persuaded Indonesians to join the Russian armed forces in the war against Ukraine. The Indonesian police are investigating human trafficking and have named a total of 13 suspects in five cases. Among them are two Russian and one Ukrainian citizens as well as ten Indonesians, the police said.

The recruiters are said to have spread their offers via social media and initially held out the prospect of various civilian jobs abroad. Anyone who applied via online forms was then contacted and picked up by the agents.

Only then would the interested parties find out what it was actually about: they were supposed to fight for Russia and go to war as mercenaries. According to the police, anyone who then wanted to back out and return home had to expect to have to pay the costs of transport back to their home town themselves.

Indonesians may have died at the front

Just over the weekend, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry emphasized that the authorities were currently checking reports circulating on social media about the death of an Indonesian citizen who had allegedly joined the Russian military and was said to have been sent to Ukraine. "The Indonesian embassy in Moscow is investigating and verifying the information, including the identity and status of the person concerned," the media quoted the spokeswoman as saying.

Such recruitments are not an isolated case. In Kenya, East Africa, among other places, men were lured to Russia with promises of civilian jobs and later sent to the front in Ukraine. Kenyan police arrested a suspected recruiter in February who is accused of recruiting 25 compatriots under false promises.

According to a September statement from Amnesty International, there are similar reports from Brazil, Colombia, Somalia, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The human rights organization documented cases in which people were said to have been recruited as drivers, cooks or security guards, but then ended up in the Russian military. An international investigation by the human rights organization FIDH speaks of a global recruitment system that is said to have already reached 27,000 people from more than 130 countries.