Kimende, Kenya \u2013<\/strong> Several weeks after Dancan Chege left his home in Kimende town in Kenya\u2019s Kiambu County for Russia, having been promised a job as a truck driver, he instead found himself on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n With no combat experience, it was not something he had signed up for. But the trainer readying Chege and other fighters told him: \u201cThis is the Russian military, and once you are in, you either fight or die,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Last week, Kenya\u2019s National Intelligence Service (NIS) unveiled a report which said more than 1,000 Kenyans have been recruited \u201cto fight in the Russia-Ukraine war\u201d, with 89 currently on the front line, 39 hospitalised and 28 missing in action.<\/p>\n Chege, a 30-year-old father of one, is one of the few who made a narrow escape, but dozens of families are demanding that the government take action to ensure their loved ones\u2019 safe return home.<\/p>\n Many of the returnees and families of those still abroad say they were lured or tricked into joining the war on Russia\u2019s side.<\/p>\n Chege, who used to work as a truck driver, delivering fresh vegetables from his town to the coastal city of Mombasa, was fraudulently recruited last year after he lost his job and decided to look for other opportunities.<\/p>\n He asked a friend who worked as a driver in the Gulf for advice. \u201cHe connected me with an agent in Nairobi who had taken him there,\u201d Chege recounted, sitting in his living room in Kimende. \u201cAfter we spoke, she [the agent] told me that jobs in Dubai, where I wanted to go to work as a driver, would take long and that she would get back to me when she had a good offer.\u201d<\/p>\n Two weeks later, the agent called back, saying she had a good offer for him to work in Russia as a truck driver delivering supplies to military barracks.<\/p>\n He accepted, and within three days in October, Chege had a visa and an air ticket. \u201cA Russian agent asked me whether I was ready to travel \u2026 He had called me at 6am and by 11am I already had a plane ticket for 3am the next morning,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Chege\u2019s family took him to the airport, where he left on a connecting flight via Istanbul, Turkiye, before landing in Moscow, the Russian capital.<\/p>\n In Russia, he was sent for a week of ballistics training before being transferred to a Russian base in Ukraine, where he says he was given a full combat uniform, and his civilian clothes were burned.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOn the way, some Chinese and Russians asked me through a translator why I was there, and I insisted that I was going to drive the military trucks. They were surprised but told me that they were specifically there to \u2018fight and kill the Ukrainians\u2019,\u201d Chege recounted.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I asked some Ugandans and Kenyans that I met later, and seeing what training we were being given, we realised that we had been fooled and we were going to the war front.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent months, reports have surfaced from South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa about young men fraudulently recruited for work abroad, only to end up on the front lines in the Russia-Ukraine war.<\/p>\n All in all, nationals from 36 African countries are known to be fighting for Russia in the four-year war, Ukraine\u2019s foreign minister said in November.<\/p>\n At the base he was sent to in Ukraine, Chege went through a one-month training and was sent to what he called the \u201cyellow zone\u201d before eventually going to the \u201cred zone\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cOur trainer there told us that it was going to get tough. He prepared us for the worst and told us that we should be courageous enough to see dead bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon after, Chege witnessed this firsthand. \u201cI saw thousands of dead bodies that were piled into something like a wall.\u201d That\u2019s when he knew he had to find a way out.<\/p>\n \u201cI tried to call my agent and went to the commander, asking to leave,\u201d he said, but was told he was in it until the end.<\/p>\n A week into fighting, Chege thought he would not survive. He called his wife and told her that if he went offline, his family would know that he had died.<\/p>\n \u201cThree of my friends from the six of us had been killed by a drone,\u201d he lamented.<\/p>\n With no other options, Chege decided to feign\u00a0a mental breakdown.<\/p>\n \u201cI decided to discharge my firearm aimlessly into the woods, and after all 12 magazines were spent, I pretended to be mad, collecting cartridges from the ground and eating them while talking to myself, unbothered by my two friends who rushed to check on me.\u201d<\/p>\n The other soldiers were ordered to take him back to base, which was \u201ca relief\u201d, he said, as he was afraid they would kill him then and there.<\/p>\n He was later taken to a military hospital for mental health treatment, where, with the help of a Russian soldier who was a patient, he got access to a phone to contact his family. He asked them to send fake car accident photos from his mother\u2019s phone, explaining that his wife and three children had been killed and he was needed back in Kenya.<\/p>\n \u201cThat made the doctor give me permission to go to the commander,\u201d he said, \u201cand that is how I went to the Kenyan embassy and flew back home.\u201d<\/p>\n Chege returned to Kenya last month at a time when more reports were surfacing of Africans trapped or killed on the front lines of the Ukraine war.<\/p>\n On February 10, Kenya\u2019s Prime Cabinet Secretary (PCS) Musalia Mudavadi announced that the government had repatriated more than two dozen Kenyans from the war zone and that Moscow\u2019s use of its citizens in combat was unacceptable.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have facilitated 27 Kenyans to come back home away from the front line and from what they thought were different jobs but ended up being lured into battle,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The PCS also said he would put the issue of fraudulent recruitment of Kenyan civilians into war on the agenda at a planned meeting in Russia.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have seen loss of lives, and I am planning to make a visit to Moscow so that we can emphasise that this is something that needs to be arrested,\u201d he said in a statement to the media.<\/p>\n In its report last week, the NIS said that\u00a0to facilitate Kenyans\u2019 travel to the front lines, recruitment agencies had colluded with rogue airport staff and immigration officials of the country, as well as with staff at the Russian embassy in Nairobi and at the Kenyan embassy in Moscow.<\/p>\n The Russian embassy in Kenya denied wrongdoing, calling the claims a \u201cdangerous and misleading propaganda campaign\u201d.<\/p>\nRecommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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