‘Voluntary-compulsory’ recruitment BBC News Russia examines how Russia recruits Kyrgyzstani migrants to fight in Ukraine

A new investigation from BBC News Russia examines how the Russian military has enlisted labor migrants from Central Asia to dig trenches in the Belgorod region and in Ukraine’s annexed territories as well as to participate in combat.

About 1 million migrants from Kyrgyzstan live in Russia, and most of them working in the construction and trade sectors. In 2022, bodies of people killed in Ukraine began arriving in Kyrgyzstan’s largest cities, Bishkek and Osh, including both professional soldiers who signed contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry and mercenaries who fought as part of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary cartel.

Recruiters began approaching Kyrgyzstani inmates in Russian prisons in the summer of 2022, a Moscow-based Kyrgyzstani lawyer told BBC journalists. He said he learned from his clients that the inmates were initially “insistently asked” to go to war in exchange for amnesty, and that, starting in late September 2022, they were signed up in a “volunteer-compulsory manner” to serve with Wagner Group.

In January 2023, Kyrgyzstan residents began receiving word that their relatives had died in Ukraine between September and November 2022.

One Kyrgyzstani woman told the BBC that she went months without knowing the whereabouts of her husband, who had been serving a sentence in a Kaluga prison before he stopped communicating with her. In January, her husband’s uncle told her that her husband had died in Bakhmut back in October. Because the man had listed his uncle as his legal representative, Wagner Group had ignored his wife’s requests for information. In late January, the woman found what she believes is her husband’s grave in Fryanovo, a village near Moscow, but she has no way of confirming that the grave belongs to him.

In some cases, the families of Kyrgyzstani men who have died in Ukraine have managed to have the bodies of their relatives sent back to their home country. The first known funeral of a Wagner fighter held in Kyrgyzstan was in January, when the body of 28-year-old Ayan Alisherov was sent to Osh from Moscow. After learning of Alisherov’s death, his mother was given 100,000 rubles ($1,191) in cash at the paramilitary group’s office in Moscow.

The Kyrgyzstani authorities have not commented on the deaths of the country’s citizens in the war in Ukraine. In May, a 31-year-old Bishkek resident was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a local court for fighting in the war on the Russian side. Kyrgyzstan’s National Security Committee is also investigating a criminal case against citizens who fought in the war on the Ukrainian side.