Bangladeshis seeking jobs in Russia forced to join war on Ukraine: Report

A recruiter persuaded Maksudur Rahman to leave the tropical heat of his Bangladeshi hometown and travel thousands of miles to freezing Russia for a job as a janitor.

Within weeks, he found himself on the front lines of the Russian war in Ukraine.

An Associated Press investigation published Tuesday found that Bangladeshi workers were lured to Russia under the false promise of civilian work, only to be plunged into a nearly four-year war. Many were threatened with violence, imprisonment or death.

AP spoke to three Bangladeshis who escaped the Russian military, including Rahman, who said that after arriving in Moscow, he and a group of Bangladeshi colleagues were asked to sign Russian documents that turned out to be military contracts.

They were taken to a military camp for training in drone warfare techniques, medical evacuation procedures and basic combat techniques using heavy weapons.

Rahman protested, complaining that this was not the job he had agreed to do. A Russian commander offered a blunt response via a translation app: “Your agent sent you here. We bought you.”

Rahman said workers in his group were threatened with 10-year prison terms and beaten. “They said, ‘Why aren’t you working? Why are you crying?’ and kick us,” said Rahman, who fled and returned home after seven months.

The families of three other missing Bangladeshi men said their relatives shared similar stories with their loved ones.

AP said the workers’ accounts were corroborated by documents including travel documents, Russian military contracts, medical and police reports and photos. The documents show the visas granted to Bangladeshi workers, their injuries sustained during fighting and evidence of their participation in the war.

The three Bangladeshi men told the AP they were forced to perform front-line tasks against their will, including advancing ahead of Russian forces, transporting supplies, evacuating wounded soldiers and recovering the dead.

Men from other South Asian countries, including India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, have also complained of being tricked into joining the fight by Russian recruiters who promised them jobs. Officials from Kenya, South Africa, Jordan and Iraq said the same thing happened to their countries’ citizens.

Some Bangladeshi workers were lured into the army with the promise of positions far from the front line.

Mohan Miajee enlisted in the Russian army after the job that originally brought him to Russia – as an electrician at a gas processing plant in the remote Far East – was plagued by harsh working conditions and unrelenting cold.

While looking for a job online, Miajee was contacted by a Russian army recruiter. When he expressed his reluctance to kill, the recruiter said his skills as an electrician made him an ideal candidate for an electronic warfare or drone unit and not for combat.

Miajee was taken in January 2025 to a military camp in the captured town of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine. He showed the camp commander documents describing his experience and explained that his recruiter had asked him to apply for “electrical work.”

“The commander told me, ‘You have been made to sign a contract to join the battalion. You cannot do any other work here. You have been cheated,'” he said after returning to his village of Munshiganj.

Miajee said he was beaten with shovels, handcuffed and tortured in a cramped basement cell and held there every time he refused to carry out an order or made a mistake. For example, because of language barriers, “if they told us to go right and we went left, they would beat us severely,” he said.

Neither the Russian defense and foreign ministries nor the Bangladeshi government responded to a list of questions, according to the AP report.

The families of some of the men filed complaints with Bangladesh police and visited the capital, Dhaka, three times to pressure the government to investigate.

Salma Akdar has not heard from her husband since March 26. During their last conversation, Ajgar Hussein, 40, told him that he had been sold to the Russian army.

Hussein left in December 2024, believing he was being offered a job as a laundryman in Russia, his wife said. For two weeks he was in regular contact.

Then he told his wife that he was being taken to a military camp where they were trained to use weapons and carry heavy loads of up to 80 kg (176 lb). “Seeing all this, he cried a lot and told them, ‘We can’t do these things. We’ve never done this before,'” his wife said.

After that, for two months he was offline. He reappeared briefly to explain that they were forced to fight in the war. Russian commanders “told him that if he did not leave, they would arrest him, shoot him and stop providing him with food,” she said.

Village families confronted the recruiting agent, demanding to know why their loved ones were being dragged into war. The agent responded dismissively, saying this was standard procedure in Russia, insisting that even money launderers had to undergo similar training.

Hussein left a final audio note for his wife: “Please pray for me. »