Russia Broadens Its Efforts to Recruit Foreigners for the War in Ukraine

‍The Russian recruitment effort for the war in Ukraine has taken a new turn. Since this summer, the number of contract service announcements calling for foreigners to join the Russian army has increased more than sevenfold. OpenMinds found 19 thousands social media posts promoting military service and targeting this group.

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In January 2024, Vladimir Putin signed a decree, allowing foreigners and stateless individuals who enlist in the Russian army until the end of the Ukraine military operation to apply for Russian citizenship through a fast-track process. They do not need to pass exams in Russian language, history, or law, nor are they required to have lived in Russia for five years on a residence permit. 

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Since then, reports have emerged of people from all over the world – South and East Asia, the former USSR republics, Africa and Latin America – taking part in the war. To attract more recruits, a large-scale public campaign has been launched targeting foreign audiences.

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OpenMinds identified at least 132K military service promotion posts on the Russian social network VK since January 2022. Then we identified ads that targeted non-Russian citizens since early 2023. We found that, by mid-2025, one in three contract announcements was aimed at foreigners – a sharp increase from 2024, when such posts made up only about 7% of all advertisements.

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Most of these announcements are aimed at Russian-speaking audiences, as the promotion on VK is conducted in Russian. The campaign primarily targets citizens of former Soviet countries: the CIS is mentioned in 46% of posts, including Belarus (6%), Kazakhstan (6%), Uzbekistan (3%), Tajikistan (3%), and Kyrgyzstan (2%). 

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Other countries appear in 38% of cases, mostly in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In 16% of ads, no specific country is targeted. The most frequently targeted non-Russian-speaking countries are India, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Bangladesh. This indicates that the campaign is also aimed at countries without significant Russian-speaking minorities. Despite the distance and language barrier, such recruits have still been joining the Russian army.

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Analysis of Russian search engine statistics shows that the launched promotion is having some effect at least for the countries, where a portion of the population still speaks Russian. While interest in service among foreigners was minimal in the early years of the full-scale invasion, the share of Yandex queries from CIS countries for “contract service in the special military operation” increased tenfold in 2024 and continued to grow in 2025.

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These announcements promise foreigners not only social and financial benefits but also assistance with obtaining a Russian passport. Some explicitly invite CIS citizens and other foreigners even if they do not speak Russian or have expired documents. They also assure that recruits will not be sent to assault units and will be assigned to specific positions with lower risk to their lives. 

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Such new recruitment strategies, including the targeting of foreigners for front-line service, have coincided with rising Russian battlefield losses and the authorities’ efforts to align actual enlistment with their publicly reported recruitment figures. OpenMinds described this in more detail in our previous report.

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Methodology

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Using the VK API, we extracted public posts about contract military service from the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 through July 2025. The initial dataset was assembled using a predefined keyword list and then refined with additional terms. We further applied a large language model (OpenAI GPT-4o-mini) to classify and retain only posts explicitly promoting contract service, resulting in a dataset of approximately 132K publications. To identify posts mentioning foreigners, we also applied a predefined keyword list and used a large language model (Gemini 2.0 Flash). In total, this yielded around 19K VK posts from 2023 through September 2025.