By Dotun Olayemi

He had worn Nigeria’s uniform once already. Ayebusiwa Olabode Victor, a 34-year-old former navy personnel from Ilutitun in Ondo State, had done his service, come home, and gone looking for the next chapter of an ordinary life.

What found him instead was a recruiter’s promise: a security job in Russia, decent pay, papers processed, nothing to worry about.

He signed the contract in late February 2026, a week after Nigeria’s Foreign Ministry had quietly warned citizens against exactly this kind of enlistment. By May, Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence had confirmed what his family would learn not from the Federal Government of Nigeria, nor from any Nigerian embassy, but from a foreign bulletin. He was dead, killed in fighting near Hrafske in the Kharkiv region.

The bulletin that carried his name belongs to a wider effort Kyiv set up specifically to break the pipeline that killed him. On May 25, 2026, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched stop russian recruiters, a clearing house built to document and publicise the predatory recruitment practices of the Russian Ministry of Defence, to expose the recruiters and the networks that feed them, and, by that exposure, to save the lives of the foreign nationals still being funnelled toward the front.

The site draws on independent investigations, casualty data, victim testimony and media coverage compiled by Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War working alongside the Foreign Ministry. On June 29, 2026, it published the names of 485 African nationals recruited into the Russian armed forces and confirmed dead. Victor’s name sits inside that list.

He is one name in a ledger that keeps growing. Ukrainian authorities and the Coordination Headquarters say 215 Nigerians have signed contracts with Russia’s Ministry of Defence, and at least 25 are now dead or missing. That places Nigeria fifth among African nations by confirmed deaths, behind Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and South Africa, in a continental toll that has passed 485. Some of the dead were declared, then found alive in Ukrainian prisoner camps, a confusion that says as much about the chaos these men were fed into as it does about anyone’s record-keeping.

The pattern is depressingly consistent. Young Nigerians, some armed only with student or work visas, arrive in Russia expecting factory floors or driving jobs, and within weeks find themselves handed rifles after training that can run as short as three weeks. Survivors describe being used as expendable infantry, sent ahead of regular units to draw fire or trip mines, with a frontline life expectancy measured in hours, not months. “You escape, or you die,” one African survivor put it. That is not a metaphor. That is the operating instruction.

Three more Nigerian names belong in this account, not among the dead but among the missing in the ordinary sense: men Ukraine is holding as prisoners of war, whose details stoprussianrecruiters.org has also made public. Matthew Sunday Bankole, 37, has been detained since November 2025. Adisa Ridwan Balogun, 33, has been held since December 2025. And Kehinde Oluwagbemileke Adisa, 30, has been in Ukrainian custody since June 2025; he had travelled to Russia to study population and development, and only later signed a military contract that put him on the front rather than in a classroom. Their cases, taken together with Victor’s death, sketch the same trajectory from three different starting points: a veteran looking for security work, a student who was redirected mid-course, and men whose paths into a Russian trench are still not fully public.

In July 2026, former Nigerian Senator Shehu Sani added his own voice to the warnings already circulating, cautioning Nigerians against enlisting in the Russian armed forces and urging citizens not to let themselves be turned into mercenaries.

What should trouble Nigerians most is not simply that this is happening, but how little the state has done about it. Zimbabwe has arrested and charged nine people, including Russian nationals, in six separate cases since 30 March. Two of those charged are Russian citizens, identified as Sofia Leonova and Leonid Koftov. The Zimbabwean nationals implicated are alleged to have worked hand in hand with Russian handlers; Oscar Sifelani Mtshiya, 48, is believed to have trafficked five Zimbabweans to Russia alongside four unidentified Russian collaborators; Edward Kachingwe allegedly worked with a Russian national known only as “Roman” to move Zimbabweans through South Africa; Resnath Chingombe is accused of colluding with a Russian handler going by “Curious”; and four more Zimbabweans arrested in March 2026 are alleged to have worked with a Russian contact identified only as “Ivan”.

Kenya, for its part, has repatriated 28 of its citizens since December, even as it wrestles publicly with allegations that a sitting cabinet minister, Labour Minister and former Foreign Affairs Minister Alfred Mutua, had close personal and political ties to the very work-placement scheme, one that sent more than 400,000 Kenyan nationals abroad, that is now accused of funnelling citizens toward Russian recruiters. One of the men photographed with Mutua in June 2025, celebrating what he called a “life-changing opportunity” in a food-packing factory abroad, was Erastus Mundia Muyela, a 38-year-old Kenyan believed to have died fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Sources allege President Ruto has known of Mutua’s involvement for some time.

Mutua denies it, and says he has deregistered 23 recruitment agencies over suspicious practices.

Nigeria has issued one vaguely worded advisory that never names Russia, and nothing else. No arrests of recruiters. No repatriation mission for Bankole, Adisa or Balogun. No compensation for grieving families like Victor’s. No public inquiry.

There is a genuine legal knot here, since Nigerian law treats enlistment in a foreign force as a crime carrying up to life imprisonment, and any returning survivor could face prosecution rather than sympathy. It is worth sitting with why that knot exists at all.

The statute was written for a different kind of man: the trained mercenary who sells his gun to the highest bidder with his eyes open. It was not written for a jobless graduate handed a Russian work visa and told to sign paperwork in a language he could not read, only to be marched to a trench three weeks later. It was not written for a student like Adisa, who went for population and development and came back, if he comes back, a prisoner of war.

Treating both men as the same offender is not the rule of law being applied evenly. It is the rule of law being applied lazily.

International practice offers a way through, if Nigeria cared to look. Ukraine itself has chosen to hold captured Nigerians like Bankole, Adisa and Balogun as prisoners of war rather than execute them as unlawful combatants, a courtesy the Geneva Conventions do not strictly compel it to extend to mercenaries. Kenya and Zimbabwe, for all their own shortcomings, have started to draw the same line Nigeria refuses to draw.

That a man deceived by a trafficking network is a victim first, and a case study in state failure second, before he is ever a criminal. Nigeria’s own anti-trafficking statutes already recognise this distinction for women moved into forced labour and prostitution abroad. There is no principled reason the same logic should stop at the barracks door simply because the deception ended in a rifle rather than a brothel.

None of this requires Nigeria to grant blanket amnesty to every man who signed a Russian contract, nor should it. Some recruits may well have known precisely what they were walking into. But that distinction, between the deceived and the willing, between the trafficked and the mercenary, can only be drawn through investigation, hearings, and a functioning repatriation pipeline. It cannot be drawn from Nigeria’s current position of studied silence, which resolves nothing and simply lets every family, Victor’s, Bankole’s, Adisa’s, Balogun’s, bury their dead or wait for their POWs without ever finding out which category their son belonged to. A nation does not resolve a legal knot by pretending it does not exist.

It resolves it by bringing its citizens home, asking who lured them there, and naming the recruiters still operating, quite possibly, still within Nigerian borders, currently, right now. Silence is not neutrality. It is a second abandonment.

Dotun Olayemi is a social commentator, he writes from Lagos and can be reached through [email protected]