Vladimir Putin’s immigrant army Ethnic minorities are being forced onto the battlefield

After independence in 1991, post-Soviet Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Georgia had to be fought without troops from its neighbours. But since February 2022, Moscow has been seeking to bolster its ranks with Central Asian immigrants. Terrified migrants received povestki on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and many sought help from all but powerless local lawyers and NGOs. Media reports — and heavily publicised scandals back home in Central Asia — have drawn attention to the Russian army’s brutal press ganging of new arrivals and to numerous cases of workers tricked into enlisting.

And yet, foreign soldiers tend to cause less trouble politically. While the Kremlin’s mass mobilisation of its citizens in September 2022 was successful in terms of recruitment numbers, it sparked disquiet among privileged and hitherto “safe” residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Since then, efforts to recruit Central Asians have become more frequent and more violent. Any migrant who sets foot on Russian soil risks being hastily rounded up and packed off to the front in Ukraine, ready to join the ranks of the fallen in an early grave.

The irony is that Russia’s war is portrayed in propaganda as an ethnonationalist crusade to reunite Muscovites with their Ukrainian “brothers”. It is, according to the rhetoric, a war fought to save white Russians from the “epidemic” of Westernism — with all its connotations of queerness, blackness, and other “non-traditional” values — emanating from Ukraine. The heroes of the war feted on television and at official ceremonies are, almost to a man, white Russians. Meanwhile, ethnic minorities — Muslims recruited at home and abroad — bear the brunt of the worst fighting. Yet despite it all, Central Asian migrants keep coming to Russia. And, more bizarrely still, they keep choosing to enlist in the Russian army.

What might be driving one of the most downtrodden ethnic groups in the region to voluntarily risk their lives in Moscow’s war? The chance of earning a life-changing sum of money is the obvious motivation. Moscow promises volunteers more than $2,000 a month in wages. When the average salary in Kyrgyzstan is less than $400 a month, that offer might give any young Kyrgyz pause for thought — even if their country’s authorities officially forbid them to take up the offer and Moscow does not always pay out.

But, more than a short-term pay-out, Moscow promises to make good on the old immigrant dream. Over the past two years, the route to Russian citizenship — and long-term socioeconomic security, assuming the fighting in Ukraine can be navigated safely — has become easier and easier for volunteers. In its desperate hunt for bodies, the Kremlin has binned more and more rules preventing Central Asians from becoming citizens. Today, a volunteer has a path to a passport after just a few months spent in the Russian army: a simple quid pro quo that suits both parties, even if the power imbalance is self-evident. Moscow, the old imperial centre, is still a land of unrivalled economic opportunity in the region.

It’s impossible to say how effective these tactics have been in terms of raw numbers, as Moscow does not release official statistics about the size and composition of its army. However, the evidence suggests that plenty of Central Asians are, by force or choice, landing in the ranks of Putin’s army in Ukraine. Hundreds are dying, but still their compatriots keep coming, with 1.3 million arriving in the first quarter of 2023 and similar numbers since.

In this way, Moscow has established a new type of capitalist imperialism. In some ways, its hold over its regions resembles the old Soviet system, when citizen-comrades dreamed of coming to the imperial metropolis of Moscow to realise dreams of upward mobility in a rigid social hierarchy. But this old-fashioned relationship between the empire and its peripheries is married to a 21st century globalism. In the Soviet era, movement between and within nations was tightly controlled. Today, though, sovereignty is no boundary to a greater power siphoning off the human resources of a neighbour. This is taken to a new, brutal extent by Moscow’s military recruitment tactics, which turn Central Asians into mercenaries-cum-economic migrants. In Europe, such free movement is an opportunity for richer Western nations to draw on their Eastern neighbours for cheap labour; in Russia, it provides the manpower for a 20th century “meatgrinder”.

Ironically, Central Asia itself has become the recipient of an outflow of Russian migrants. Educated and wealthy young Russian exiles are setting up cafes, IT firms and other businesses in what were once the imperial peripheries of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where visas are easily available and Russian is still widely spoken. The Kremlin is getting a raw deal: in return for a flood of bodies to be sacrificed in war today, the best of its young generation are leaving and taking tomorrow’s economy with them.

However, a growing number of Central Asians are increasingly disgruntled with this untenable situation. As their governments vacillate over relations with the Kremlin, sections of society are buoyed by anti-Russian and national pride movements. Indeed, it’s likely that many of the young immigrants in Russia itself are only there for the money and would much rather be at home. In the years ahead, perhaps, the youngest Central Asian generation will follow in the footsteps of their Ukrainian peers and thoroughly reject not just Russian influence at home but the lure of the imperial metropolis as an immigration destination. Moscow cannot count on Central Asia as its recruit reservoir forever.

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Dr. Ian Garner is assistant professor of totalitarian studies at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw. His latest book is Z Generation: Russia’s Fascist Youth (Hurst).

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