Ghana says 55 citizens killed after being lured to fight for Russia

Ghana’s foreign minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa says at least 55 Ghanaians have been killed after being “lured” into Russia’s war in Ukraine, with 272 believed to have been drawn into the conflict since 2022. Speaking after a visit to Kyiv, he said two Ghanaians are now prisoners of war, and pledged a crackdown on “dark web illegal recruitment schemes” operating in Ghana, according to The Guardian.

The numbers fit a pattern that has been surfacing across Africa: recruitment into Russia’s armed forces marketed not as enlistment but as mobility—jobs, visas, and sometimes the promise of citizenship. Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said at the same briefing that more than 1,780 Africans from 36 countries were fighting in the Russian army. The offer is simple: cash and paperwork up front, risk and death later. The chain is harder to see because it is built like a labour market—brokers, facilitators, document fixers, and travel routes—rather than a military pipeline.

For the intermediaries, the product is not ideology but optionality. A young man without stable income can be sold a story of construction work, security jobs, or “contract” employment that becomes frontline service once he is inside Russia’s system. The broker collects a fee; the recruiter offloads liability; the employer becomes the army. Families and home governments pay the downstream costs—missing sons, consular cases, and the slow work of tracing identities across borders.

The prisoner-of-war angle adds another layer of leverage. Once a citizen is captured, the problem shifts from prevention to bargaining: who speaks for the detainee, what can be traded, and how much political capital a government is willing to spend to retrieve someone who left through informal channels. Countries that maintain economic and diplomatic ties with Russia—Ghana among them—also face a delicate calculation: public outrage at “human shields for others,” as Ablakwa put it, versus the cost of confronting a partner.

The Guardian notes similar cases in South Africa, where the government this week said two citizens died on the front lines, and where police are investigating alleged recruitment activity linked to Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former president Jacob Zuma. In Kenya, a previous intelligence report cited more than 1,000 recruits, with officials discussing talks in Moscow.

Ablakwa’s statement promised public education and enforcement against recruitment networks. But the market he is describing is fueled by wage gaps and by the fact that the most dangerous work is the easiest to outsource.

Ghana is now counting its dead and its prisoners. The recruiters are counting how many more departures they can arrange before anyone closes the route.