Recently, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha drew attention to a stark and unsettling fact. Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has now lasted longer than the bloodiest part of World War 2 which involved two monstrous dictatorships of the time, Germany’s Adolf Hitler and the USSR’s Josef Stalin in the meat grinder of 1941–1945.
Now, same as in the bloodiest war of the 20th century, it’s more than 1,400 days since Russia’s Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked attack on peaceful Ukraine.
Over this time, Russia has failed to achieve a single strategic objective of its aggression. Ukraine has not been broken. Ukrainian society has not collapsed. International support has endured. Instead, Russia itself has suffered enormous losses, with more than a million killed and wounded and vast destruction of its own military capacity.
It is precisely at this stage of a war that its deepest logic becomes visible. As Russia fails to deliver results and avoids accountability both at home and on the battlefield, it pushes the human cost of its war outward – recruiting and consuming the lives of foreigners.
In recent months, similar stories have emerged across several African countries. While Kenya has drawn particular attention to this issue, reports from other parts of the continent point to the same pattern – false promises of civilian jobs resulting in war trauma and death.
Those who survive speak of jobs promised and contracts misrepresented; arriving on tourist visas, having documents confiscated, being pressured into signing papers they could not comprehend, and are sent directly into combat.
Others travelled knowingly, believing the risk was calculated and predictable. Those who are lucky to return are not bringing home the money they were promised, but injuries, trauma, and permanent damage to their health.
What we are witnessing is not an anomaly, but an adaptation by a state unwilling to accept failure.
Now losing around 1.3 million in the meat grinder against a peaceful country that never threatened it, Russia is fighting a war not until the last Russian dies, but until the last poor and downtrodden from around the globe does.
Africa is not being drawn into this war out of partnership or solidarity. It is being pulled in because of a purely cynical, colonial attitude. According to our data, around 1500 Africans were lured or tricked into this war by Russian recruiters. Lives of Africans are considered by the aggressor to be expendable: cheap and easier to replace. This is how this war of aggression has slowly turned into a war of consumption – publicly framed as opportunity and cooperation, while driven by deception.
The strategic exhaustion explains Russia’s increasing reliance on terror rather than military success. Unable to secure decisive gains on the front lines, Moscow has turned to the daily bombardment of Ukrainian cities, using Shahed-type drones and ballistic missiles not to change the course of the war, but to compensate for failure on the battlefield.
During 2025 alone, Russia launched more than 1,950 missiles and over 54,600 Shahed-type and other drones at targets across Ukraine. Many of these were large, coordinated strikes deliberately directed at civilian objects – residential buildings, hospitals, schools, as well as energy and heating infrastructure. These attacks did not alter the balance on the battlefield. Instead, they demonstrated a method of warfare that avoids direct confrontation with opposing forces and relies on inflicting harm on civilians – not to win battles, but to destroy an independent nation, at enormous financial cost and with calculated human suffering.
According to United Nations data, 2025 became the deadliest year for Ukrainian civilians since the start of the full-scale invasion. At least 2,514 civilians were killed and more than 12,100 were injured, representing a 31% increase compared to 2024 and a 70% increase compared to 2023. Crucially, 97% of these casualties occurred in areas under Ukrainian government control, far from active front lines.
In this version of the Russian-style warfare, there’s always someone else who must suffer: peaceful dwellers of Ukrainian cities, foreigners trapped in this war, poor and unprotected. Putin himself and his clique are never seen on the battlefield. They are always busy orchestrating someone else’s death.
In today’s globalised world, even the most distant wars no longer remain remote. They reach families who lose sons to a conflict that was never theirs; families who discover that geography and distance no longer provide safety from decisions made elsewhere.
This war shows how, in an interconnected world, even conflicts fought far away begin to matter once the human cost is pushed beyond the battlefield through deception. What allows this to continue is not the absence of consequences, but the ease with which they are offloaded onto others. The Kremlin ignores any calls to take responsibility, blaming its deliberate strategy on the rogue players or illicit recruiters.
In the meantime, it is clear to everyone: it is Russia’s war machine itself that offers Africans a ticket to prosperity, in fact offering a new form of slavery: without hope, without a chance of a new life, but with a guaranteed passage to an unmarked grave or trauma beyond repair.
The writer is the Ambassador of Ukraine to Kenya
