1/ The Russian authorities are recuiting thousands of immigrants to fight in Ukraine through a mixture of deceit, pressure and promises of accelerated Russian citizenship, according to the independent Russian outlets SOTA and Skat. ⬇️ 
2/ The Russian Army is currently advertising for recruits from Central Asian countries, SOTA reports. City buses in Moscow are carrying adverts in Uzbek promising that those who "enter military service under a contract" can "receive Russian citizenship in a simplified manner".
3/ As SOTA points out, though, many countries ban their citizens from fighting in foreign countries – a legacy of the war on terror. Uzbekistan punishes it with 5 years in jail, its neighbour Tajikistan with 20-year jail terms. Local imams have also preached against joining up.
4/ However, many migrants aren't getting a choice or are being tricked into signing up. Skat has published an interview with an employee of the Sakharovo migration centre just outside Moscow, who says migrants have been lured under false pretences since as early as March.
5/ Migrant recruitment was publicly announced in September by Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, who announced that the city government would establish a military recruitment facility at Sakharovo. But recruitment has reportedly been going on a lot longer than that.
6/ The Sakharovo employee says that from March, after migrants filled out their residency paperwork they were offered "six months of [military] service with a monetary allowance, gigantic by their standards, and then immediately receive a Russian passport."
7/ Foreigners are not legally permitted to serve in the Russian Army. However, the employee suggests "there are special units with migrants." They are taken to a room "where a man in uniform sits, not even a military commissar, but from some military school," who recruits them.
8/ "At first they were offered to go and fight on a voluntary basis, but apparently the demand for such an arrangement was low and did not suit the authorities. And after a while our workers were instructed to put this clause in place by default, without asking anyone."
9/ The attraction, says the employee, is that "for immigrants, this is good money, plus it sounds tempting to get a Russian passport without obstacles in just six months." Those who agree get a notation – "888" – put in their papers to signify their recruitment.
10/ The migrants are told they should not discuss their recruitment: "at the beginning of the registration they were, roughly speaking, zombified, offered [a contract], and then they warn that you should not communicate with other employees on this topic."
11/ According to the employee, huge numbers of migrants are being offered secret recruitment contracts. Each of the 50 staff in the relevant department has been told to offer contracts to at least 100 people a day – thus 5,000 daily.
12/ The figures have increased in recent months, alongside Russia's partial mobilisation. "There was a time, at the end of October, when every second migrant walked with such a [secret contract] marking, from an 18-year-old boy to an aged man."
13/ Some Sakharovo employees were not happy about their role in this effort, expressing moral concerns about the work they were doing.
14/ "I know people who absolutely did not want to do this, to be the first link in the cause of death of a man in this senseless war, but they were obliged under the pretext of fines and deprivation of bonuses."
15/ However, many other employees "say that the more [migrants] go to war, the less of ours will die ... the majority [of staff] support the policy aimed at the destruction of Ukraine, and agree with Putin." Most employees were ex-military or ex-law enforcement personnel.
16/ The employee notes that many of the staff "have long been broken by the system and moral and ethical issues are put below mercantile ones. Moreover, the majority comes there under patronage - there are very few people from the street [working] in the center."
17/ Employees at Sakharovo have even competed with each other to get the largest number of recruitments.
18/ "At one meeting a staff member was praised for having collected the biggest number of eights in a month and at the end of the meeting she was awarded an "Alyonka" chocolate bar. She was so touched that she even shed a few tears."
19/ The Russian authorities have also been carrying out forced recruitment of migrants who are present illegally or have problems with their papers. This has caused problems – in October, two forcibly recruited Tajiks carried out a mass shooting on a training range.
20/ It's not clear how the recruited migrants are being used – whether in their own battalions or to fill gaps in decimated Russian units, or whether in front-line combat roles or rear areas logistic-type roles. Quite possibly it's a combination of all of these.
21/ However, migrants from Central Asia have certainly previously been captured by the Ukrainians on the front line. It's likely that the Russian government is simply trying to get as many new bodies into the army as possible, no matter where they're from. /end
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