Nobody knows for certain how many South Africans are fighting and dying on the front lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) said it was only aware of “limited cases of South African nationals who have been lured to travel to the Russian Federation under false pretences to be trained as bodyguards”.
But leaked Russian army records list 32 South African nationals among hundreds of African men recruited or tricked into Russian armed forces and mercenary units as cannon fodder for Ukrainian drones.
Two South Africans, both severely wounded in Ukraine, told News24 that, unlike the 17 South Africans allegedly lured into the Russian military with promises of bodyguard training by Jacob Zuma’s daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, they had applied online for truck-driving jobs in Poland only to become the targets of a Russian recruitment scam.
One of the men’s cousins also responded to the advert. He was killed within days of being sent into battle.
The wounded men, referred to here with the pseudonyms “Absalom” and “Bongani”, said they and their families have been pleading for help from the South African Embassy and the government for weeks.
On Thursday night, Bongani was told by hospital administrators that he was being discharged to a military unit, even though his wound had not healed and he remained on crutches.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” he said in a late-night text message.
“They said the commander will come and pick me up. They said I have 15 days of sick leave, not to do combat, but the commanders don’t follow that. If they take me, I am dead.”
The men form part of a much larger continental pattern. A report published last month by the Swiss-based open-source investigations non-profit, INPACT, documented 1 417 African nationals from 35 countries who signed contracts with the Russian army between January 2023 and September 2025. Of those, 316 are confirmed dead.
‘Of our group of 10, seven are dead’
Absalom and Bongani said they were contacted by a woman based in Russia named “Angelina”, who discussed their licences and work experience over weeks of WhatsApp contact.
She provided them with flight tickets. Both flew from OR Tambo International Airport to Doha and then on to Moscow on Qatar Airways in mid-December. Both said Angelina cut off all contact the moment they checked in at OR Tambo.
At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, two men were waiting for them. Absalom and Bongani were presented with documents written in Russian and told to sign them. When they were told the contracts were for the Russian military, they protested that they had come to work as truck drivers. The recruiters were dismissive, saying there had been a “misunderstanding”. Their South African SIM cards and passports were confiscated. There was, they were told, no going back.
Training lasted just two weeks. Bongani found himself alongside a group of 10 black men, including Nigerian and Zimbabwean citizens. Seven of them are now dead. All were killed in combat between 29 December and 10 March, when News24 first spoke to him.
Bongani’s cousin, Mandla Ncube, was also killed in January, possibly the third South African passport holder to die in the conflict. Born in Zimbabwe, Ncube had lived in South Africa for more than 20 years. There are conflicting reports about his death. Some accounts suggest he was killed in a drone strike, others in a landmine explosion. His body has not been recovered. His family was told he lay where he fell for three days because drones would target anyone who tried to retrieve his remains.
The INPACT report found that the average service duration for an African recruit before death was six months. Fifty-one of the 316 confirmed dead survived less than a month.
Both men said they feared being discharged from the hospital above all else, because discharge meant redeployment and almost certain death.
“Ukrainian soldiers are drones,” Absalom said. “I’ve never seen a Ukrainian on the battlefield, only drones and the dead bodies of Russian soldiers.”
Three drones: Absalom’s story
Absalom was sent to the front the same day his training ended. He was handed a 90-litre pack and made to carry equipment that other soldiers refused to carry themselves. “I was the only black man there. They treated me badly because of it. They’re all racists.”
On or around 2 January, Absalom was hit in three successive drone attacks during a single engagement. The first shattered his arm. He tried to apply a tourniquet with his one working hand and ran for cover in a nearby river. The second drone followed him, but missed when he threw himself flat on the riverbank. The third struck as he picked himself up and ran. Shrapnel tore into his lower back and stomach. Doctors later told him one fragment could not be removed because of the blood loss it would cause. It remains inside him.
Unable to walk, Absalom dragged himself to an abandoned Ukrainian trench using his one functioning arm. He drifted in and out of consciousness. He remembers snow covering his head. Two Russian soldiers eventually pulled him from the trench and injected him with what he believes was adrenaline.
Then one of the soldiers complained that he was too heavy to carry. He cocked his gun. “He wanted to finish me,” Absalom said.
“I couldn’t care at that point. I said: ‘If you want to kill me, go ahead, just do it’.” A second soldier intervened: “Don’t kill him. Remember, he has children.”
It was a tiny moment of humanity amid the slaughter.
The threat to execute a wounded combatant who is hors de combat – unable to fight and no longer participating in hostilities – constitutes a potential war crime under the Geneva Convention.
The Russians made Absalom walk, despite his wounds. He walked and fell, walked and fell, for three kilometres until they reached the Russian command post. Two months after his arm was broken, he has yet to receive any surgical treatment. “Since I came here, they never do anything for my arm,” he said. “They’re just treating us like animals.”
Bongani: ‘We are not humans to them’
Bongani ran a small tourism and transport business in Gauteng. When it faltered, he began applying for truck-driving positions abroad. Like Absalom, he was contacted by Angelina, the Russian recruiter, in November after he had applied for a position in Poland.
In January, he was deployed to the front. He was assigned to collect and bag the mangled, charred corpses of Russian soldiers killed on the battlefield in drone attacks. It was “traumatic beyond description”, he said.
The Russians in his unit kept their distance from him and used him for tasks they considered beneath them or too dangerous to undertake.
We are not humans to them. We are just easy targets, and to them, killing us or seeing us die is just fun.
He was wounded when an FPV drone struck during the stretcher evacuation of a Russian soldier. The man they were carrying was killed. Shrapnel hit Bongani in the upper right thigh; an Iranian he had befriended was fatally wounded. “I could hear him cry out, but I was lying there in pain, and there was nothing I could do to help him.”
‘Disposable’: Racism on the front line
The deep-seated racism described by Absalom and Bongani is not unique to their experience. It is a pattern documented across the treatment of African recruits in Russia’s war.
In January 2026, a video emerged showing a terrified Kenyan man, Francis Ndung’u Ndarua, in uniform with a landmine strapped to his chest. A Russian soldier, using racist slurs, pushed him at gunpoint to the entrance of a bunker and told him he would be used as a “can opener” – effectively a suicide bomber – to breach enemy positions. He has not been heard from since.
In a separate video, a Russian soldier filmed a group of African fighters singing and referred to them in Russian as “disposables”, adding: “They’ll be singing a different tune once they’re at the front.”
‘They will send me back to the frontlines and get me killed’
The men have been in contact with the South African Embassy in Moscow. Both received the same instruction: obtain your passport and a letter of release from your commander. But that is an impossibility. Bongani’s commander told him he could have his passport back only after surviving a year of combat. Absalom, from his hospital bed, asked: “I am in the hospital. How am I supposed to go to my commander from hospital?”
Bongani’s last contact with the South African Embassy was on 7 March. Then on Thursday, 12 days later, and a week after News24 submitted questions about the case to the department, he received a call from an embassy official.
She told him “they don’t have any money”, but could assist with a “travel certificate” and booking flight tickets as long as he could raise the funds.
She said the military must release me with my passport so I can travel from Ukraine to Moscow. The military won’t do that, so how do I get to Moscow without travel documents?
Two hours after that call, the hospital informed Bongani that he was being discharged and sent back to his military unit.
Department spokesperson Chrispin Phiri said they could only provide “non-financial consular assistance to South African citizens abroad”.
In cases where South Africans have had their passports taken away from them, “the government, through appropriate diplomatic channels, will engage the country concerned”.
He did not directly address questions about the men, their predicament, or the department’s engagements with Russian authorities about them in his response, saying the South African government “is in regular contact with Russian counterparts”.
In a recent telecon with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Phiri said President Cyril Ramaphosa had raised “serious concerns regarding South African nationals on the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine war”.
Absalom finally received a WhatsApp from the embassy on Tuesday this week, stating that it had written a “note verbale requesting intervention from the Russian ministry”.
In a message to News24 on Thursday, Absalom said: “The doctor told me anytime they can discharge me… These people will send us to the frontline again. Please just help us!”
Added Bongani: “Since January, I have been calling the embassy for assistance. Now I’ve been discharged, even though I am still wounded. They (the Russian military) will definitely send me back to the frontlines and get me killed.”
This article was first published by News24 on 22 March 2026.