On December 13, 2023, a group of seven Indian men gathered at a restaurant in the southeastern city of Chennai. Strangers to one another, the men drank chai and shared biryani, bonding over stories of their home provinces, from the Himalayan valleys of Kashmir to the coastal plains of Kerala. 

Just days earlier, the men had flown to Chennai from across the country. Instructed to pack lightly, some carried little more than a few changes of clothes along with shiny new passports, freshly stamped with Russian tourist visas. They were told to wait in Chennai for further information. 

Over the coming days, the men became inseparable. “We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together,” explained Mohammed Sarfaraz, who was part of the group. The 28-year-old restaurant worker had traveled from his native Kolkata. “We were all very nervous,” he said. 

Joining Sarfaraz was Azad Yusuf Kumar, a 31-year-old engineering graduate from Kashmir, and Syed Ilyas Hussaini and Mohammed Samir Ahmed, two 24-year-olds from Karnataka who both left catering jobs at Dubai airport to move to Russia. Also among the men was 27-year-old Surinder Paul from Jammu, Parveen Lamar from Darjeeling, and Mohammed Tahir, a 24-year-old from Gujarat.   

As agents picked over the final details of their departure, the group were introduced to other men who would also be making the same journey: Hemil Mangukiya, a 23-year-old embroiderer from Gujarat, and Mohammed Sufiyan, a 24-year-old from Telangana. 

The men exchanged numbers and made promises to one another. “Since we were going together, and had spent time together, we said that when we go, we will stick together,” Sarfaraz explained in Hindi during hours of voice calls. 

But soon after, the men were divided into smaller groups and given different departure dates. Over the course of eight days the men all left for Moscow. First, Mangukiya and Sufiyan left with another group of men. Next, Kumar, Hussaini, Samir Ahmed, and Surinder Paul flew via Bahrain to the Russian capital. And on December 22, Sarfaraz, Tahir and Lamar made the journey. 

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Despite their clashing languages and customs, the men had all been lured to Russia by similar promises; well-paid work abroad and the possibility of securing foreign citizenship. The offer was attractive in India, where an acute labor crisis had left over half the working age population out of official employment.

Until June 2023, Sarfaraz worked seven days a week in the kitchens of a luxury five-star hotel in Kolkata, serving food to international business people passing through the city. The days were long and stressful, he said, and at just 18,000 rupees (around $200) a month, the wage was barely enough to support himself and his father, who required costly gangrene treatment.

Sarfaraz’s problems only mounted when a change in management at the hotel cost him his job. Before long, he found himself scouring the internet in search of work. In September, he came across the page of a YouTuber named “Baba Vlogs,” run by an Indian man based in Dubai named Faisal Khan. On his channel, Khan was offering well-paid work across the globe for even low-skilled Indians.

In one now deleted video, Khan advertised a “security helper role”’ in the Russian Army. In the video, Khan boasts men could earn up to 200,000 rubles a month working in logistics way behind the frontlines. “The [Russian] government feels that all those helping in these times need to be given benefits. This [job] will give you permanent residency,” said Khan as he wandered the streets of St. Petersburg in a separate video uploaded in September.

“Within five minutes, I contacted him,” Sarfaraz recalled. Two months later, he had emptied out his savings to pay for a visa and cover letter and scrape together just some of the 100,000-rupee commission Khan requested on top. “The rest he said I could pay in installments once I received my first pay check,” he said.   

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Late at night on December 22, Sarfaraz, Tahir, and Lamar were quietly led into Chennai airport by two close confidantes of Khan. The men, one a goateed man called Michael and the other who went unnamed, handed them their flight tickets and insurance, and gave them strict instructions to say they were traveling for tourism purposes only. 

The men were assured that once they got to Russia, their visas would be changed to work visas, but Khan and his team had been coy about the details of this, the men told The Diplomat. 

“We didn’t know anything. I was just happy that I was going to Russia,” said Mohammed Tahir in a phone interview from his native Gujarat in January 2024. “When we passed through immigration and headed toward the flight, I was excited. It was my first time traveling on a plane.”

Having only recently turned 24, Tahir was one of the younger men that traveled from Chennai to Moscow in December. A carpenter from Ahmedabad, Tahir recalled that when he first told his parents he would be closing his carpentry shop and going to work for the Russian Army, they begged him not to leave. “But after I mentioned it was good money and we would be financially stable, they were convinced,” he said. 

In comparison to the other groups before them who had experienced issues at immigration both in Chennai and in Moscow, Sarfaraz, Tahir, and Lamar breezed through. As they nervously edged closer to the front of the queue at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport after a days-long journey, they recited the instructions they had been given by Khan’s men.

“We said that we were tourists and had come to visit Russia for the Christmas period,” Tahir said. Sarfaraz was surprised to find that the border officer already had some of their details. “They asked us to sign some documents, and then said ‘welcome to Russia,’” he said.

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Raja Pathan and his group wait at a Moscow airport. Photo courtesy of Raja Pathan.

By the winter of 2023, Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive to take back lost territory in the country’s south and east was stalling. Russian forces, anticipating the offensive, thwarted Kyiv’s efforts by establishing dense layers of fortifications along the front, digging intricate networks of trenches, tunnels, and anti-tank bunkers, and laying down thousands of land mines. 

In the rear of those defensive lines was Raja Pathan, a 26-year-old Indian from the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, a modern city that serves as the regional capital to both Haryana and the neighboring state of Punjab.  

Unlike the other groups of Indian men that began arriving to Russia in late 2023, Pathan had come to Moscow almost a year earlier, on January 2, 2023, to study e-commerce at a Moscow University, he said in a phone interview. Pathan said he traveled to Moscow on a student visa arranged by an agent, and hoped to use his future degree to facilitate business between India and Russia.

But weeks after arriving in Russia, Pathan learned the agent had tricked him and there was no university place. Within months, he signed a contract with the Russian Army, claiming to have been enticed by the military advertisement posters that are ubiquitous along Moscow’s streets. “I had to do a general exam on what I thought about Russia and the........

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