The last time Norma saw her son was in late January, when she dropped him off at an airport in Peru’s capital, Lima. He told her he found a job as a cook for the Russian army advertised on social media, assuring her he’d be far from the war in Ukraine, make good money and even have a shot at obtaining Russian citizenship.
Norma was instantly suspicious. Her 31-year-old son had never left Peru before and had never even held a weapon. (CNN is not publishing Norma’s full name or that of her son to protect both from retaliation.)
“I wanted to lock him in the house, but he had made up his mind already,” Norma told CNN. She considered even calling the police. “He told me ‘Mom, please, understand, I am just going as a cook.’ But a mother’s heart knows, if not I wouldn’t have felt so anxious.”
When she dropped him off at the airport, Norma saw there were others waiting to fly to Russia, too. She tried questioning them, but they refused to speak with her.
“My son asked me not to embarrass him, that I had to believe in him, that he was just going to work as a cook,” she said. “He left me heartbroken. Something told me that there was something wrong. I said goodbye, and that was the last time I saw him.”
Her instincts were right. Soon, Norma received videos from her son that showed the true nature of the job. He had joined the ranks of hundreds of Peruvian men allegedly lured into the Russian military by local recruiters and social media ads with promises of lucrative employment in Russia, only to find themselves fighting on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.
Shortly after Norma’s son joined, he sent his mother images of himself in battle gear, digging trenches and building pinewood bunkers with other foreign fighters in a Ukrainian forest, videos she shared with CNN. On the sporadic calls Norma had with her son and video messages he sent, she could hear drones exploding in the background – which he assured her were far away.
The videos soon trickled to a stop by early April, when Norma’s son said he was being “punished” by a commander for misbehavior.
“I told him ‘That’s a lie, you are going to fight on the front lines,’” she recalled. “He told me to calm down. And since that day I haven’t heard from him again.”
“I have this light of hope that he is somewhere, hiding in a trench, but I really don’t know.”
As Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on, the Russian military has gone to significant lengths to pad its ranks, including by recruiting foreign fighters from developing countries with promises of high salaries and bonuses.
In February, CNN reported that numerous men from African countries had been pressed into military service in Russia after being offered high-paying civilian jobs as drivers or security guards. A dozen men who spoke with CNN said that soon after arriving in Russia, they were forced to sign Russian-language contracts, given minimal training and sent into combat.
Several countries have raised an outcry over Russian recruitment. Kenya’s foreign minister flew to Moscow in March to demand that Russia stop recruiting Kenyans, describing the pipeline bringing Kenyan citizens to Russia as a human trafficking ring. Russia’s embassy in Nairobi called the allegations “dangerous and misleading” in a statement to Deutsche Welle.
After thousands of Nepalese citizens volunteered to fight for Russia, Nepal banned any travel to Ukraine or Russia for work.
The stories from Peruvian recruits and their families are similar. CNN spoke to twelve families that have been protesting for weeks outside of the Russian embassy in Lima and the Peruvian Foreign Affairs Ministry, waiting for answers on their relatives’ whereabouts.
Many of the men are from impoverished backgrounds and know little of what might await them in Russia.
Pedro Bravo, director of Peruvian Communities Abroad at Peru’s Foreign Ministry, told CNN that many recruits “have limited resources and are in dire need” of funds. “They don’t have a very clear understanding of the international reality,” Bravo said. “It’s much easier to deceive them.”
Rosa, a mother of three who asked CNN to not use her surname, said her 48-year-old husband travelled to Russia with several other Peruvian men, hoping to obtain jobs as security guards. He had worked as a prison guard in Lima, but Rosa said her husband had no military experience before signing up through a local recruiter in Peru.
CNN saw and reviewed WhatsApp messages between Rosa’s husband and a Spanish-speaking recruiter, nicknamed “Vizio.” The messages show that he agreed to “enlist in the army of the Russian Federation” for a one-year contract. The recruiter, who declined to be interviewed and refused to give CNN his real name when we reached out to him, told Rosa’s husband he’d have health and life insurance and would be repatriated to Peru if he became injured.
Rosa insists that her husband was unaware he would be sent to war.
“They never told him that he was going to go to war, that he was going to have to sacrifice his life, he was not going to get paid. He wouldn’t have gone there,” she told CNN in a phone interview.
After traveling to Russia, Rosa’s husband’s messages home sounded reassuring. But soon they became fragmented, and he often deleted messages moments after sending them.
“He told me: ‘I think they’ve brought us to war. This is hell,’” Rosa said. Other messages described starvation, brutal military drills, constant drone attacks and recruits being punished for not understanding Russian commands.
On March 26, he told Rosa he was being moved again and ordered to collect his weapons and belongings. “He told me: ‘I love you all so much. You will always be in my heart,’” Rosa remembered.
She hasn’t received a message from him since. Several of his fellow troops have told Rosa that he died in a drone strike, but she remains convinced that he is still alive. “They were taken there as cannon fodder, as if their lives were worth nothing,” Rosa said, weeping. “I have three children who cry day and night for their father.”
CNN has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment.
The issue has attracted government attention, with Peru’s public prosecutor’s office announcing last month that the government is investigating Russian recruitment, which it described as “human trafficking.”
Percy Salinas, an attorney representing some recruits’ families, gave CNN a copy of a prosecutorial order that describes the scope of the judiciary’s case.
Authorities are investigating 36 complaints from Peruvian citizens who say that their relatives or friends were deceived “via false job offers abroad — specifically in the Russian Federation — with the purpose of transporting them out of the country and subjecting them to…forced participation in an armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine,” according to the order.
The public prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the case when reached by CNN.
Bravo, from the foreign ministry, told CNN that the Peruvian government has made at least 247 separate requests to Moscow for information on Peruvians in the Russian military and demanded “the immediate, safe return of our fellow nationals to their home country, given that they departed without the proper authorization.”
Russia has said that it “deeply respects the decision of foreign citizens to participate in the defense of (Russian) sovereignty and security.”
“The Embassy reaffirms its ongoing readiness to take all necessary measures to obtain information as quickly as possible based on formally submitted requests,” the Russian Embassy in Lima said in an April statement regarding the “concerns of Peruvian families.”
Salinas, a lawyer representing the families of recruits, estimates that there are at least 800 Peruvians fighting for Russia right now, many of whom signed up on the promise of high salaries.
“The definitive reason of why many families made the decision, and the men travelled to Russia, was an economic reason,” Salinas told CNN. “$20,000 bonus once you signed the contract and very flashy salaries of $3,000 or $4,000.”
Most never receive the money promised, the lawyer said. Numerous family members told CNN that their relatives in the Russian army were unable to wire money to them even after they’d started earning a paycheck.
Salinas admitted that there is an element of “personal responsibility” for the men who’ve signed army contracts, but insisted that most Peruvians fighting for Russia were “lured by deception.”
“This falls under the category of human trafficking, and this is a human rights issue,” Salinas said. “Because Peruvians were lured here under false pretenses to perform work, and this could eventually lead to their death.”
One Peruvian soldier currently in Russian-occupied Ukraine told a similar story to CNN.
“I made the decision to come here because of the job they were offering; it was better pay than what you make in Peru, and they told me I was going to work as a security guard in Moscow,” said Guillermo, a 28-year-old Peruvian army veteran from Lima. CNN has changed his name to protect him from retaliation. “I’ve been enlisted for three and a half months, and I honestly want to go back to Peru.”
Guillermo told CNN that he and a friend were recruited by Pocho Wilson Pinto Peña, a reserve officer in the Peruvian military. Upon reaching Russia, Guillermo said his new superiors confiscated his phone and “practically forced” him to sign a contract in Russian that he was not allowed to translate.
CNN reviewed a copy of the contract, as well as several others supplied by recruits’ families. All were standard, one-year Russian military contracts like those signed by foreign recruits from other countries. (Pinto’s name does not appear on any of the contracts CNN reviewed.)
Pinto told CNN he had not recruited Peruvian men for Russia’s war but merely given out a telephone number for a separate Peruvian recruiter in Russia, whom he refused to name. He said that the men who joined up knew exactly where they were going – or should have.
The recruiter “told me he just needed staff, not for what exactly,” Pinto said. “But the country is at war, so logically, as a military man, I would know where they are taking me.”
Pinto said he had warned the men he connected with the recruiter that they may be sent to the front lines and given them advice, such as “if there’s a drone coming, you should duck.”
“It makes me very sad that they were maybe lied to by some other people,” Pinto added. He said that he had even escorted one distraught family to the Russian embassy in Lima to inquire about their kin. Pinto is aware of the prosecutorial inquiry into recruitment in Peru, which mentions a recruiter named “Pocho,” and considers its allegation of human trafficking “absurd.”
“I am not involved in any human trafficking, I’m an honest man,” Pinto said. “I’m crystal clear and honest, I’ve never been involved in anything.”
From occupied Ukraine, Guillermo told CNN that his life is bleak. The friend he’d joined up with was killed in combat the month before.
“I’m completely abandoned,” Guillermo said. “I have no food, no medicine, I was injured in a drone attack, and my kneecap is broken.”
“My daily routine is carrying boxes of cold food or other types of boxes,” he continued. “I do all of this with the help of a cane. When I do that kind of work at night, I can’t sleep because my knee swells up too much and hurts. All I want is to go home.”
Guillermo said that he had tried to get help from the Peruvian embassy, but they told him “they couldn’t help” – he’d signed a contract.
Bravo, the diaspora director at the foreign ministry, told CNN that the Peruvian government’s hands are tied. “What do I do when the person claiming to have a knee injury is on the front lines? I can’t go to the front lines to get him out,” Bravo said. “That possibility simply doesn’t exist.”
Once the Peruvian soldiers sign their contracts, Bravo added, “the situation becomes very difficult when it comes to reaching them.”
Guillermo knows all of this. He is painfully aware that his situation seems hopeless. “I’ll leave here either dead in the war or killed,” Guillermo said. “I have no way out.”
