Cubans attracted to the Russian army by their high salaries and passports – News

May 6, 2024 Vaseline stjohnson 0

Russia is likely to have been recruiting Cuban citizens to fight in its army in Ukraine, a BBC investigation has shown.

In September and October 2023, a pro-Ukrainian platform called InformNapalm leaked online the passport data of more than 200 Cubans who allegedly joined the Russian military.

The passport details were obtained, according to the site, by hacking the emails of a Russian military recruiting officer in Tula, south of Moscow.

A search on Facebook has shown that 31 of the names mentioned in the Ukrainian leak match accounts whose owners appear to be in Russia or linked to the Russian military.

Some, for example, have posted photographs of themselves wearing Russian military uniform, or in places that have street signs or Russian license plates. Others mention Russia as their current place of residence.

Many of those Facebook users began posting Russia-related content in the second half of 2023, indicating when they might have arrived in the country.

Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has suffered heavy losses on the battlefield. A BBC investigation confirmed the names of more than 50,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, but the real number is likely to be much higher. Ukraine’s own estimate puts the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded in the war at nearly 500,000.

Recruiting foreigners to replace some of the losses also helps the Kremlin avoid the risks posed by trying to mobilize Russians by force. When Russia declared a partial mobilization in 2022, hundreds of thousands of men left the country.

Bringing Cubans to Russia is relatively simple. The two countries have been allies since the Cold War, Cubans do not need a visa to travel to Russia and direct flights to Moscow facilitate the trip.

Meanwhile, lucrative military contracts offered by Russia attract Cuban men desperate to escape the island’s worsening U.S.-sanctioned economic crisis.

Leaked online documents and media reports suggest that Cuban men are being offered monthly payments in the region of $2,000 (£1,600) per month, a huge sum for Cuba, where the average monthly salary is less than $25 (£20 ).

The promise of Russian citizenship may also attract some Cubans.

Facebook Lucrative payments and Russian passports make enlistment attractive for CubansCubans are attracted by lucrative rewards and Russian passports. (This man’s face is blurred to protect his identity)

Since the start of its war against Ukraine, Moscow has been taking steps to make it significantly easier for foreigners to obtain Russian citizenship after spending time in the military, and the BBC has seen social media posts suggesting that some fighters Cubans received Russian passports in a matter of months. to register.

A Russian passport allows visa-free travel to 117 destinations, while Cuban passport holders are limited to 61. A local media outlet in the city of Ryazan, near Moscow, confirmed that Cubans are joining the Russian army. The Cubans wanted to “help our “Some of them would like to become Russian citizens in the future,” he reported. But it is difficult to find a reliable estimate of the number of Cubans who have joined the Russian ranks. Ukraine’s diplomatic envoy for Latin America and the Caribbean, Ruslan Spirin, put the figure at 400 in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

A Cuban officer in Russia, Lázaro González, told an exiled anti-government radio station that 90 Cubans were serving under his command.

According to him, they were likely to be deployed in already occupied areas of eastern Ukraine rather than in front-line positions.

“While the Russian army occupies areas in Ukraine, what we Cubans do is support the army in those cities and in those areas that are occupied, that’s all,” González told the Miami-based radio station.

REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini Last year, Marilin Vinent showed a photo of her son Dannys in a Russian uniform, saying he had gone to Russia to work in construction.Alexandre Meneghini Last year, Marilin Vinent showed a photo of her son Dannys in uniform, saying that he had gone to Russia to work in construction.

Numerous reports suggest that Cubans have often joined the Russian military after coming into contact with recruiters on social media, but that not all seemed aware of the true nature of the work they were being offered.

A popular Cuban YouTube content creator last year told the story of two 19-year-old Cubans who claimed they had been offered construction jobs in Russia but were instead sent to the front lines in Ukraine.

His case reflects the experiences of other foreigners who told the BBC they were lured to Russia with the promise of higher salaries, only to end up on the battlefield.

For their part, Cuban authorities have issued contradictory statements about the participation of their citizens in the war in Ukraine.

Following a flurry of reports in September 2023 about Cubans fighting in Ukraine, authorities in Havana said they had arrested 17 people involved in their recruitment.

However, shortly after, Cuba’s ambassador to Russia, Julio Antonio Garmendía Peña, said that his government had nothing against the Cubans who wanted to “simply sign a contract and legally participate in this operation alongside the Russian army.”

Hours later, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, said that Havana was against “the participation of Cuban citizens in conflicts of any kind.”

RAMON ESPINOSA/AFP Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (right) and Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez shake hands during a meeting in Havana on April 20, 2023.The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, met last year in Havana with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities have said they have seen an increase in the number of foreign fighters joining Russian forces in recent months, as well as foreigners among soldiers the Ukrainian military has captured on the battlefield. .

Petro Yatsenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian prisoner of war agency, told the BBC that many of them came from low-income countries such as Cuba, India and Nepal, as well as African and Central Asian states.

“Every week we capture up to five people from foreign countries on the front line as prisoners of war,” he said. His fighting skills were low, he added, which meant that his life expectancy on the battlefield was not even days, but hours.

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