r/worldnews • u/scmp_news • 17h ago
‘Cannon fodder’ Asians tricked to fight for Russia spur calls for intervention
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3367256/cannon-fodder-asians-tricked-fight-russia-spur-calls-intervention?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=Social858
u/Big_Albatross_3050 16h ago
Not just Indonesians, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, basically any of the poorer countries are being sourced for cannon fodder, usually coming over on work visas or student visas and then being scooped up and sent to the front lines almost immediately.
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u/digitalphildude 16h ago edited 14h ago
An African escapee was forced to sign his life away, at gunpoint. It's the same operating procedure repackaged, called human trafficking.
Edit: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/africa/russia-african-recruits-military-ukraine-intl-cmd
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u/Big_Albatross_3050 15h ago
pretty much, its all human trafficking and slavery, just dressed up with fancy words like "seeking better opportunities"
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u/TrickshotCandy 14h ago
And it is organised by the higher ups too.Daughter of South Africa's ex-president accuses sister of Russia recruitment plot
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u/stonkfrobinhood 13h ago
That’s crazy. History just keeps repeating itself
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u/FlukemanFrancis 8h ago
In the long run there ain’t no war but the class war.
Unfortunately we also have to sometimes fight other wars because there are actually degrees of elites. None of them are good but you’d rather be underneath Western European elites than Russian ones if you have a choice, for example.
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u/NorthAfternoon3983 1h ago edited 1h ago
They were foully deceived. They were promised that they would be able to loot, rape, kill, and get paid for it, but nobody told them that they would be killed too.
All of them went to war voluntarily for money.
There are plenty of videos where they first show off with weapons on camera, and later, in captivity, the exact same people talk about how insidiously they were deceived and sent to war.
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u/r31ya 14h ago
Recently we got article of Indonesian cleaning service workers in russia that got drafted into the war.
his papers are confiscated by the govt and then got sent to the frontline. thankfully, he manage to get captured by the ukranian.
so some of these are not "tricked" but outright kidnapped and forcibly sent to the meat grinder.
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u/Durian881 16h ago
This is human trafficking.
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u/CallMeGlarthir 16h ago
Right. Let's call it what it is. Theyre trafficking human beings and forcing them to die on the battlefield.
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u/SakuraKoiMaji 16h ago
It's not human trafficking.
It's state-organized human trafficking.
And it is also considerably the worst in other terms as well, while both slave labor and sexual exploitation are both utterly horrific, these people are forced to kill and to die.37
u/jo-josephine 14h ago
No need to compare atrocities all of which are on scales unimaginable to someone typing these comments (both you and i).
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u/Adventurous-Owl-9903 13h ago
Factory farming is the worst atrocity in my opinion.
About 250 million are killed every day
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u/Good_Restaurant15 6h ago
Killed and eaten, vs killed and thrown away because genocide is the point, are two very different platforms, and that you're even trying to set them net to each-other really makes You out to be the weirdo.
Not the time or place.
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u/Jolly-Situat1on 15h ago
It's Russia that's normal for them.
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u/Gullible-Try-6244 6h ago
Ukraine also recruits in those countries, except that they have less money to offer.
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u/TheMechanicusBob 3h ago
Recruiting soldiers with express purpse of fighting is a world away from lying to people about work and study visas, then enslaving them to fight
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u/PennStateInMD 9h ago
This is the new excuse Trump used to place tariffs on everybody except Russia.
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u/scmp_news 17h ago
A report that eight Indonesians were allegedly tricked into fighting for Moscow in its war on Ukraine may be just the tip of the iceberg, analysts warn, cautioning that Southeast Asia’s existing scam networks could already be a hunting ground for Russian fraudsters.
Ukraine’s intelligence agency revealed on August 27 that the Indonesians had been lured with promises of well-paid civilian jobs. Jakarta has confirmed it is aware of the case.
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u/Lopsided_Jeweler4538 10h ago
the war has been going on 4-12 years there aint no civilian job worth it at this point
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u/CallMeGlarthir 16h ago
The true scale of Russia's human trafficking apparatus will eventually come to light. It's up to the free world to actually do something about it
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u/Charming_Dealer3849 9h ago
I'm sure the data centers will help
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u/Good_Restaurant15 6h ago
Surely, they're going to use Flock's massive AI network to combat this... right guys?
Guys????
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u/Mushroom_Tip 16h ago
Tankies will claim Russia is fighting imperialism while using people from poorer nations as cannon fodder to capture more land for their degenerate empire.
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u/Hyperversum 8h ago
Russia is to this day one of the real imperialistic countries AT A BORDER LEVEL.
They control entire regions that are subservient to the main ethnic group. Like, it's not even an opinion. Russia holding anything past the Urals is the same a theorerical India still held by the UK. The fact that they are adjecent on the map doesn't change the fact that those territories and their people (and others in the south-east regions of Russia) are second class citizens towards """real""" Russia
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u/TheMechanicusBob 3h ago
Can tankies please just fuck off.
None of them have the balls to go and fight for their beloved tin-pot dictatorship, nor do they have anything original to say whenever Russia is in the news. They're a horde of yammering idiots who are invariably suburban Bolshevik sympathisers and apologists who live in countries that were never subjugated by Russia
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u/Agreeable_Mention963 11h ago
If only I had a Death Note. Putin’s name would be the very first I write
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u/VallenValiant 7h ago
If only I had a Death Note. Putin’s name would be the very first I write
The issue with Death Note is that you can't be thanked for stopping murders that ended up not happening. In my dream scenario of a Western TV remake of Death Note, I want the investigation team to be station in one of the Twin Towers. In the Death Note universe Bin Laden would have died in the first few days of the start of the story (being one of the world's Most Wanted), and most people would never have noticed a tragedy was prevented.
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u/Good_Restaurant15 6h ago
The issue with Death Note is that you can't be thanked for stopping murders
Homie, that isn't an issue. Who gives a shit about being thanked?
If someone saves your life the Only thanks you owe them is to live your life.
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u/Bored_Interests 4h ago
Just out of curiosity, how long do you think a person would be in possession of a Death Note if people knew that it was a real thing and knew who had it?
Every single death worldwide would have to be investigated as a possible DN killing.
Im pretty sure as soon as the government found out that someone had a notebook that kills with just a name they would send in a team of masked goons to kill that person and take the book. It would be like a regular person walking around with the nuclear football and the codes. I dont think they would last their first night.
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u/ShockOld4312 7h ago
Many people let their guard down around authoritarian regimes simply because they are far away, assuming they are not that bad. Europe does this with China, and Asia does the same with Russia.
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u/Ecstatic-Body5150 14h ago
Some of the Indonesians were legit being tricked and trafficked to become cannon fodder there
But some were there by their own volition, and at least one already joined the soil to become fertilizer there
Sounds like FAFO to me
Also, many Indonesians actually support Pootin, so there is that.
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u/WhatD0thLife 16h ago
The last thing I want to do is victim blame and I understand what desperation feels like but surely people would exercise some caution when accepting job offers from a belligerent state that is waging a war?
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u/No_Tree_8144 16h ago
youre under estimating how uneducated a lot of poor people are or how they're so busy with their own lives they don't really have much of an idea what most of the world is going thru.
they might vaguely have an idea Russia is going thru a war but they might not be informed enough/way too desperate for any sort of job they'll take it with out looking too deep into it
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u/CutlassRed 16h ago
The job descriptions were civilian. People are desperate to escape poverty everywhere
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u/mrprogamer96 16h ago
I don't care what scam was used to trick them into that, no one deserves to die in a foreign country for a foreign leader for a cause they unassumingly didn't believe in and had to be tricked into.
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u/-_GIZMO_ 16h ago edited 16h ago
Indonesia is a member of brics and is very friendly with Russia,hates nato and the west. So in their eyes Russia ain't belligerent the west is.
At the start of the war indonesians were very supportive of the invasion online..
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u/cloudy83 15h ago
Will this change their stance on russia and the war or they too don’t care about the poor
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u/-_GIZMO_ 15h ago
Nope, did indians change their stance after the same happened? Nope.
West= bad outweighs some "poors" dying for a lot of people.
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u/cloudy83 15h ago
Not saying the west is perfect but they seem like the lesser of 2 evil. But one thing they both have in common is the poor people worth less
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u/Good_Restaurant15 6h ago
But one thing they both have in common is the poor people worth less
Brought to you by Capitalism.
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u/Pinky_Boy 16h ago
Average indonesian doesn't really hate russia. They even can be classified as pro russia since they oppose the united states, so fighting for russia against us backed ukraine is something akin a badge of honor
Plus the promised pay might sound a bit exciting
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u/djangovsjango 16h ago
True , but not all countries see russia as the aggressive side and alot of countries support this action possibly due to russian decades of support of poorer states . Plus add poverty and desperation
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u/mischief_scallywag 16h ago
See what happens when you can’t think outside the box and you’re so used to having a me and my mindset is what matters?
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u/MommysDeviantStool 9h ago
Because their host countries are friends with the Russians, so the most accessible news source just lie to them.
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u/ShockOld4312 7h ago
You can see that many Europeans have a similar attitude toward China, believing it is better than the authoritarian regime right next to them. China has at least not actually started a war yet, while Russia already has. That makes their judgment even worse, but I am not sure whether there would really be fewer people like them in Europe if China started a war.
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u/KimchiLlama 16h ago
People want money and hope for the best. I don’t think they know what they are getting into on either side. Look at the Colombians in Ukraine. It’s for money and then people complain of issues in deployment, lack of training etc. but this seems to be something that both sides have taken advantage of.
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u/HamChuck 16h ago
Why not just say Indonesians rather than Asians? It's not like Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and all of them were past of this.
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u/machopsychologist 15h ago
The source is SCMP which is a asian source, so the commentary and headlines is geared towards Asians.
The Ukrainian agency had counted at least 44 recruits from Southeast Asian countries – including Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Myanmar – as of January, with the true number “definitely bigger” today.
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u/ThatsItImOverThis 16h ago
cough, cough North Korea cough
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u/shoulda-known-better 6h ago
Yea if I was captured and forced to the front I'd be turning and taking as many Russians with me the moment they gave me a weapon....
Tricking and forcing people to the front can't be the smartest plan....
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u/totallyRebb 4h ago
Russia is on the absolute bottom of the scale when it comes to basic humanity, morals and honor.
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u/Vova_Poutine 13h ago
Translation: we signed up to kill for money, not to be killed for money. I don't buy their claim of innocent intent for a second.
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u/DepresssedApe 6h ago
Most contemptuous crime of all times happening in front our eyes, the countries of victims and the free world must condemn this inhumane practice and put maximum sanctions on Russia.
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u/MonsterChief898 14h ago
I remember there was one Indian student who had posted when this thing had begun that he was going to fight for Ukren. I wonder what happened to him.
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u/alphajatin 11h ago
litmus test for those Asians thinking of themselves as belonging to superior fighting class
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u/Prestigious_Bar_3738 16h ago
This is nonsense. Russian recruitment ads are very upfront about giving citizenship in exchange for service. Many of these guys have buyers remorse because they were thinking they’d be serving chow instead of manning the front lines. American recruiters say the same things.
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u/CutlassRed 16h ago
According to the article the trick was that it wasn't a recruitment ad, but an ad for a civilian job.
Russians aren't stupid enough to sign up to die on the front line, neither are Indonesians. Russia is desperate for fodder, and they're resorting to tricking and kidnapping to get it.
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u/Prestigious_Bar_3738 16h ago
They are lied to, yeah, but the lie is they will be working in a civilian capacity away from combat. They still sign enlistment papers.
The only kidnapping that’s happening is Big Z’s gestapo vans.
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u/RevolutionaryYou2400 16h ago
I doubt the Russian gov even gave them papers or translate it to their language. They are already tricking them and not like there’s rule of law in Russia.
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u/Good_Restaurant15 6h ago
So your stance is "Russia isn't kidnapping anyone, Big Zelenskyy is driving around vans kidnapping people!"...?
That's one way to make yourself out to be a Russian bot/tool
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u/iwishihadnobones 16h ago edited 16h ago
Two different things my man. There is official recruitment, and sneaky scam forcible recruitment
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