Thousands of Cubans have been recruited to travel to Russia—and many have ended up fighting in Ukraine, possibly under false pretenses. A 41
Last month we mentioned how Russia is trying to trick people in Kenya and India into joining the Russian Army. Apparently Putin is also looking to Cuba as a source of cannon fodder for his disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
A Russian travel agent in Ryazan (Рязань) in particular has been luring young men from Cuba with promises of employment. Of course the "jobs" are with the failing Russian Army.
Cubans – two 19-year-olds identified as Alex Vega and Andorf Velasquez – recounted how they ended up wounded in battle alongside Russian forces in Ukraine. Speaking from what they said was a military hospital in Russia’s Kaliningrad region, the two said they had traveled to Russia “to make some money,” a trip they said was arranged and paid for up front, by a trio of women: two Russian, one Cuban. When they arrived in Moscow, the pair told a popular Cuban video blogger, they were forced to sign a Russian-language contract they did not understand and were then sent to the provincial city of Ryazan, where they were housed in a school dormitory. They ended up on the front lines in Ukraine, digging ditches -- and eventually being wounded, they said in the August 2023 video.
Rule #1: Don't go to Russia for "employment". Rule #2: If you're already in Russia, don't sign anything unless you want to be shot or blown to pieces in an illegal war.
Putin can't round up enough Russians to die in his war. So he has to import people from developing countries to die in place of Russians.
Nearly 44 months into its all-out assault on Ukraine, Russia has deployed nearly 700,000 men to wage its war, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. And Moscow has cast its net wide to keep up the flow of personnel: some 12,000 North Koreans are believed to be fighting alongside Russian forces. First among other nationalities? Cubans. Ukrainian intelligence estimates several thousand Cubans have been recruited, many of them tricked into fighting alongside Russian units. An internal US State Department cable seen by Reuters put the number of Cubans fighting in Ukraine around 5,000, and the Cuban government, US officials allege, is actively supporting them. According to Ukrainian officials who traveled to Washington last month to brief congressional leaders, at least 20,000 Cubans in total are “awaiting travel and deployment” to Russia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Cubans may been recruited by a 41-year-old, multi-lingual travel agent from Ryazan: more than 3,000 foreigners, in fact, according to a letter written by her lawyer and obtained exclusively by Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit.
Alex Vega and Andorf Velásquez were certainly not the only Cubans duped into the Russian Army.
Their story also overlaps with that of Frank Manfuga, a 36-year-old Cuban man who was captured by Ukrainian troops in March 2024, three months after joining the Russian military. In interviews with Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, he claimed he was tricked into boarding a Russia-bound plane with the promise of a job in construction. Sometime in early 2023, Smirnova began posting Spanish-language job announcements on Facebook and the Russian equivalent, VK, in a Spanish-language group called "Cubans in Moscow.” The job postings, which have since been deleted, offered a signing bonus, a monthly salary of around 200,000 rubles ($2,000), and eventually Russian citizenship. The amounts were vastly higher than average wages in Cuba.
The travel agent in Ryazan, Yelena Smirnova, was not just luring Cubans to Russia but profiting off of them.
Smirnova would front the costs for a recruit’s travel from Havana to Moscow, accommodation in Russia, and related expenses. After arriving in Russia, the person would then reimburse her for these expenses after signing a contract. Smirnova or her co-workers would make a copy of the person’s bank card and withdraw an initial payment from it—to cover their expenses. A May 2023 article in the newspaper Ryazanskiye Vedomosti detailed how a group of new recruits, from Russia as well as Cuba, had signed new contracts. “The main motivation is to help our Motherland in these difficult times for her, and the financial component is a nice bonus,” the paper quoted a local military recruiter as saying.
"Bonus" indeed. So Smirnova was both essentially robbing the Cubans and then putting them in grave danger by sending them to Russia's shabby invasion of Ukraine.
The article by investigative reporters Yelizaveta Surnacheva and Andrei Soshnikov is longer and more detailed. Hopefully somebody will translate it into Spanish and circulate it in Cuba.
Putin keeps the war going even though everybody outside the Russian World knows he'll never conquer Ukraine.
Today is Day 1,329 of Putin's "3-Day Special Operation". Only somebody who is demented or crazy would keep such a staggeringly costly and futile war going on. Putin is a sociopath who cares nothing about human life except his own. He's perfectly willing to let hundreds of thousands of Russians, Koreans, Kenyans, or Indians die so he can pretend that he is the Peter the Great of the 21st century.
Here's the official Ukrainian daily report of Russian losses; this one is for 14 October 2025. It's in Ukrainian with English translations. Ukraine should consider publishing these with translations in languages of countries where Russia is looking for new cannon fodder. They can then be circulated on social media in those countries.