‘The worst decision you can make’

How Russia lured hundreds of men from Nepal to fight in Ukraine, leaving many of their families in financial ruin

In the summer of 2023, an unlikely trend began dominating TikTok feeds in Nepal: dozens of videos showed Nepali men bragging about having joined the Russian army. According to these foreign fighters, the service conditions were comfortable, the work was safe, and the salaries were higher than anything on offer back in Nepal. To many young Nepali men sitting at home, moving to Russia seemed like a no-brainer; all they had to do was take out a loan to pay a middleman for a visa and a plane ticket. What they didn’t realize was that they were only seeing footage from training centers, where Nepali recruits spend a few weeks at most before being sent into the line of fire. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Nepali men have enlisted in the Russian army over the last two years, and at least dozens of them have been killed. Some of these men were the sole breadwinners for their wives and children. Irina Kravtsova, a special correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, traveled to Nepal to hear the stories of these men, the families they left behind, and the activist leading the fight for the government to intervene. Meduza shares an abridged translation of her report.

Bista Prakash grew up in the small town of Dailekh, where he and six family members lived on a single salary. Like hundreds of thousands of Nepalis, his father often had to work in neighboring India to make ends meet.

Before 2023, Bista had only left Nepal once, when he accompanied his dad to India as a teenager to earn extra money for the family by working at a hotel. Over eight months, he earned 45,000 Nepali rupees, or about $335.

After finishing high school, Bista enrolled in college, hoping to become a schoolteacher. One day in June 2021, a young woman smiled at him in a bookstore; according to Bista, he fell in love almost immediately. They were married soon after.

Bista’s wife was attending college in the nearby town of Surkhet, so the newlyweds only saw each other a few times each month. Then, one spring morning, she was found hanging from the ceiling fan in her apartment.

“My heart was torn to shreds,” Bista says. “For the next several months, I hardly ate, cried all day, and couldn’t get out of bed.”

Eventually, one of Bista’s cousins suggested he go to study IT in Russia for a “change of scenery.” The cousin had done the same thing years earlier and now had a successful career at Yandex. Bista liked the idea, so he took out a high-interest loan from a local lender and paid an “agent” one million rupees ($7,500) to help him get a ticket and a Russian tourist visa.

When he arrived in Russia in June 2023, Bista rented a studio apartment along with seven other Nepali men he’d met through a WhatsApp group. Before he could enroll in IT courses, the university required him to study Russian language for a year. In the meantime, he’d planned to find a job to pay off the money he’d borrowed to get to the country. Only after he arrived there did he realize that his visa made it illegal for him to work in Russia.

Seeing no other options, Bista began working under the table in a warehouse. After his first month of work, however, his employer refused to pay him. Soon after, police raided his apartment and arrested him and his roommates for not having the proper residency documents. “We were terrified,” Bista says. “The police treated us like animals.”

After forcing the men to spend the night in jail, the police demanded 5,000-ruble (about $57) bribes from each of them. Bista had no choice but to pay. At around the same time, his lender in Nepal began calling him and demanding he pay off his debt. Bista was beginning to panic.

In August, Bista noticed an ad on the subway inviting volunteers to join the Russian army. The following day, he went to an enlistment office, where he was shown a contract in Russian. He used Google Translate to translate it into Nepali and began to read. But as soon as he saw the amount of money he could make, he says, the other details seemed irrelevant.

“The offer looked like I’d won the lottery. It was like a dream,” Bista says, smiling sheepishly as he recalls his past naïveté.

Asked if he realized that serving in the army would entail killing people, Bista says he “wasn’t thinking about it from a moral point of view,” only as a job. “I really needed this money — I was a million rupees in debt,” he tells Novaya Gazeta.

“But you must have understood that the job would involve killing,” Novaya Gazeta’s correspondent presses.

“I didn’t have an active desire to kill people,” Bista says. “But when you go to war, you only have two options: kill or be killed.”

“There’s a third option: don’t go to war,” the correspondent says.

Asked what he knew about the war that he planned to join, Bista says he thought that “both sides were at fault” and that while Russia may have initiated it, Ukraine was “killing people too” while fighting “under orders from the U.S.” He says he got his information about the war from “global media” and TikTok.

At the recruiting station, Bista was promised that he would spend about six months in a training camp before being sent to the front.

‘I was sure I was going to die’

At the training center, Bista’s commanders spoke exclusively in Russian, despite the fact that he’d had to pass an English test to enlist (though he’d used his phone to cheat). “We didn’t understand what they were saying,” he recounts. “Whenever we failed to do what they asked, they would start cursing at us.”

Finding the “unsalted and unspicy Russian food” at the training center inedible, Bista subsisted largely on tea, bread, and cookies. It didn’t help that he was often served beef, which he doesn’t eat for religious reasons.

But despite the difficulties, Bista says, he felt he was on the verge of a wonderful new life. During this period, he posted numerous videos on TikTok that all had one basic message: he had lucked out. One clip showed him smiling while lying next to a tank with a piece of straw in his mouth; another showed him hugging his unit mates in a forest. And for little more than this, he believed, he was going to be paid nearly $2,000 a month.

Then, after just three weeks at the training center, Bista was suddenly sent to the front line in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. On his way there, he had “not even the slightest understanding of how horrific it would turn out to be,” he tells Novaya Gazeta.

“Endless war. Bombs falling everywhere. Explosions. You couldn’t hear anything at all. It was so scary. Bullets whistling by, drones flying all around,” Bista recounts. “I was sure I was going to die and that I’d never make it back to Nepal. I begged my Russian commanders to let me go home, but that just made them mad at me.”

During his time on the battlefield, Bista barely ate and went four to five days at a time without sleeping. “A lot of the time, they just didn’t bring us any food. And if you fall asleep, you’re not going to wake up,” he explains. “They would send us to the front line at night. Whoever survived until morning would continue fighting. Whoever died was free.”

“Do you know how many people you killed?” Novaya Gazeta’s correspondent asks.

“Maybe 10, maybe 50,” Bista responds. “I would fire at them from a grenade launcher at night, and from far away. So I couldn’t see how many people I killed.”

One night in September 2023, Bista was injured when bullets and shrapnel hit his leg, shin, and shoulder. “At that moment, I thought I’d lost my legs and gone deaf: everything went totally silent. I thought I’d died,” he says.

Two more nights passed before he was evacuated by helicopter and hospitalized in Belgorod. His surgeons removed the bullets from his legs, but they decided to leave the deeply embedded bits of shrapnel.

The videos Bista had posted on TikTok served as an effective advertisement for friends back in Nepal. The entire time he’d been at the front line without phone access, they’d been messaging him about whether life in the Russian army was really as good as it looked. When he could finally use his phone again, Bista immediately called them to show them his wounds and the poor hospital conditions; speaking Nepali, he talked them out of enlisting right in front of the doctors and Russian soldiers.

“Coming here is the worst decision you can make,” he told his compatriots.

In late November, a doctor approached Bista and said, “Since you can stand on your leg, we’ll send you back to the front soon.”

Until this, Bista had thought the worst was behind him: he would recover, be discharged from the army for health reasons, and get a hefty payout for his injury.

Two days later, early in the morning, he swapped his hospital gown for athletic shorts and a T-shirt and snuck out of the building. He walked for about 30 minutes without looking back before flagging down a taxi driver, whom he paid 100,000 rubles (about $1,100) to drive him the 12 hours to Moscow. He spent the entire journey praying.

When he arrived in the Russian capital, he went straight to the Nepali Embassy. After waiting for a few days for a new passport, he paid a Nepali “agent” nearly 670,000 rupees (nearly $5,000) to help him get to India. From there, he was able to safely return to Nepal.

‘We’ll forget about poverty forever’

Twenty-eight-year-old Sanjok Acharya had dreamed of being a soldier since childhood. The choice seemed obvious to him: all of the men in his family had either served in the Nepali Army or in the Indian Army. (The Nepali government has special agreements with India and the U.K. that allow Nepali soldiers to enlist.)

After finishing school, Acharya got his wish and enlisted in the Nepali Army, where he was paid $180 a month. Because the army supplied him with food and a place to live, he was even able to send some of his salary to his parents.

At 20 years old, Sanjok met his future wife, Sabina, who was only 15 and still in school at the time. They were married six years later, in June 2021.

Because Sanjok’s army salary was too little to support a family, he decided to move to Dubai and join the local police force. His salary increased to $1,000 a month, though he now had to spend six months at a time living far away from his family.

In June 2023, Sabina gave birth to the couple’s first child, a girl named Shreya. Sanjok was in Dubai at the time; Sabina called him from the hospital and showed him their daughter over video. “Sanjok was crazy happy. He told her how he was going to kiss her tiny little hands and feet,” Sabina says.

But Sanjok would never meet his daughter in person. One month after her birth, he secretly flew to Moscow and joined the Russian military. On July 26, he called one of his uncles over video and, standing in his military uniform, told him the news: “I’m in the Russian army!”

“The recruiter who lured him into this work had promised him that he wouldn’t be required to fight, that everything would be safe, and that he’d be able to break the contract at any time,” the uncle tells Novaya Gazeta. He says Sanjok planned to spend no more than one year in the Russian army.

“Just imagine it: I’ll earn a ton of money and I won’t have to constantly be away from you anymore,” Sanjok told Sabina over the phone. “They’ll give us Russian citizenship, we’ll live in Europe, and we’ll both get a good education here and forget about poverty forever.”

Sanjok spent just 10 days in training. “After that, he was transferred to the front, to [a relatively calm area],” his uncle says. Two months later, in October 2023, Sanjok sent his wife a voice message: “They’re taking me to the front line. They say we won’t have service for a month. I’ll call you as soon as this is all over. Take care of yourself and our baby.” Sabina never heard from him again.

Today, 23-year-old Sabina lives with Sanjok’s parents. The entire family is living on her father-in-law’s pension, which they supplement by growing vegetables and grains.

“My life ended before it really even got started,” Sabina tells Novaya Gazeta’s correspondent through tears. After Sanjok’s disappearance, she almost completely stopped eating. When she’s not doing housework or taking care of her daughter, she spends most of her time at the family’s home altar, praying for the gods to bring her husband back home alive.

“Sanjok was not a murderous person,” Sanjok’s uncle says. “He was cheerful — he loved to have fun and spend time with his friends” He only joined the Russian army, his uncle insists, because he wanted the best possible future for his family and he believed the recruiter who promised he wouldn’t have to fight on the front line.

“We can’t keep living like this forever,” his uncle continues. “If Sanjok is dead, the Russians are obligated to send us his body. He’s a Hindu — we’re supposed to cremate him, otherwise his soul will be suffering forever. As his family, we’re obligated to help him avoid this. Even if we don’t get his body back, we’ll perform a farewell ceremony to at least help us cope with losing him. But we need information about him. How long will they [the Russian authorities] continue tormenting us?”

‘I was being used as cannon fodder’

Mohon Oli, a 35-year-old from the town of Rolpa in western Nepal, spent the summer of 2023 strolling around his hometown and eavesdropping on people’s conversations.

Years earlier, Oli, unable to find work, had moved to Russia and enrolled in university. After graduating, he got married to a Russian police officer and settled down in Moscow. Then, a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he returned to his hometown to lure his former neighbors into joining the Russian military.

After years in Moscow, Oli stood out from his compatriots: he was more muscular, had tattoos, and sported a trendy haircut. His new style signaled to his former neighbors that he’d found financial success abroad — and that he could help them do the same.

That summer, according to locals who spoke to Novaya Gazeta, all of the men in Nepal seemed to be talking about one thing: how great it would be to join the Russian army. In stores, language schools, and markets, men spoke with envy about those who had already enlisted. Scrolling through TikTok in their spare time, they encountered countless videos of Nepalis in Russia bragging about being part of the Russian Armed Forces.

“It seemed like service there would be just as safe as in the Nepali Army, only the pay would be 10 times higher, you’d get a nice uniform, nice weapons, you’d be in a wealthy country, and your entire future would be taken care of,” 27-year-old Khagendra Khatri, also from Rolpa, tells Novaya Gazeta.

But there was something the men in Nepal didn’t know: foreign fighters in the Russian army were only allowed to take videos from training centers, and not from the front line, where they’d be sent almost immediately after signing their contracts.

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Khatri, who had studied agricultural engineering in college, had long wanted to work in South Korea through a labor migration agreement between Seoul and Kathmandu. Once he learned Korean to the A2 level, as was required, he planned to put his name into the virtual line at the South Korean labor exchange and wait for a job offer.

One day, Mohon Oli sent Khatri a message on Facebook and suggested they meet up. “Why wait so long to start getting paid in South Korea? Come to Russia and start earning a $2,000 paycheck as soon as tomorrow. No, it’s not dangerous. They’ll train you well before they send you to the front,” Khatri recounts Oli saying.

The closest things to weapons Khatri had ever held were rakes and shovels, but he decided to go to Russia nonetheless, assured by Oli that his training instructors would teach him everything he needed to know. He planned to spend two or three years in the army, save up his earnings, get a Russian passport, and then find a different job in Russia. In August 2023, he borrowed $7,000 from a lender to pay Oli.

Khatri says there were about 50 other Nepalis on his flight to Moscow. All of them were also planning to join the Russian army. Upon arriving at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, they were met by an “agent,” sent by Oli, who accompanied the men to a training center.

For the first few days of their training, Khatri says, he and the other Nepali men were on an “emotional high.” Within the first week, however, they were added to a WhatsApp group with foreign fighters who had enlisted earlier. What he saw there shocked him.

“There were videos showing a bunch of Russians and Nepalis lying dead on the battlefield. Some of them were missing legs, some were missing arms, some were blue. It really scared me,” Khatri recounts. Meanwhile, a training commander told him that he would be sent to the front in just two weeks. “That’s when it hit me that I was just being used as cannon fodder,” Khatri says.

One evening after dinner, Khatri approached one of his commanders and showed him his phone with a message auto-translated from Nepali to Russian: “Help me and my friend flee. I’ll pay you 70,000 rubles.”

The commander agreed. He led Khatri to a window and pointed outside. He then pointed at his watch to show that Khatri should take his belongings and escape through the back gate at exactly midnight. That night, Khatri and his friend followed the instructions and successfully escaped. Claiming to be lost hikers, they managed to hitchhike the 14 hours back to Moscow.

When he finally returned to Nepal, Khatri was furious at Mohon Oli. He went straight to the police, where he reported the recruiter and asked for help getting back the money he had paid him. The authorities said they couldn’t help him return the money because he had paid in cash; Oli, meanwhile, had already fled to India.

‘Fire the worthless foreign minister!’

In many Nepali families, especially in small towns and villages, women get married very young — often without going to college. But with or without a college degree, there are hardly any jobs for them outside of big cities. After getting married, they traditionally move in with the parents of their new husband and spend all of their time at home taking care of their in-laws and children. Their husband is usually the family’s sole breadwinner.

When Nepali men join the Russian army, the lives of their families often go from difficult to unbearable. When they die or disappear, their families lose their only income source and are saddled with the massive debts the men took on to get to Russia in the first place.

In the winter and spring of 2024, many of these women borrowed money from their neighbors and traveled to Kathmandu. Some of them wanted to pressure the authorities to rescue their husbands from the front; others hoped to get official confirmation of their husbands’ deaths so they could seek the compensation payments the Russian government had promised.

One of these women was 22-year-old Roji Pun. Her husband had joined the Russian army without telling her, claiming he’d found a job in Romania, to pay off the family’s medical debts; they’d borrowed a large sum of money from their neighbors after their son was born with heart problems. She meets Novaya Gazeta’s correspondent on May 24. At 3:00 p.m., she and six other women sit on the steps outside the entrance of the Nepali Foreign Ministry building and, holding their children in their arms, begin chanting:

Help rescue our husbands from Russia! Evacuate the injured citizens of Nepal from there! Get them treated! Return the bodies of the dead to their homeland! Pay their families compensation! Fire the worthless foreign minister!

Hardly a minute passes before police surround them and drag them outside of the building’s gate.

The wives of the Nepali men recruited into the Russian army have only found one person willing to advocate for them and help them pressure the Nepali authorities: 30-year-old activist and politician Kritu Bhandari.

The women initially tried to knock on the doors of government offices on their own, but they were consistently ignored and given the runaround. Then they remembered a situation several years earlier in which human traffickers had begun tricking Nepali women into going to Belarus, where they were forced to perform sex work. Bhandari had played a key role in the campaign to bring the women back home.

When the women came to her for help, Bhandari was certain that she wasn’t the person for the job; she didn’t have enough influence. “But nonetheless, I started researching this issue with the hope of at least writing an article about it for some newspaper,” she tells Novaya Gazeta.

As part of her research, Bhandari spoke to 300 families whose relatives had enlisted in the Russian army. “I was struck by what I heard from them,” she says. “I realized these people were going through true hell. I was also shocked to realize that the true number of Nepalis in the Russian army was much higher than they were saying on Nepali TV.”

Over time, more and more men who had joined the Russian army and their relatives began contacting Bhandari. She refers to all of these people as “victims.” Altogether, more than 1,000 soldiers’ relatives have reached out to her for help.

By the end of May, Bhandari had managed to verify the identities of over 699 Nepali men who enlisted in the Russian army. According to the information she’s compiled, at least 117 Nepalis have been injured in the war. Many of these men are in hospitals and are in constant contact with Bhandari. She’s learned of at least 41 Nepalis who have died in the war. As of June 2024, the Nepali authorities have officially confirmed only 35 of these deaths. Just 15 Nepalis, according to Bhandari, have managed to terminate their contracts with the Russian army. (These numbers only include people who have contacted Bhandari themselves or whose relatives have contacted her.)

In the winter of 2024, the Nepali authorities repeatedly asked the Russian government to stop recruiting Nepali citizens in their army, noting that the two countries don’t have any military agreements. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov promised that the families of soldiers who died would receive compensation payments but did not acknowledge Nepal’s request to return their bodies and to stop recruiting. In January 2024, Nepal officially stopped giving its citizens permission to work and study in Russia.

In March 2024, more than 200 soldiers’ relatives filed complaints with the consular department of the Nepali Foreign Ministry, demanding that the authorities save their husbands and sons who had joined the Russian army.

According to Bhandari, during this period — while the authorities invariably told her they were “trying” — she learned of the deaths of 20 additional Nepalis in the war. “That’s why I’m [protesting] on the street,” she tells Novaya Gazeta. “In Nepal, people’s voices aren’t heard until they become anarchists and start protesting furiously.”

‘Nobody was responding to us’

In April 2024, Bhandari and 37 “victims” went to Nepal’s main government building and began chanting their demands. The response from the authorities was swift: all of the protesters were taken to the police station and threatened with criminal charges.

“When absolutely nothing had worked and our demands had been ignored, the women warned me that they were going to be forced to literally destroy themselves and their children, because without their husbands, they were doomed,” Bhandari says. “To prevent them from doing this, I convinced them to start pressuring the government in more radical ways.”

On April 19, Bhandari and a group of soldiers’ wives went to a sporting goods store and asked to borrow a tent and yoga mats. They then set up camp near a government building and began a hunger strike. The police quickly forced them to relocate to a park. After they moved, the same police came and demanded they “pay for the space.”

“You sent your husbands away in hopes of earning more money, and now you’re crying on the street. Is that really fair?” the officers asked.

Every day, according to Bhandari, the police would show up at their camp, curse at them, and treat them “like criminals.” Despite this, about 50–70 people began joining the protest every day, and many women stayed in the tents even overnight. Bhandari and many of the women she was advocating for were repeatedly arrested during this period.

On the 11th day of the strike, Bhandari and the other women held a protest in front of the Russian Embassy, holding Russian-language signs that read “You recruited Nepalis without a military agreement. Either get out of Nepal or return our Nepali soldiers from Russia.” After the protest, the women threw the signs onto the embassy grounds. The police arrested them but released them soon after.

“We became physically weaker. We also started to lose morale after seeing the government show such apathy towards our demands,” Bhandari says. “Nobody was responding to us: not Russia, not the E.U., not the U.N., not the Nepali government. Even the political party I belong to didn’t take any serious steps. They all acted as if saving these people’s lives wasn’t their responsibility.”

On the 17th day of the hunger strike, the activists received a letter from then-Nepali Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. In it, he promised to help the protesters if they ended their hunger strike. They agreed, and they met with the prime minister in person soon after.

“I’m working hard to solve the problem you’re talking about,” he told them. “I’m even thinking of going to Russia, meeting with Putin, and sending all of our people back home.” However, not a single government institution began working on “solving the problem” after the meeting, according to Bhandari.

“I was given an entry pass for the government building, but now the guards take it from me, and I have to get a new one issued each time [I go there],” she says. “Plainclothes police now patrol the places where I meet with ‘victims’ to discuss our next steps. Instead of helping us, the government is searching for new mistakes they can use to frame us. The human traffickers who send Nepalis to Russia have started sending me threats, demanding that I stop this work. I’ve started to feel very vulnerable.”

Reporting by Irina Kravtsova for Novaya Gazeta Europe. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.