A meeting with Russian mercenaries in a Ukrainian prison: ‘I’m lucky to be alive’

Kehinde asks, in a low, cautious voice, if he can shake hands. He has just left cell 403, in block 13 of the prison where he is being held, somewhere in Kyiv province that will remain anonymous for security reasons. The light is dim in the corridor, but it gains intensity along the labyrinth that leads to the room where he is being held. The smell is strong. A soldier, stripped of his weapon, safely stored at the entrance to the facility, tells him yes, he can shake hands. He smiles. His full name is Oluwagbemileke Kehinde, and he was born 29 years ago in the Nigerian town of Ewekoro. Educated and with professional experience, he was captured last July in southern Ukraine, heading toward Zaporizhzhia, by a unit of Russian soldiers rebelling against Vladimir Putin’s government. His life had taken a near-fatal turn in just over four years. “I’m lucky to be alive,” he admits. “But now I don’t know what to expect.”

Kehinde isn’t the only foreigner in the prison. Door by door, the guards open the small windows which serve as peepholes into the cell. On the other side of the bars, a room with two rows of bunk beds is located. Some inmates lie down, others sit or loiter by the gate. It’s easy to see, from their features, that some are foreigners, many of them members of the thousands of war mercenaries — Ukrainian intelligence services don’t provide figures on how many they have captured — that Moscow has hired to bolster its major offensive in Ukraine. The payment: a Russian passport and a salary of around €2,000 ($2,350) a month.

As Kehinde, of medium height and wiry build, prepares to leave his cell, an inmate of Egyptian origin in another cell peers out the window. He doesn’t want to talk. In the next cell down the same corridor, Hassan, also Egyptian, has fewer qualms but prefers to keep his last name private. He acknowledges the greeting in Arabic, although the conversation continues in Russian. He bends and tilts his neck to be seen through the bars. He is 28 years old and has six siblings. He traveled to Russia to earn money.

“I had experience with weapons, I had worked as a guard,” Hassan says. So he signed a contract with the Russian army a year ago in exchange for a passport. With this document, he could be part of a prisoner exchange and return to Russia. “I don’t want to go back to Egypt,” Hassan says, “I could get 10 years in prison there.” As a habit of incarceration, he asks for cigarettes, but has little luck.

Chinese and North Korean fighters captured by the Ukrainian army in recent months are temporarily held in this same prison. The Freedom of Russia Legion — Russian opposition fighters fighting in defense of Ukraine and the unit who captured Kehinde — lists other nationalities among the imprisoned mercenaries: Cubans, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Belarusians, and one Italian. According to Ukrainian intelligence services, in addition to Nigeria, the African platoon on Moscow’s payroll includes soldiers from Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, Togo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and Zimbabwe.

For most of these foreigners in prison, the best option is to participate in one of the prisoner exchanges — the Russian and Ukrainian authorities have exchanged more than 10,000 soldiers from each side since February 2022. Since they have Russian passports in their pockets, their countries of origin aren’t very interested in their future.

Kehinde is terrified of speaking. He refuses an on-camera interview with local reporters; he will only speak with this newspaper. His fear isn’t about the treatment in prison, which he admits is fair, but that he might say something inappropriate that could hinder a possible exchange. He believes someone from his embassy might visit him and make inquiries, something that hasn’t happened yet. He has scars all over his body — above his lip, next to the nape of his neck, on his right arm — that look like burns. Shrapnel from the Russian bombings that nearly ended his life the day he was captured. He repeats over and over that he doesn’t know what to expect now that he’s a prisoner of war. “I’m not in my best mental condition,” he admits. But in the heat of the conversation, he calms down and opens some doors to his story.

“I graduated in my hometown and worked for a while,” Kehinde says. He tweaks his shaved hair and nervously rocks back and forth in his chair. He struggles to get into his personal life, but if you follow his digital trail, it’s there, online, public. Seeing a photo of his mother on a cell phone, he laughs and changes his expression. It was she who asked “what the hell” he was going to do in Russia when he decided to leave four years ago. “I wanted a better life,” he replied. He talks about her because she’s the one he had the closest relationship with. “My plan was to finish my studies in Russia and either leave or stay,” Kehinde continues. He traveled and began a master’s degree at the Moscow Higher School of Economics in the same subject he had experience in: urban planning.

This young Nigerian’s journey is not unique. The pattern is repeated often: young and not-so-young foreigners who travel to Russia to study or work and — faced with financial difficulties or when their papers are expiring — are tempted to join the army. Many of these recruits, especially men of African nationality, make the leap to the trenches from prison. That is the case with Kehinde. He doesn’t want to go into details, but according to information from the Freedom of Russia Legion, he was arrested for a drug-related problem. “I spent two and a half years in prison,” he says, “and it was there that I learned Russian by watching television, reading the newspapers, and talking to other inmates.” His course was in English.

Although Kehinde’s journey to war sounds dramatic and unfortunate, he maintains a disbelieving and, at times, cynical narrative. He is very intelligent, using English terms frequently used by war analysts, such as “war of attrition,” to refer to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine following the Russian invasion. He is reluctant to please the uniformed officers who have him behind bars and are present during the interview; he is critical of Ukraine and the West. “Everything could stop if they would sit at the table,” he says.

“I wanted to be free, and I agreed to join the army,” Kehinde continues in his account. He was offered freedom in exchange for fighting. At first, he worked as an interpreter for other foreigners, as English is one of his native languages and he was fluent in Russian. “When I heard there were North Koreans, I knew I was onto something bigger than I thought,” he adds. The explanation for how he ended up wielding a rifle, heading into combat, like so many others among the mercenaries, is simple: “It’s war and it’s an army,” he recounts, “and if the commander tells you to pick up a weapon, you do it or you’ll probably end up shot.”

At this point in the conversation, caution has eased. Kehinde is somewhat more critical of those for whom he fought; he lets himself be carried away by the story he tells, recounting how the day he was ambushed by Ukrainian troops, communications failed. “If my colleagues had done their job, they wouldn’t have caught me and we would have completed the mission.” However, he doesn’t deny the country that brought him to the front lines. “Russia has been a good country for me,” he asserts with conviction, “and if they hadn’t put me in prison, I wouldn’t have ended up in the war.” He would like to return there.

Next to the cells, an officer places a cart carrying two large tin buckets filled with stew and rice, along with a pot of vegetables and sliced bread. It’s lunchtime. Kehinde walks back slowly to his cell, hands behind his back, freely and uncuffed, as if he were taking a stroll.

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