The Ukrainian and Russian armies use international volunteer fighters and mercenaries. Their respective calls have been heard in Africa, especially among young people, prompted by injustice or by better pay. No official figure for the number of soldiers from Africa in the war in Ukraine has yet been released.
He is Nigerian, is 27 years old and wants “join the team” Ukrainian. The BBC Africa met Ottah Abraham, who lives quietly in Lagos, 8,700 km from the front of the war in Ukraine, says the British news site.
“This philosophy graduate is one of hundreds of Africans, from countries including Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Algeria, who say they are ready to take up arms in the battle against Russia”, details the BBC.
Kereti Usoroh, who also lives in Nigeria, in the capital Abuja, is a 29-year-old lawyer. If he wants to go and fight alongside the Ukrainians, it is, he says, because “it’s about fighting a tyrant”.
The Deutsche Welle (DW) speaks of more prosaic motivations than a simple disinterested outpouring of solidarity. The German site reports the words of a young student, in Nairobi, for whom, if Ukraine decides to pay “a good amount of money” that he cannot win in Kenya, he will leave to fight. The DW and the BBC question the inclinations of departure of an African youth whose only horizon is sometimes unemployment.
No African would have yet joined the Ukrainian ranks
They would be, indicates the BBCsome 20,000 foreign fighters responded to President Volodmyr Zelensky’s call to come”support the Ukrainians”. And Ukraine removed its visa requirements and also offered “equipment and salary to those with a valid passport and military training.”
Like Kereti Usoroh and Ottah Abraham, dozens of “hopeful volunteers” to engage visited the Ukrainian Embassy in Abuja. But the embassy had to backtrack in the face of the reaction of the Nigerian authorities. ”Nigeria discourages the use of mercenaries anywhere in the world and will not tolerate
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