Before being injured by a landmine blast that shredded his boots and left his feet bloody, Duncan Chege had sent his wife a video of himself taking cover in a small dugout under a tree in the frontlines in Ukraine. 

The footage was part of his trail of proof to his family back in Kenya’s Kiambu County of the lie he was sold – enticed by the promise of a job offer in Russia as a truck driver but which turned to be conscription to fight in the ongoing war in Ukraine that entered its fifth year this week.

His mother told TRT Afrika of her days of anxiety during Chege's ordeals in Ukraine, as her son kept sharing photographs of himself in full combat uniform while in the frontlines. She had sold the family’s lone cow to secure his son’s air ticket to Russia and incurred huge debts for his trip back home.

“They lied to him about the job offer but I thank God for returning my son alive. His life is more important to me than anything else,” she told TRT Afrika.

“We sold our cow, which we relied on for milk for sale, because the money was needed urgently,” she added.

Chege, a 30-year old father of one, was unemployed and lived with his family in their home before he left. The employment agent had promised a monthly salary of around $2,500 for the job in Russia.

When he landed in Moscow, the Russian capital, in October last year, he was received by a Russian work agent who was to take him to his new workplace. The supposed job offer had been organised with the help of an agent in Nairobi that Chege he was referred to by a Kenyan friend working in Qatar as a truck driver.  

The long trip from the airport in Moscow instead ended in a Russian military barracks where he underwent a week-long training on ballistics, before he was transferred to a military base in Ukraine.

Up until then, Chege still assumed he was being prepared to drive military trucks delivering cargo from China. It was fellow recruits who informed him they were being trained for action in the warfront.

Chege is one of the rising numbers of Africans fighting for Russia in the war. Ukrainian authorities estimate that over 1,400 nationals from 36 African countries have been recruited to fight for Russia.

But Chege estimates the number could be more, a view corroborated last week by Kenya’s intelligence agency, which informed the country’s parliament that from just Kenya alone over 1,000 citizens were currently fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

“There are many Africans fighting in Ukraine, and many of them have died. I saw the bodies on the battle field,” he told a Kenyan news outlet.

Governments across Africa have previously cautioned their citizens against joining the conflict. Others like Kenya and South Africa have asked Russia to allow the repatriation of the bodies of their nationals killed and those captured as prisoners of war.

Kenya's Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi early this month announced he would travel to Moscow for talks aimed at "conclusively resolving the matter and identifying sustainable solutions".

Ghana's Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa this week visited Ukraine and urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to release two Ghanaian prisoners of war captured fighting for Russia.

While at a second military base in Ukraine, Chege and his comrades, as he calls them, went through a month-long training on explosives and GPS navigation, before their eventual deployment to the "red zone".

He narrated to a Kenyan news outlet how on a march to a Ukrainian village, they encountered bodies strewn on roadsides, estimating the count to be in the hundreds. Injured soldiers lacked medical aid, he said, narrating horrific scenes of soldiers disemboweled and others with shattered limbs.

A feigned mental breakdown coupled with fake car accident photos sent by his wife are what it took Chege to stage a narrow escape from Ukraine.

“That made the doctor give me permission to go to the commander, and that is how I went to the Kenyan embassy and flew back home,” he told a local news outlet.