Pitch black in the forests of the fiercely contested Donbas region and grenades were raining down on Pedro Antunes. The 33-year-old Brazilian had been sent on a suicide mission to scope out a Ukrainian base by his Russian commander.
He heard a loud whirring noise above his head. Ukrainian drones were everywhere, dropping grenade after grenade.
‘I would listen to where they landed and try to dive in the opposite direction,’ Antunes says. ‘You cannot think about death at that moment. You have to focus on staying alive.’
Each explosion set his heart racing. The intense ringing in his ears from the barrage left him disorientated, unable to work out where or when to jump.
‘I thought it better for me to run,’ he says. ‘But I was quickly hit by two grenades, one in the left arm, another on the right thigh. I lost so much blood. I thought I was going to die very soon. So much pain.’
With no tourniquet or pressure dressings to stem the bleeding, Antunes looked to find whatever he could to plug the deep wound.
‘I remembered there was a Snickers bar in my pocket,’ he tells me, wincing at the memory. ‘So I took it and shoved it into the hole in my thigh.’
And then, from one of the drones, a Ukrainian voice beckoned to him. ‘Syudy!’ it shouted. ‘Here!’
In desperation, with no idea what he had been told, Antunes replied: ‘I do not speak Russian. Please do not kill me, I am Brazilian, not a soldier.’ He placed his hands above his head in surrender.
‘Okay, follow me,’ the drone operator responded in English, and the Brazilian limped behind the machine for one agonisingly long kilometre.
‘I was walking very slowly because of my injuries,’ he said. ‘I remember that time, everything went silent.
‘It was like a movie. I thought I was 100 per cent going to die, and on the walk I was confessing to the drone and begging for forgiveness. I was saying, ‘Please say I’m so sorry to my wife, to my mother, my family. I’m here in this place with these stupid people.’
Antunes was given food, water and medical treatment by the Ukrainians before he was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Lviv, near the border with Poland.
It was here that he shared his story for the first time, with the Daily Mail. So how did a Brazilian end up fighting for Russia on the frontline of its barbaric war?
He claims his nightmare started two years ago when he began applying for IT roles on LinkedIn. In 2022, he had moved from Brazil to live in rural Tasmania with his Australian wife, an academic.
Antunes says he was drawn in by an advertisement for a software developer job in Moscow at the state-owned defence conglomerate Rostec. He insists the ad specified it was a civilian role, nothing to do with the military.
‘The salary was around $4,000 (£3,000) per month,’ he says. ‘They offered free education for my master’s degree, health insurance and help with an apartment.’
He landed the job and boarded a plane to Russia in March 2024, intending to return to Australia after two years.
Just two days after arriving in Moscow, he met the recruiter at an office where he says he signed what he thought was his employment contract, written in Russian.
He was bundled into a small van and three hours passed before it came to a stop. Antunes said his unease turned to dread as he stepped out of the van – at the gates of a military facility.
A Russian commander named Aleksandr asked if he had any military experience. ‘I told him, ‘Why are you asking me?’ I am here to start work in a company,’ he claims. The military official told him the document he had signed was a contract to serve in the military for one year.
‘My wife was going crazy and I was so scared,’ he recalled. ‘She cried so much and I was worried I was going to die. He says he contacted Brazil’s embassy in Moscow, but received no help.
He was taken to another Russian military base where they sought to use his IT expertise. He was taught how to operate drones and a month later deployed to the Donbas with a group of soldiers from Chechnya.
After weeks on the frontline, his commander sent him on that ‘suicide mission’.
Antunes has been a prisoner of war ever since and says he is treated well in one of five Ukrainian prisons housing thousands of captured Russian soldiers.
Does his story stand up to scrutiny? In quotes attributed to him that surfaced online, Antunes allegedly said he had a ‘greater inclination toward Russia’ and that being part of the Russian military offered an ‘opportunity to be part of that’.
He denies ever saying this.
Whatever the case, he is one of a growing number of international recruits who – wittingly or not – signed up for the Russian army’s ‘meat grinder’ and ended up a PoW in Lviv.
Another is Kenyan athlete Evans Kibet who arrived in St Petersburg at the end of July on a two-week visa to host an event on behalf of his country, famous for its long-distance runners.
The 35-year-old says he came to attend a cultural festival and to teach Russian athletes how to train. He claims a festival staffer persuaded him to stay, saying he could organise a one-year work visa.
The chance to provide a better life for his family, and in particular his teenage daughter, was too enticing, he says, so he signed a stack of documents presented to him by the man even though they were written in Russian and unintelligible.
The next morning, the man seized his passport before driving Kibet to a nearby military facility.
Then it finally dawned on him what was happening, he claims. ‘I was so scared that I would never see my daughter again. I started to get angry and asked the guy why he signed me up.
‘He told me, ‘You will manage and get out of this, it is only for one year’. That was the last time I saw him.’
After five days, he was sent to the frontline. As soon as he saw the chance, he says, he deserted: ‘I dropped everything and just ran for my life . . . There were so many dead soldiers. My mind kept on telling me I would be the next one.’
After more than a day trudging through the forest he began to lose all hope of making it out alive.
Then he heard gunfire and made the desperate decision to move towards it. ‘I didn’t even know if they were Russian or Ukrainian,’ he admits. ‘But I shouted to them for help. They were shocked because they didn’t expect me to be there. They pointed their guns at me.’
Kibet raised his hands in the air, fell to his knees and begged them for help. ‘I am a Kenyan, I’m not a fighter,’ he told the soldiers. ‘Please save my life.’
The soldiers, who were Ukrainian, took him in as a PoW and he was transferred to the prison camp in Lviv.
Extraordinarily, while he’s explaining to me that he hasn’t been able to tell his family what he’s been through, a Ukrainian prison official overhears and allows him to call them.
Kibet, who can’t quite believe what is happening, takes off his hat, tries to compose himself, and nervously waits before his uncle answers the video call.
He starts crying as he is bombarded with questions in Swahili. ‘I told my family not to worry or put pressure on themselves worrying about me,’ he says after the call, wiping tears from his face.
‘I said do not stress, I am well here. Do not send any money. I will hopefully be home soon.’
In the Lviv prison camp, Kibet formed a bond with a young Moroccan who says he was also forced into the Russian military.
Afraid of reprisals from Russia, he speaks to the Daily Mail under the pseudonym Youssef El Amrani. The 23-year-old, from Tiznit on the west coast of Morocco, says he moved to Russia in October 2022 to study medicine at a university in Ryazan, a city 200km south-east of Moscow.
But in September 2024, after completing his second year of studies, he was stopped by police on the street and asked for his documents. ‘I showed them my ID and immediately knew I was in trouble,’ El Amrani mutters. ‘I knew they were looking for any excuse to arrest me.’
He says they took issue with the fact he’d moved apartments and the address on his ID did not match his current home.
‘They put me in handcuffs and forced me into their police car,’ he adds. ‘I was caught in the campaign that targets immigrants and forces them into the army.’
El Amrani was placed in a cell for three days when a police officer barged in with an ultimatum: either join the Russian military for one year or stay in prison.
‘He shoved a lot of documents in my face and said, ‘Sign here, sign here’,’ El Amrani tells me. ‘I had no choice and I was just focused on surviving. But I made a plan to defect at the first opportunity.’
On his first day on the frontline he was tasked with taking supplies from one end of the Russian base to another and saw his opportunity to escape. He’d been walking for at least a day through a forest, lost, before he heard the sound of Russian artillery.
‘I followed the trajectory of the artillery to find the Ukrainian positions,’ he says. He came across Ukrainian soldiers at a small bridge and made a loud noise so they could see him.
‘I shouted at them because I did not want them to think I was sneaking up on them and for them to kill me,’ he explained. ‘Once they saw me, they told me to freeze. I told them I was not Russian and I wanted to surrender but there was a language barrier.’
El Amrani was told to raise his hands above his head and get on his knees. Following an intense period of questioning, the Moroccan was transported to Lviv.
Almost every foreign fighter here claims they were tricked into fighting for Russia, but their stories cannot be independently verified. Nor are their claims always believed. ‘For us, there is no fundamental difference between foreign servicemen fighting for the Russian Armed Forces and Russian citizens themselves,’ says Vitalii Matvienko, who runs Ukraine’s I Want To Live project, which encourages fighters to surrender to Ukrainian forces.
A handful of these foreign fighters openly admit they signed up to fight for Russia voluntarily, including medical student Victor Kofi. ‘They didn’t force me, I made the decision by myself,’ the 27-year-old from Togo in West Africa admitted. He arrived in November 2024 to study at Saratov State University.
Kofi, who has a wife and an 18-month-old daughter back in Togo, had seen a poster in the airport advertising a military contract. The pay was 47 times the national average in his country.
‘I like Russia, it’s a good country,’ he insists. ‘The main draw was the Russian citizenship,’ he admitted. ‘It would open me up to the whole world and be able to travel. I can’t do that with a Togolese passport and I would also be earning money to give my family a better life.’
After two months he was deployed on the frontline to collect bodies. ‘This was the first time I’d seen dead people,’ he says. ‘You’d see someone without a head, others with arms and legs torn apart, and missing body pieces all over the field.’
He estimates that he collected more than 300 bodies in the month he spent on the frontline.
‘It’s not easy dealing with dead bodies every day,’ Kofi adds, shuffling in place. ‘But there was nothing I could do. This was my job.’
One evening, following a brutal exchange of gunfire and explosives, Kofi and his team of eight drove in to collect the bodies of Russian soldiers. But when they came to leave, their vehicle wouldn’t start and they were surrounded by seven Ukrainian drones.
‘We froze, and at the same moment Ukrainian soldiers came out,’ he says. With guns pointed at them from every angle, Kofi and the other Russian soldiers slowly put down their weapons and dropped to their knees.
‘I was scared for my life,’ he admits. ‘I was waiting for my time on Earth to end and for them to just shoot me. Around me the Russian soldiers were crying and begging not to be killed.’ He was transferred to the PoW facility in Lviv three weeks ago.
Russia has stepped up its recruitment of fighters from the poorest countries as it continues to lose soldiers at a rapid rate.
Ukrainian intelligence has identified more than 18,000 foreign mercenaries from 128 countries – including North Korea, Cuba, India, Egypt, Armenia and Uzbekistan – fighting for Russia, with the highest number of them recruited this year.
It uses them as cannon fodder in the war which has seen an estimated one million Russians killed, wounded or missing since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
At the PoW camp in Lviv, the Daily Mail heard stories from men across the globe, some even in their late 50s, as to how they ended up fighting for Russia.
They are not kept in cells or handcuffed, and are free to roam the site and socialise.
Ukraine says its treatment of them is starkly different to that of its own soldiers held in ‘unofficial detention sites’ in Russia.
What will be the fate of these foreign mercenaries? Ukraine has warned they could be stuck in limbo, even if a peace deal is struck between the warring countries.
Russia shows no interest in taking them back, while Ukraine’s priority is to get their own citizens back from Russian captivity.
These men might have survived the meat grinder – but their fate is far from certain. And with the vast majority of countries unwilling to accept citizens who have served as foreign mercenaries, the chances of repatriation are slim.
