Russia recruits soldiers through Facebook and Google ads

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The pitch almost never mentions war.

A man scrolling through Facebook or searching on Google sees an advertisement from what looks like an ordinary staffing agency, promising construction work, a security job, a film role or help getting a Russian visa.

Clicking through, he arrives at a polished recruitment website. Some even carry the logos of Western news organizations such as the BBC, falsely suggesting an endorsement.

Behind this systematic online manipulation campaign is a Russian war recruitment machine — and much of it is running on Western digital channels, servers and other tech infrastructure.

A new report shared with POLITICO by Code for Africa, a non-profit African network of digital democracy labs, shows that Russia-linked military recruitment relied on advertising and tracking technology from Meta and Google to reach potential recruits and measure their campaigns, targeting workers in some of the world’s poorest labor markets. Researchers identified 89 websites, seven social media or Facebook accounts and 39 messaging accounts or channels used by the operations, with new ones popping up daily.

The recruiters target young men facing unemployment or precarious work, offering salaries that typically dwarf what they could earn at home. In an ad reviewed by POLITICO, a “global casting call” for a new movie project seeks African male actors, with an artificial intelligence-generated picture of Black men dressed as soldiers, above the words “shooting in 2025.” The advert was found on a Facebook page based in Germany.

Code for Africa from adverts on Facebook recruiting African men to fight for Russia.

Another advert sponsored by “IRC Russian Bear” showed a Black soldier with Russian flags stitched to his khakis, promising $15,000 immediately upon signing the contract and a $3,000 monthly salary. “A chance to change your life,” the ad reads.

Beyond social channels, the investigation found that the core of the operation rested on Western tech. The flagship recruitment brand was hosted on a server in Amsterdam; websites across the network were built using AI tools from companies in the United States and Sweden; and when prospective recruits filled in application forms, software from an Austrian company collected their personal information before it was sent to Russia.

“Behind that Western layer sit ordinary Russian commercial hosts, and behind those a bulletproof-hosting tier built to survive complaints,” the researchers wrote. “The result is that a war sold to Africans, Asians and Belarusians is sold with the tools of the countries that publicly oppose it.”

Code for Africa said Western technology companies could easily remove accounts, advertisements and services being exploited by the networks — and many of the recruitment sites aren’t exactly hiding from view. Meta has so far taken down more than 300 ad campaigns linked to these recruiters, Justin Arenstein, director of Code for Africa, said.

Frontline traffic

Searches conducted from inside the EU for “contract service” or “engineer contract for foreigners” in Russian or “join Russian army as a foreigner legal benefits citizenship” in English lead users directly to recruitment websites.

The researchers also found a striking difference in how Google’s AI-generated search summaries presented the schemes depending on language. In EU languages, warnings about the risks were displayed prominently, while in other languages those warnings appeared much further down.

Alex McPhillips, a Google spokesperson for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, contested certain claims in the investigation, notably reports that the majority of the sites mentioned used Google ads. Nonetheless he said the company is “actively investigating” all elements of the report. “We have strict policies and systems governing our products that are designed to protect people and ensure access to reliable information, and we take enforcement action when we find violations,” McPhillips said.

While there is no independently verified total of foreign recruits, Ukrainian officials have estimated that some 1,700 to 1,800 people from 36 African countries have been recruited to fight for Russia in Ukraine. Moscow disputes allegations of organized recruitment and has maintained that African recruits joined voluntarily.

Adverts on Facebook recruiting African men to fight for Russia. | Code for Africa

The issue has reached the highest diplomatic levels. In March, Kenyan Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi raised the issue with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while South African President Cyril Ramaphosa reportedly spoke directly about it with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Will Brown, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Moscow had built up an immense propaganda system aimed at Africa, with tens of thousands of bots, influencers and content marketers tasked with weaving a compelling story for the continent, where Russia presents itself as a champion of freedom, sovereignty and African dignity.

“At first, we thought this propaganda system was just being used to shift public opinion. But now it’s clear the system is also being used to traffic desperate young men to the frontline,” Brown said. “They tell stories of racial abuse, having their money stolen and being forced to sign contracts they don’t understand and a week’s training before being thrown into a minefield.”

He added that ECFR had separately recently identified a significant network recruiting African women for jobs in Russia’s drone and weapons factories. Advertisements have appeared on online forums and even public billboards in major African cities such as the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

“Like the men, they are tricked and coopted,” Brown added. But escaping can be even harder, he added, because the women can find themselves far from African embassies and other potential sources of help.

This article has been updated.