When Fighters Come Home — and What the State Does Not Have Ready

Out of a group of 14 Ghanaians lured to Russia in August 2024 — promised security work and agricultural jobs — only three were known to be alive a month after they arrived. The others had been deployed to the front line in Ukraine after a few days of training and absorbed into what Ukrainian officials call "meat assaults": waves of bodies thrown at fortified positions to exhaust the defence. The lucky ones ended up in prisoner-of-war camps. The unlucky ones did not.

Three survivors. Fourteen men. One month. This is not an abstraction about regional security dynamics. It is what the labour market for violence looks like when the state has nothing credible to offer instead.

The Ghanaian case is not an outlier. It is a data point in a pattern that now spans the continent. A documented investigation compiled through NGOs and Ukraine's prisoner repatriation programme has identified over 1,400 fighters from 36 African countries enlisted into the Russian military between 2023 and mid-2025. The figure is acknowledged to be non-exhaustive. The actual number is almost certainly higher.

The West African corridor is particularly active. Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon all appear in the recruitment networks. What draws men in is not ideology. It is the oldest logic in the world: the promise of wages that nothing at home can match — a $13,000 signing bonus, monthly pay of up to $3,500, and a Russian passport at the end of service. The pitch is delivered in Twi. In Igbo. In Pidgin English. Recruitment videos circulate on TikTok explicitly targeting home-country audiences. This is not opportunism. It is infrastructure.

The departure of these men often feels, to the state, like relief. Pressure eases. Idle young men leave. Potential unrest is exported. The problem appears solved by absence. But absence is not resolution. It is deferral — and deferral accumulates interest.

What matters is not only that these men leave, but what they become while away. Combat teaches discipline under fire, small-unit coordination, weapons handling, and an intimacy with risk that does not fade easily. It also teaches something more corrosive: that violence can be organised, compensated, and normalised. When these men return — or circulate through the region — they re-enter society carrying capabilities the state rarely tracks and almost never plans for.

Criminal organisations, political patrons, and armed entrepreneurs are quick to recognise value where the state has not. Skills learned abroad find new applications at home.

This is not a moral failure of individuals. It is a design failure of institutions. And the institutional design failure has a specific geography.

There is a second strand to this story that rarely appears in the same conversation as the Ukraine recruitment pipeline, but belongs alongside it. The Sahel now accounts for over half of all global terrorism casualties. ECOWAS recorded 450 attacks and over 1,900 deaths across West Africa in the first eleven months of 2025 alone. JNIM — the al-Qaeda affiliate that has blockaded Bamako, overrun military bases, and deployed drones and IEDs against government forces across Mali and Burkina Faso — is not staying in the Sahel. It is moving south.

JNIM has already mounted cross-border incursions into northern Ghana, Togo, and Benin, establishing clandestine cells in border communities where state presence is thin and local grievances run deep. In January 2025, JNIM-claimed attacks in northern Benin killed 28 Beninese soldiers. A separate Nigerian extremist group established a foothold in Benin's Borgou Department as recently as June 2025, following military pressure in Nigeria. These are not distant early-warning signals. They are events that have already happened.

Border opacity compounds everything. States that struggle to manage exit rarely manage return better. Fighters re-enter quietly, without documentation, assessment, or follow-up. Intelligence services often learn of their presence indirectly, if at all. Reintegration programmes — where they exist — are underfunded, symbolic, and structurally disconnected from the security agencies that most need the information.

Employment policy is decisive here. States that offer credible pathways back into lawful work reduce the appeal of armed entrepreneurship. States that do not effectively subsidise the reuse of violent skill. Reintegration is not charity. It is containment. It channels capacity away from informal coercion and back into legible economic life.

Hinge states — those that sit between Sahel conflict zones and the coast, that export labour and import return risk, that host US surveillance operations in one conversation and receive Ukrainian diplomatic pressure in another — face this challenge more acutely than others. Their relative stability makes them attractive destinations for return. Their borders connect conflict zones to calmer markets. Pretending this is not happening is an invitation to surprise.

Walter Kwami writes on systems, governance, and the structures that determine outcomes. This dispatch draws on CNN and PBS investigations into African recruitment networks (2025–26), RFI's reporting on fighter deaths and families, the French Institute of International Relations December 2025 report, and UN Security Council briefings on West Africa and the Sahel.