Finding Fighters Abroad: Russia’s Foreign Recruitment Strategies

In 2024, Harry Stevens wrote “Strangers in the Motherland: The Dynamics of Russia’s Foreign Recruitment,” where he explained the various dynamics of the Kremlin’s foreign recruitment enterprise. A year later, amidst many war developments, we asked Harry to revisit his arguments. Image: The Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2024 article, “Strangers in the Motherland: The Dynamics of Russia’s Foreign Recruitment,” you argued many foreign recruitment schemes were likely funded and operated by provincial governments rather than by the Kremlin itself. Is that still the case today? Why is this distinction important?I believe it’s likely that most foreign recruitment schemes are still operated by provincial governments, as opposed to the Kremlin. The underlying cost concerns that motivated the offloading of foreign recruitment onto the provinces are still operational, arguably more so as funding the war becomes ever more challenging. This would also be in accord with ongoing patterns of burden-shifting, not least the insistence that provincial governments pay hefty enlistment bonuses with their own funds.That being said, it’s likely that these campaigns have been carried out in closer coordination with the Kremlin over the last year. Many of the efforts I analyzed in the original article were little more than human trafficking operations, tricking foreigners with offers of factory jobs. The reality of these programs led to efforts to prosecute organizers and break up recruitment rings. Anecdotally, the rate and intensity of efforts to suppress foreign recruiting seem to have declined. This would be consistent with the increased involvement of the Kremlin to secure non-intervention from foreign governments.The distinction between provincially led versus Kremlin-first foreign recruitment schemes offers us an indicator of the difficulty the latter is operating under. As the war has generally contributed to a centralization of power under the Kremlin, instances where power