Moscow Now Recruiting Muslim Tatars for Its Africa Corps Because They’ll Find It Easier to Work with Muslims in Northwest Africa

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 5 – Moscow has become notorious for recruiting non-Russians and using foreigners to fight in its war in Ukraine. That effort reflects both the lack of a sufficient number of ethnic Russians and the Kremlin’s desire to hide just how much of an impact Putin’s war is having on the population of the Russian Federation.

            But now, the IdelReal portal suggests, it is seeking to recruit men from Tatarstan and Russia’s other Muslim republics to fight in its Africa Corps because their religious and cultural background will make it easier for them to work in the Muslim countries of northwest Africa (idelreal.org/a/sluzhba-v-afrike-tatarstan-i-afrikanskiy-korpus/33404934.html).

            There are Soviet and even tsarist precedents for doing using Muslims in this way, but this marks the first time that Moscow has launched such a broad effort in that regard, something that may backfire on the Kremlin by highlighting its need for men from the Muslim nationalities, which are the only nations in the Russian Federation still showing demographic growth.