I Dream of Heroic Africans Fighting for Ukraine

Western money plus third world manpower can defeat Putin

In August 2024, Ukrainian forces launched an incursion into Kursk Oblast, capturing settlements and creating a salient inside Russia. Though the territory taken was small, at its peak about 500 square miles and 92 settlements, this was something new in the war, as it was the only time that Ukraine gained significant land within Russia, instead of defending or regaining its own.

After eight months of struggle, Russia finally announced that it had retaken the entire territory. Yet the Kursk incursion appears to have caused a major headache for Putin. Throughout most of the war, Russia has been gaining territory on an inch-by-inch basis. But when it came to reestablishing control within Russia proper, Putin was willing to do whatever it took to move at a faster pace. Part of his strategy involved recruiting North Koreans to fight on his behalf. The number of North Koreans dead or wounded in the Kursk fighting is estimated by British intelligence to have been 6,000, more than half of those sent off to the war. ChatGPT gives me a very unscientific estimate that perhaps 20% of the casualties on the Russian side in Kursk were North Korean. The troops were sent there having no idea what they were fighting for, but they were apparently good enough soldiers and willing to risk their lives.

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If paying North Koreans to fight is so effective, it’s an interesting question why Putin doesn’t use them all the time. The reason is probably that he cared a lot more about getting Kursk back than making incremental gains in Ukraine. The Kursk salient was a blot on the Russian war effort, and governments are often compelled to take extreme measures when facing an emergency. See Operation Warp Speed. It would be a good idea if we cut more red tape to help drug development along as a general matter, but it took Covid-19 for us to make a respectable effort to do so in the case of testing and manufacturing vaccines.

Putin probably feels that using North Koreans, or other third worlders, in Ukraine is bad PR. But here we have a proof of concept. At least some of the North Koreans appear to have been conscripted and sent to Russia instead of volunteering. But recruiting poor mercenaries is a tried and true strategy around the world. The Wagner Group has hired soldiers from Syria and Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, it was reported that up to 14,000 militiamen, mostly from Darfur, had been recruited to fight with Saudi- and UAE-supported forces in Yemen. They were making around $500 a month, which was more than a Sudanese doctor working full time. The fighters also received a few hundred more each month they saw combat, along with an approximately $10,000 one-time bonus after six months of service. In total, each soldier would cost less than $20,000 in his first year.

Setting aside the situation of a handful of minors, there is nothing to indicate that the Sudanese militiamen were not making a rational economic decision. Their lives had been awful, and $20,000 could do a lot to improve their condition. Some may get injured or die, but I don’t have any reason to believe they were not accurately judging their circumstances.

Ukrainians are much more expensive. Someone fighting in combat operations for 30 consecutive days against the Russians makes around $2,900 to $3,200 a month. For those on the front line or in the enemy rear, pay can be nearly $5,000 a month. Even if you include their bonus, the Darfuris are less than a third of that. You might have to adjust the numbers to account for the fighting being riskier in Ukraine than Yemen, but I’d be surprised if Africans didn’t end up much cheaper regardless.

The way I see the Ukraine War, the international community has an interest in maintaining the territorial integrity norm. We cannot countenance a country taking land from others just because it can. Even if it does succeed, it’s better for the effort to be costly than for it to be cheap. For believers in liberalism, there are also interests in not giving Putin a moral victory, and having a free, intact, and successful Ukraine, since it would like to pivot to the West while Russia has determined to remain backwards.

Ukraine’s victory benefits the whole world, but Ukrainians themselves have borne the vast majority of the direct costs of fighting Russia. They are getting tired of it, and I don’t blame them. It’s interesting that Ukraine has a minimum age for the draft, which in 2024 was lowered from 27 to 25. I can’t find a historical example of a minimum conscription age anywhere near that high in any country facing a major war. Russia similarly has an official government policy of not sending conscripts to Ukraine, though in practice many do end up getting talked or coerced into going. Normally, Putin would rather risk the lives of older soldiers, convicts, and North Koreans.

Saviors of the West?

It seems that recruiting Africans to fight in Ukraine would solve this dilemma. Ukraine wants to expel the Russians, but its problem is a lack of manpower. The West has a lot of money and an interest in Ukraine winning. There’s no particular reason that Ukrainians themselves have to fight. Africa sits there, a continent full of people in dire straits who would take major risks in order to get paid an amount of money that is quite small by Western standards. Some will complain that this is “exploitative,” but these are the same kinds of people who dislike the immigration systems of the Gulf Arabs. They are bad at moral reasoning, and act as if by keeping poor people far away and out of sight, rather than giving them opportunities to improve their lot, you are protecting them. There is no way we can have enough contempt for those who think that you can commit a harm by providing a struggling person with an option they would not otherwise have.

You probably can’t be too honest about what you are doing here, as there is the PR issue. If we had real intelligence agencies, they would recruit the Africans and pay them but sell the world on the idea that they were all coming to Ukraine because they read about their struggle for freedom and felt inspired to join in. Once we get used to Africans in the Donbas, perhaps we can be more open about what is going on and scale up the operation. We could also of course recruit people from outside the African continent, in places such as the Middle East and Central Asia.

But Africans in particular would pose more of a PR nightmare for Putin than for Ukraine. What would it look like for Russians to be gunning down poor black people fighting for freedom? Imagine the documentaries Ken Burns would make about this. It can throw a wrench in Putin’s desire to present himself as the leader of the developing world coalition. Ideally, we could buy off some African leaders too, who would have an interest in their country getting remittances from those going to fight.

Plus, as we’ve learned from college and professional sports, there are few things whites find more pleasurable than watching black people engage in heroic physical feats. As the Ukrainian cause has lost its luster, Africans fighting for freedom can reinvigorate support for the war. I imagine glowing profiles of Mwamba from the slums of Kinshasa reading Thomas Jefferson by candlelight in the trenches. It doesn’t have to be as cynical as that sounds. Let the Africans know that they’re part of history, and the rules-based international order rests on their shoulders.

We would end up having a war with liberal whites and third worlders trying to better their material conditions on one side, and the leader of the Rightoid International teaming up with the slave state of North Korea on the other. This would make clear the most important ideological dividing line that will shape the next few decades of world politics.

It appears that the Trump administration is sick of the war in Ukraine, and is prioritizing forcing some kind of settlement. Whether it succeeds or not, unresolved issues will remain, and we should be prepared for the possibility that even if the parties agree to a ceasefire, the conflict will flare up again. Ukraine will then be stuck in the exact same situation, with the lack of manpower being its main challenge. Hopefully leaders in Kiev and across Western capitals will keep in mind that there are untold millions out there who would be delighted to join the historical struggle for freedom for a fraction of the cost of conventional soldiers.