"‘Bullet in my head’: The Indian man who crawled to escape Russia’s Ukraine war,"

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It was the dream of a new start that made Prince and his fishermen cousins, Vineeth Silva and Tinu Paniadiam, all in their early 20s, decide to migrate to Russia in January.

Increasingly erratic weather patterns have reduced both the number of days fisherfolk can head out to sea and the catch they return with. The shoreline has suffered from human activity. And there are few other jobs around...

The offer of a job as a security guard in Russia, which came through a recruiter, proved irresistible for Prince and his cousins. In freezing January, they arrived in Moscow after each paying $8,000 to the recruiter, only to be separated on landing by the recruiter’s Indian representative in Moscow...

“Finally, the truth emerged – we weren’t there for the advertised position; we were expected to join the Russian army as helpers,” Prince said.

The recruiter, whom the cousins had already paid in full, was no longer reachable. “We had no choice but to follow the representative’s orders,” Prince added.

A Russian official took Prince to an army camp in Rostov, the southern Russian city that is the headquarters of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. The officers spoke to Prince in English, but he had to sign several documents in Russian – which he couldn’t understand...

Finally, Prince returned home on April 3. On the way to Kerala, he had to stop in New Delhi, where he was debriefed by Indian security officials, who, in recent weeks, have made arrests and conducted raids against recruiters accused of luring people to Russia on false pretexts.

But the pattern of vulnerable Indians finding themselves trapped in job scams overseas is not limited to Russia’s war in Ukraine, experts say.

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