An INPACT investigation reveals 234 Ghanaian men enlisted in the Russian army since 2023 55 of them confirmed killed in Ukraine
In a video that circulated on social media and was obtained by investigators, a group of young Ghanaian men in military fatigues speak directly into the camera in Twi, Ghana’s most widely spoken local language. Their message is disarmingly casual: “Go to Fly Away travel agency, trust them, they will take you to Russia. It’s not a lie. We are all Ghanaians and we made it here. These are our weapons.”
The weapons they display are Russian-issued assault rifles. The landscape behind them is the frozen terrain of eastern Ukraine.
That video, now part of a sweeping investigative dossier published in February 2026 by INPACT a France-based investigative research organization has laid bare one of the most disturbing dimensions of Russia’s war in Ukraine: the systematic recruitment of young Ghanaians, lured by the promise of salaries, passports, and a better life, only to find themselves deployed as frontline assault troops in one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century.
234 GHANAIANS, 55 DEAD
The INPACT report, titled The Business of Despair: The Russian Army’s Recruiting of African Fighters, is based on a database of 1,417 African nationals who signed formal military contracts with the Russian armed forces between January 2023 and September 2025. The database was obtained through contacts linked to the Ukrainian project Khochu Zhit translated as “I Want to Live” a Ukrainian initiative that tracks foreign nationals recruited into the Russian military.
Ghana is the third-largest contributor to this grim register, with 234 confirmed Ghanaian recruits identified in the database. Only Egypt, with 361 men, and Cameroon, with 335, contributed larger contingents from the African continent.
More chilling still is the death toll. Of the 1,417 Africans on the list, 316 have been confirmed killed in action. Ghanaians account for 55 of those deaths the second-highest national death count after Cameroon’s 94. The youngest Ghanaian recruit listed in the database was just 18 years old, making Ghana the country of origin of the youngest African fighter identified in the entire investigation.
INPACT cautions that the database is almost certainly not exhaustive. Crosschecking it against separate records of African combat deaths in Ukraine uncovered additional names not found in the master list, meaning the true number of Ghanaian recruits and Ghanaian dead is likely higher than currently documented.
THE TRAVEL AGENCY AT THE CENTRE
The trail leads, in significant part, to a Ghanaian travel agency with branches in Accra, Kumasi, and Sunyani: Fly Away Travel & Tour, linked to an individual named Nana Adjei Acheampong.
According to INPACT’s investigation, Fly Away was directly named in the video of Ghanaian fighters recorded from inside Russia. When investigators contacted the agency, it initially confirmed its involvement in facilitating travel to Russia in writing, before subsequently issuing a denial.
The agency also operates a branch in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, giving it a transnational footprint well suited to routing young men through multiple jurisdictions before delivering them into the hands of Russian military recruiters. INPACT notes that the agency maintains a “very discreet” profile regarding the precise nature of its services a discretion that stands in sharp contrast to the explicitness of the Ghanaian fighters’ video endorsement.
Fly Away is not alone. The INPACT investigation maps an entire ecosystem of travel agencies, social media groups, Telegram channels, and WhatsApp networks operating across West Africa to funnel recruits to Russia. Some advertise directly for the Russian army. Others maintain the veneer of tourism or study facilitation while serving, in practice, as logistical pipelines for military recruitment.
THE PROMISE AND THE REALITY
The recruiters’ pitch is carefully crafted to resonate with the aspirations of young Ghanaians facing limited economic opportunities at home. Advertisements, many circulating on Facebook and TikTok the platforms most used by young Africans, according to INPACT offer signing bonuses of between USD 2,000 and USD 30,000, monthly salaries of USD 2,200 to USD 2,500, free flights to Russia, free medical coverage, and perhaps most enticingly Russian citizenship within three to six months of signing a contract.
For a young Ghanaian man in his twenties confronting unemployment, or trapped in a low-wage job in Qatar or Dubai, the offer can appear transformative. The case of Marfo Nicholas Kwaku, a Ghanaian teacher who had gone to Qatar to work during the FIFA World Cup windfall and found himself unemployed, illustrates how the recruitment pipeline captures men already in vulnerable situations abroad, not just at home.
A recruiter approached him with the Russian opportunity. By April 2025, his family was tracking his location via Facebook posts from Tutaev, a city some 300 kilometers northeast of Moscow.
By mid-May 2025, after photographs emerged showing him in Russian military uniform alongside other foreign recruits, his family heard nothing further.
Marfo Nicholas Kwaku appears in the INPACT killed-in-action appendix.
The reality confronting those who make the journey is starkly different from what was advertised. Africans captured by Ukrainian forces on the battlefield have consistently described being rushed through a contract they could not read written entirely in Cyrillic and deployed almost immediately to assault positions on the front. The average length of service before death among the African recruits on the INPACT list is just six months. More than 50 recruits were killed within a single month of enlisting.
GHANA’S SILENCE
Despite the scale of what the INPACT data reveals 55 Ghanaian men confirmed dead fighting for a foreign power in a war that has nothing to do with Ghana the government in Accra has yet to issue any substantive public response to the phenomenon.
Ghana is not alone in this silence. INPACT notes that the majority of African governments have neither acknowledged nor acted against the Russian recruitment networks operating within their borders. Togo stands as one of the few exceptions, with its Ministry of Foreign Affairs issuing a warning to citizens after several Togolese nationals were captured in Ukraine. South Africa dismantled a recruitment ring in December 2025 and charged five individuals, including a prominent radio presenter. Kenya conducted police raids against human trafficking networks running the pipeline to Russia.
Ghana has done none of these things despite the fact that the recruitment infrastructure operating within its territory is documented, named, and traceable.
The Ghanaian men appearing in the INPACT kill list span a wide age range, from young men in their early twenties to those in their forties. Their names Aboagye-Mensah Isaac, Nkrumah Joshua Kwaku, Owusu Gabriel, Essuman Humphrey Fiifi, Bio Derrick, Acheampong Charles, and dozens more read as a cross-section of Ghanaian society.
Christians and Muslims. Akan and northern names side by side. Men from across the country’s social fabric, united in death under the Russian tricolor.
A COMMERCIAL ECOSYSTEM BUILT ON DESPAIR
What INPACT has uncovered is not a simple story of individual deception. It is a structured, transnational commercial ecosystem that has grown up around Russia’s need for cannon fodder in Ukraine.
At the top sits what investigators believe is coordination at least partial by Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB. A Russian national operating in Kenyan WhatsApp job groups, who described himself as acting on behalf of the FSB through a shell company called OneClickVisa, offered undercover INPACT researchers two options: enlist directly for USD 2,500 to USD 5,000 per month, or become a local recruiter and earn USD 500 to USD 700 for each contract signed within two weeks.
Below that level operates a dense network of travel agencies, local recruiters, pro-Kremlin influencers, and crucially former recruits who have returned, or who post from inside Russia, effectively serving as living advertisements for the pipeline they entered.
The INPACT report also identifies the Alabuga industrial zone in Tatarstan home to an Iranian drone manufacturing plant that supplies Russia’s war effort as operating its own parallel recruitment programme, the Alabuga Start initiative, which specifically targets young African women between 18 and 22 years old for factory work.
Russia, in other words, is running an entire human resource extraction operation across Africa, drawing in young men for its frontlines and young women for its war factories.
WHAT GHANA MUST DO
The INPACT report’s recommendations offer a clear roadmap for African governments, including Ghana. Investigators call for classifying Russia as a high-risk destination for employment purposes, reducing or eliminating quotas that allow agencies to place Ghanaian workers in Russia, and mandating higher due diligence standards for any operator facilitating travel or employment in Russian territory.
More immediately, the Ghanaian government should investigate Fly Away Travel & Tour and its documented role in facilitating the movement of Ghanaian nationals into the Russian military. The agency’s initial written confirmation of its involvement, before its subsequent denial, constitutes a thread that Ghanaian law enforcement and immigration authorities are duty-bound to pull.
Beyond enforcement, there is a public education imperative. The recruiters have seized the informational spaces where young Ghanaians spend their digital lives Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp and they have populated those spaces with seductive imagery of Ghanaian men living well in Russia, earning salaries their peers at home can only dream of. Counter-messaging that is equally targeted, equally visual, and grounded in the documented fate of the 55 dead in the real stories of men like Marfo Nicholas Kwaku is urgently needed.
The 55 names in the INPACT appendix are not statistics. They are Ghanaian sons, brothers, and fathers who went to Russia chasing a dream and came back if they came back at all in silence. Ghana owes them, and the families they left behind, a reckoning with how they got there and a determination that no more will follow.
Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
[email protected]
+233-555-275-880
