Ukrainian POW camp where an African who fought for Russia waits for the end of war

Mohamed Salah is a 23-year-old would-be Android IT developer from Egypt. Now, he is being held in a prisoner-of-war camp in western Ukraine, with a release date which is probably as uncertain as the duration of the war itself.

Salah was studying IT Android programming in Russia last year, when his visa expiry date loomed. He was told he needed a Russian passport to remain in the country to complete his studies.

The only way he could get a Russian passport was to volunteer for military service. He did that and was called up to fight on the frontline in Ukraine. After three months of training, he was thrown into the ferocious warfare in Ukraine’s eastern province of Donetsk, which he doesn’t want to talk about. He was injured by a Ukrainian drone on his first mission.

He says his wound was “dangerous” but that the Ukrainians treated him well in a hospital in Dnipro before he was moved to the capital, Kyiv, and then here.

There have been reports of other Africans being tricked into fighting for Russia after being lured to the country under false pretences. But Salah said he knew what he was getting into — even though he regrets volunteering and said he wouldn’t do it again.

He now believes Russia’s war against Ukraine is wrong.

He is optimistic that he will be a free man soon. He believes that as a soldier who served Russia as well as any Russian, he should be part of one of the regular prisoner-of-war swaps between the two countries.

However, he noted, none of the foreign soldiers being held in the camp where he was had been freed — only Russian nationals.

“Are you being discriminated against?” Daily Maverick asked him. “Maybe after the war,” he would be released, he replied, and would then return to Russia to complete his studies.

He has a wife and daughter in Russia and parents in Egypt, where he would like to visit soon, but he thinks there may be a case against him there for joining a foreign military force (which is also an offence in South Africa).

Salah says the general treatment he receives in the prison is “normal”.  Like others, he works an eight-hour daily shift, in his case making wire and wooden frames for beehives.

“Josh”, a Ghanaian held in the prison, was deceived into fighting for Russia, according to an account he gave to the Ghanaian journalist Kent Mensah, who was part of a group of African journalists, including Daily Maverick, who were shown around the prison by Ukrainian authorities.

Mensah wrote in Africa Report that Josh was in Moscow last year, planning to begin studying, but missed a deadline to register, and his visa was about to expire. A Nigerian acquaintance, Kylian, offered him a job as a security guard in territory captured by the Russian military.

“The job came with promises of a fast-tracked Russian passport and a monthly salary of 195,000 roubles (around $2,480). It sounded like salvation.”

Hit by a bomb

Josh signed a contract in July 2025, but instead of guarding buildings, he was given a crash course in military training. Then he was sent to the frontline in Donetsk, where a bomb dropped by a Ukrainian drone hit the tank he was in, killing eight of his comrades. He was captured.

An Ecuadorian national, William Vladimir Luje Kimia, had a similar experience to the Egyptian Salah. He had been studying engineering in the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don for three years, earning money by doing various jobs, including chef and programmer.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the West retaliated with sanctions against the Russian banking system. Kimia ran out of money and faced deportation, so he joined the Russian army to get a Russian passport to guarantee his continued residence in Russia.

He was badly injured last year in the fierce fighting around the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk province when a bullet grazed his lung. He was captured and spent three months recuperating in a Ukrainian hospital.

The Ukrainian authorities told Daily Maverick that there was also a South African in the camp, but he did not wish to be interviewed.

The building that houses the camp has a rugged industrial look and dates back to at least World War Two, when it was first used by the Germans to imprison Soviet soldiers as the Germans marched eastward, then later by the Russians to confine Germans when the German army retreated. After that, it became a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts.

A prison official told us that there were many non-Russian POWs “because Russia goes to great lengths to recruit people from other countries — in Africa, Asia and South America — to try to show they are receiving global support for their war, which is a lie”.

The camp seemed, from our tour, to be reasonably comfortable. The beds looked okay, the water was hot, and the prisoners got soap, toothpaste and deodorant.

They work an eight-hour shift in the hospital or kitchen or in the workshops making basic things like garden furniture and, rather anomalously, Christmas trees. They get paid $9 a month “for chocolates”, as our guide said, which they can buy along with other goodies at the tuckshop. They get one hour off for exercise, which could be playing soccer or pumping iron in the gym.

The wardens said they eat the same food as the inmates. We tried it and it was tolerable.

The POWs also get parcels of food from their families, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other charities.

The ICRC visits every two months and stays for two weeks to check that the prisoners are not being abused, said the prison authorities. They do not see the full ICRC reports, only the recommendations for changes, which, they said, were minor, such as a prisoner requesting a cat for psychological comfort, which was refused.

We met no prisoners of Russian nationality.

Jailed for murder

We did, however, meet a pro-Russian separatist, Andrey Maslov (58), making garden furniture in the prison workshop. He is a Ukrainian national from Donetsk province, and joined the Russian army in exchange for freedom from the prison where he was serving a sentence for murder. He was promised freedom after six months of fighting, but that didn’t happen. He was captured after two years of military service.

“Even my prison term has now expired,” he remarked ruefully. “To be honest, no one needs this war.”

When we picked him from a lineup in the courtyard, Igor Zubachov seemed to be Russian. But it turned out that he was also a Ukrainian from Russian-occupied Donetsk, and like Maslov, a pro-Russian separatist.

He was mobilised by the Russian army in 2022 after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was in charge of a medical evacuation unit and, during the fierce fighting around Avdiivka in Donetsk, was ambushed by Ukrainian soldiers while picking up wounded Russian soldiers. He had been in prison for 26 months.

Our interview soon turned into a rather heated but frank debate between African journalists, Ukrainian officials and Zubachov.

He said everything was fine in this prison, but at his first prison in the east, “they hit and tortured me … but it was no surprise because, as I was told, I was a Ukrainian fighting against my own”.

Prison officials escorting the journalists asked him why he was fighting against his people, and he replied that in his home in eastern Donbas, “I saw civilians die, children die, so I joined the Russians to defend my family.”

“How did you feel about killing your fellow citizens?” asked an official. “They were shooting at me, I was shooting at them,” he replied.

Would he do it again? Yes, he said, but not because he wanted anyone to die at his hands, “but because I would still have had no choice”.

However, later he said that if he were to be freed in an exchange, he would not return to fighting.

He said he wanted Donetsk to be part of Russia. “I was thinking of that happening in a peaceful way, but the way it did happen was terrifying.”

Colonel Andriy Chernyak of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence Agency told us that Russia had resettled eastern Ukraine with Russians after wiping out much of the Ukrainian population in the Holodomor, the genocidal famine of 1932-1933.

“Due to propaganda, those people considered themselves Russians exclusively.”

In reality, he said, “Russia uses these people as cannon fodder. They don’t know if they will be exchanged because Russians don’t consider those people their own.” DM

Peter Fabricius was among a group of African journalists who recently conducted a study tour to the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine, sponsored by the governments of those three countries and the European Union.