A Kenyan family is seeking answers and support to repatriate the body of their 29-year-old relative, who was killed in Ukraine while fighting for Russia.
Clinton Nyapara Mogesa, 29, initially left Kenya for a job in Qatar in 2024, and his family later learned that he had then travelled to Russia.
On Saturday, Ukrainian authorities reported that he had died in a so-called “meat assault” – one involving high casualty numbers – in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, after being recruited in Qatar. They said the Russians did not evacuate his body, and he was carrying the passports of two other Kenyans.
His death comes amid growing concerns about Kenyans being recruited to fight in the war in Ukraine.
Mogesa’s family told local Citizen TV that they had sold land to raise money for him to travel to Qatar in search of employment.
“His death has shocked us,” his brother Joel Mogere told the station. He said Mogesa was the last-born and “the breadwinner and the hope of this family”.
His mother, Mellen Moraa, said she was diabetic and that her son used to pay for her medication and take care of her, and said she did not know what to do.
“I plead with the government for help,” she added.
The government last month said that 18 Kenyans who had been fighting in Russia had been rescued and repatriated.
Last November, Kenya’s foreign minister said about 200 Kenyans were known to be fighting for Russia and that recruitment networks were still active.
Other African countries have reported cases of young people being approached with offers of lucrative jobs in Russia that later led to military recruitment.
Ukraine’s intelligence assessment estimates that more than 1,400 people from 36 countries in Africa have been recruited to fight for Russia.
Ukraine has in the past repeatedly warned that anyone fighting for Russia would be treated as an enemy combatant, with the safe route out being to surrender.
Ukraine’s intelligence agency on Saturday cautioned foreign nationals against travelling to Russia or accepting employment there, particularly informal or illegal work.
It said travelling there “carries a real risk of being forcibly deployed to assault units without adequate training and with little to no chance of survival”.
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[Getty Images/BBC]
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At least 21 have been killed in a Russian air strike on a village in eastern Ukraine, say local Ukrainian officials.
The victims were ordinary people collecting their pensions in the Donetsk settlement of Yarova, said President Volodymr Zelensky. Donetsk regional leader Vadym Filkashkin said emergency services were at the scene, and that as many people were wounded as killed.
Yarova is to the north of Sloviansk, one of the big cities in the region, and not far from the front line as Russian forces advance slowly in the east.
If confirmed, the death toll would be among the heaviest attacks on Ukrainian civilians in recent weeks, 42 months into Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Donetsk’s regional leader shared an image of the attack’s aftermath, parts of which are too graphic to show [Vadym Filashkin/Telegram]
At least 23 people were killed in overnight air strikes on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv at the end of August.
At the weekend Russia launched its biggest air assault of the war on Kyiv so far, hitting the main government building in the capital, in what Zelensky said was a “ruthless” attack aimed at prolonging the war.
Posting graphic footage of the attack on Yarova online, Zelensky said there were “no words” to describe the latest Russian strikes. There was no immediate response from Russia’s military.
Vadym Filashkin said the attack took place at 12:30 on Tuesday as pensions were being handed out.
Yarova sites on a key railway line in Donetsk, between Lyman and Izium. It is also only 6km (3.6 miles) away from the next village of Novoselivka, where Russian forces are closing in on the outskirts.
Ukraine’s state emergency service said another three people had died in earlier Russian shelling of settlements in Donetsk.
“The world must not remain silent,” Zelensky said, calling for a response from both the US, Europe and the G20 group of nations.
The Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine has long been in Moscow’s sights. Vladimir Putin reportedly wants to freeze the war in return for full control of it.
Russia already controls 70% of Donetsk and nearly all of neighbouring Luhansk and is making slow but steady advances.
I’m heading to the front-line Donetsk town of Dobropillia with two humanitarian volunteers, just 8km (five miles) from Russia’s positions. They’re on a mission to bring the sick, elderly and children to safer ground.
At first, it goes like clockwork. We speed into the town in an armoured car, equipped with rooftop drone-jamming equipment, hitting 130km/h (80mph). The road is covered in tall green netting which obscures visibility from above – protecting it from Russian drones.
[BBC]
This is their second trip of the morning, and the streets are mostly empty. The few remaining residents only leave their homes to quickly collect supplies. Russian attacks come daily.
The town already looks abandoned and has been without water for a week. Every building we pass has been damaged, with some reduced to ruins.
In the previous five days, Laarz, a 31-year-old German, and Varia, a 19-year-old Ukrainian, who work for the charity Universal Aid Ukraine, have made dozens of trips to evacuate people.
Evacuees leave the town of Dobropillia in Donetsk, Ukraine [BBC]
A week earlier, small groups of Russian troops breached the defences around the town, sparking fears that the front line of Ukraine’s so-called “fortress belt” – some of the most heavily defended parts of the Ukrainian front – could collapse.
Extra troops were rushed to the area and Ukrainian authorities say the situation has been stabilised. But most of Dobropillia’s residents feel it’s time to go.
Laarz and Varia make evacuation trips for the charity Universal Action Ukraine [BBC News]
As the evacuation team arrives, Vitalii Kalinichenko, 56, is waiting on the doorstep of his apartment block, with a plastic bag full of belongings in hand.
“My windows were all smashed, look, they all flew out on the second floor. I’m the only one left,” he says.
He’s wearing a grey t-shirt and black shorts, and his right leg is bandaged. Mr Kalinichenko points to a crater beyond some rose bushes where a Shahed drone crashed a couple of nights earlier, shattering his windows and cutting his leg. The engine from another drone lies in a neighbour’s garden.
As we are about to leave, Laarz spots a drone overhead and we take cover again under trees. His handheld drone detector shows multiple Russian drones in the area.
Varia holding a drone detector standing beside Dobropillia resident Vitalii Kalinichenko [BBC]
An older woman in a summer dress and straw hat is walking by with a shopping trolley. He warns her about the drone, and she quickens her pace. An explosion hits nearby, its sound echoing off the nearby apartment blocks.
But before we can attempt to leave, there is still another family to be rescued, just around the corner.
Laarz goes on foot to find them, switching off the idling vehicle’s drone-jamming equipment to save battery power. “If you hear a drone, it’s the two switches in the middle console, turn it on,” he says as he disappears around the corner. The jammer is only effective against some Russian drones.
A series of blasts hit the neighbourhood. A woman, out to fetch water with her dog, runs for cover.
[BBC]
Laarz returns with more evacuees, and with drones still in the air above, drives out of town even faster than he arrived.
Inside the evacuation convoy, I sit beside Anton, 31. His mother stayed behind. She cried as he departed and he hopes she will leave too soon.
In war, front lines shift, towns are lost and won and lost again, but with Russia advancing and the fate of the region hanging on negotiations, this may be the final time Anton and the other evacuees see their homes.
Anton says he’s never left the town before. Over the roar of the engine, I ask him if Ukraine should relinquish Donbas – the resource-rich greater region made up of Donetsk and Luhansk.
“We need to sit at the negotiation table and after all resolve this conflict in a peaceful way. Without blood, without victims,” he says.
A mother says goodbye to her son before his evacuation [BBC News]
But Varia, 19, feels differently. “We can never trust Putin or Russia, whatever they are saying, and we have experience of that. If we give them Donbas, it won’t stop anything but only give Russia more room for another attack,” she tells me.
The situation in Donbas is increasingly perilous for Ukraine as Russia slowly but steadily advances. President Volodymyr Zelensky has scoffed at suggestions that it could be lost by the end of this year, predicting it would take four more years for Russia to fully occupy what remains.
But it’s unlikely Ukraine will recapture significant territory here without new weaponry or additional support from the West.
This part of Donetsk is critical to Ukraine’s defensive. If lost or given to Russia, neighbouring Kharkiv and Zaporizhia regions – and beyond – would be at greater risk.
Injured people are transferred to field hospitals at night [BBC]
The cost of holding on is measured in Ukrainian soldiers’ lives and body parts.
Later on, I drive to a nearby field hospital under the cover of darkness. The drone activity never ceases, and the war injured, and the dead, can only be safely retrieved at night.
Russian casualties are far higher, perhaps three times as much or more, but it has a greater capacity to absorb losses than Ukraine.
The wounded begin to arrive, the cases growing steadily more serious as night stretches into morning. The casualties are from fighting in Pokrovsk, a city that Russia has been trying to seize for a year, and is now partially encircled. It’s a key city in Donetsk’s defence, and the fighting has been brutal.
The first man arrives conscious, a bullet wound to chest from a firefight. Next comes another man in his forties covered in shrapnel wounds. It took two days and three attempts to rescue him, such was the intensity of the fighting. Next a man whose right leg has been almost blown off entirely by a drone strike on the road from Pokrovsk to Myrnohrad.
Surgeon and Snr Lt Dima, 42, moves from patient to patient. This is a medical stabilisation unit, so his job is to patch up the injured as quickly as possible and send them on to a main hospital for further treatment. “It’s hard because I know I can do more, but I don’t have the time,” he tells me.
After all this carnage, I ask him too if Donbas should be surrendered to bring peace.
“We have to stop [the war], but we don’t want to stop it like this”, he says. “We want back our territory, our people and we have to punish Russia for what they did.”
He’s exhausted, casualties have been heavier, dozens a day, since Russia’s incursion, and the injuries are the worst the doctors have seen since the war began, mostly because of drones.
“We just want to go home to live in peace without this nightmare, this blood, this death,” he says.
A surgeon at the field hospital said that injuries are the worst the doctors have seen since the war began [BBC News]
On the drive out that afternoon, between fields of corn and sunflowers, miles of newly uncoiled barbed wire glint in the sunlight. They run alongside raised banks of red earth, deep trenches and neat lines of anti-tank dragon’s teeth concrete pyramids. All designed to slow any sudden Russian advance.
It is believed that Russia has over 100,000 troops standing by, waiting to exploit another opportunity like the earlier breaches around Dobropillia.
These new fortifications carved in the Ukrainian dirt chart a deteriorating situation here in Donetsk. What’s left of the region may yet be surrendered by diplomacy, but until then Ukraine, bloodied and exhausted, remains intent on fighting for every inch of it.
(Reuters) – Ukrainian troops are suffering high losses because Western arms are arriving too slowly to equip the armed forces properly, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told CNN in an interview aired on Sunday.
Russia has been gaining ground in parts of eastern Ukraine including around Pokrovsk. Capture of the transport hub could enable Moscow to open new lines of attack.
Zelenskiy said the situation in the east was “very tough”, adding that half of Ukraine’s brigades there were not equipped.
“So you lose a lot of people. You lose people because they are not in armed vehicles … they don’t have artillery, they don’t have artillery rounds,” said Zelenskiy, speaking in English. CNN said the interview had been conducted on Friday.
Zelenskiy said weapons aid packages promised by the United States and European nations were arriving very slowly.
“We need 14 brigades to be ready. Until now … from these packages we didn’t equip even four,” he said.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Saturday said Washington was working on a “substantial” new aid package for Ukraine.
Zelenskiy is due to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden this month and will present a plan for ending the war. The main elements are security and diplomatic support, as well as military and economic aid, he said.
The only thing Russian President Vladimir Putin fears is the reaction of his people if the cost of the war makes them suffer, Zelenskiy said. “Make Ukraine strong, and you will see that he will sit and negotiate”.
Zelenskiy will also reiterate to Biden demands for Ukraine to be allowed to use U.S. long-range weapons to strike military targets deep into Russia.
Kyiv needs this permission because Russian jets blasting infrastructure had begun operating up to 500 km (310 miles) from the front lines compared with 150 km earlier, he told CNN.
(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Professional soldiers from Colombia bolster the ranks of volunteers from around the world who have answered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s call for foreign fighters to join his nation’s war with Russia.
A 32-year-old from the city of Medellín was trying to save a colleague wounded in three days of heavy fighting with Russian forces. Russian drones attacked the group and shrapnel from a grenade dropped by one pierced his jawbone.
“I thought I was going to die,” said the man, who goes by the call sign Checho. The fighters insisted on being identified by their military call signs because they feared for their safety and that of their families.
“We got up and decided to run away from the position to save our lives,” Checho said. “There was nowhere to hide.”
Colombia’s military has been fighting drug-trafficking cartels and rebel groups for decades, making its soldiers some of the world’s most experienced.
With a military of 250,000, Colombia has Latin America’s second-largest army, after Brazil’s. More than 10,000 retire each year. And hundreds are heading to fight in Ukraine, where many make four times as much as experienced non-commissioned officers earn in Colombia, or even more.
“Colombia has a large army with highly trained personnel but the pay isn’t great when you compare it to other militaries,” said Andrés Macías of Bogotá’s Externado University, who studies Colombian work for military contractors around the world.
Retired Colombian soldiers began to head overseas in the early 2000s to work for U.S. military contractors protecting infrastructure including oil wells in Iraq. Retired members of Colombia’s military have also been hired as trainers in the United Arab Emirates and joined in Yemen’s battle against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
Colombia’s role as a recruiting ground for the global security industry also has its murkier, mercenary corners: Two Colombians were killed and 18 were arrested after they were accused of taking part in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.
At the military hospital normally treating wounded Ukrainian soldiers, a group of about 50 Colombian fighters spend most of their time staring at their phone screens — calling home, browsing the internet and listening to music in between meals and medical procedures, most for light injuries.
In a battlefield stalemate with Russia, Ukraine is expanding its system allowing people from around the world to join the Ukrainian army, said Oleksandr Shahuri, an officer of the Department of Coordination of Foreigners in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In early 2022, authorities said 20,000 people from 52 countries were in Ukraine. Now, in keeping with the secrecy surrounding any military numbers, authorities will not say how many are on the battlefield but they do say fighters’ profile has changed.
The first waves of volunteers came mostly from post-Soviet or English-speaking countries. Speaking Russian or English made it easier for them to integrate into Ukraine’s military, Shahuri said.
Last year the military developed an infrastructure of Spanish-speaking recruiters, instructors and junior operational officers, he added.
Hector Bernal, a retired ex-combat medic who runs a center for tactical medicine outside Bogotá, says that in the last eight months he’s trained more than 20 Colombians who went on to fight in Ukraine.
“They’re like the Latin American migrants who go to the U.S. in search of a better future” Bernal said. “These are not volunteers who want to defend another country’s flag. They are simply motivated by economic need.”
While generals in Colombia get around $6,000 a month in salaries and bonuses, the same as a government minister, the rank and file gets by on a much more modest income.
Corporals in Colombia get a basic salary of around $400 a month, while experienced drill sergeants can earn up to $900. Colombia’s monthly minimum wage is currently $330.
In Ukraine any member of the armed forces, regardless of citizenship, is entitled to a monthly salary of up to $3,300, depending on their rank and type of service. They are also entitled to up to $28,660 if they are injured, depending on the severity of the wounds. If they are killed in action, their families are due $400,000 compensation.
Checho says principle drove him to travel to Kyiv last September. He estimates that in his unit alone, there were around 100 other fighters from Colombia who had made the same journey.
“I know that there are not many of us, but we try to give the most we have in order to make things happen and to see a change as soon as possible,” he said.
In Colombia, word about recruitment to the Ukrainian army spreads mostly through social media. Some of the volunteers who already fight in Ukraine share insights on the recruitment process on platforms such as TikTok or WhatsApp.
But when something goes wrong, getting information about their loved ones is hard for relatives.
Diego Espitia lost contact with his cousin Oscar Triana after Triana joined the Ukrainian army in August 2023. Six weeks later, the retired soldier from Bogotá stopped posting updates on social media.
With no Ukrainian embassy in Bogotá, Triana’s family reached out for information from the Ukrainian embassy in Peru and the Colombian consulate in Poland — the last country Triana passed through on his way into Ukraine. Neither responded.
“We want the authorities in both countries to give us information about what happened, to respond to our emails. That is what we are demanding now,” Espitia said.
The Associated Press tracked down a Colombian fighter who uses the call sign Oso Polar — Polar Bear — and says he was the last person to see Triana alive on October 8, 2023. He says Triana’s unit was ambushed by Russian forces in the Kharkiv region, after which his fate was unknown.
The Ukrainian military unit where Triana was serving confirmed to The Associated Press that Triana is officially missing, but would not disclose any details surrounding the circumstances in which he disappeared.
Espitia, his cousin, says he’s not sure what motivated Triana to fight in Ukraine. But the 43-year-old had served in the Colombian army for more than 20 years and leaving it had been “mentally difficult,” Espitia said.
“It could’ve been for the money, or because he missed the adrenaline of being in combat. But he didn’t open up very much about his reasons for going,” Espitia said.
After almost three weeks in the hospital, Checho has returned to Ukraine’s front line. So have more than 50 other Colombian fighters who were treated in the same facility.
“The situation here is hard,” Checho told AP. “We are under constant bombardment, but we will keep fighting.”
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Rueda reported from Bogotá, Colombia. Efrem Lukatsky and Susie Blann in Kyiv contributed to this story.
