Central Asian labour migrants in Russia have long been subjected to harassment and abuse at the hands of authorities and ultra-nationalist groups. But over the past year, rights watchdogs have identified a new phenomenon experienced by labour migrants, coerced mobilisation to fight in Ukraine.

Strongarmed induction into the Russian army is among the many abuses documented in a report released by Human Rights Watch, titled Living in Fear and Humiliation. The report was compiled with the help of experts, local media and rights activists, augmented by interviews with labour migrants from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

“What we are seeing today is a continuity in the instrumentalization of migrants as a human resource that could be repurposed not just for labor purposes but also for the areas the Russian government needs, including coerced mobilization to war against Ukraine,” the report quotes Nodira Kholmatova, a sociologist and expert on the history of labor migration, as saying.

The report notes that the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in outer Moscow almost a year ago, in which Tajik Islamic militants killed 144 people and wounded hundreds more, “precipitated an escalation of xenophobia and violence against Central Asian migrants and other non-Slavic looking individuals in Russia.”

Citizenship has been an instrument manipulated by the Russian government to help fill the army’s ranks in Ukraine. A law that took effect in August 2024 enables Russian authorities to strip naturalised citizens of their citizenship for failing to register for military service. Subsequently, about one-third of the 30,000 Central Asians who had become Russian citizens and registered for service found themselves pressed into the army and sent to Ukraine, the report states. “Law enforcement conducted mass raids throughout the year to force recruitment of recently naturalized citizens,” it adds.

Just months after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian legislators approved a streamlined naturalisation process for foreign nationals, aimed primarily at Central Asians, who served in the military for at least a year. In some cases, according to the HRW report, individuals seeking to naturalise were pressured into signing military contracts before they could submit their applications for citizenship.

Central Asians who had been imprisoned, or who were out on parole for criminal offences committed in Russia, have also been pressed into service; other convicts have been enticed to volunteer by the prospect of having their criminal record cleared. “Once forcibly or voluntarily recruited, ex-prisoners are often deployed to the front lines with minimal training. Central Asian migrants who found themselves in this situation reported being treated as expendable and sent to the most dangerous combat zones,” the report states.

Meanwhile, some non-citizen migrants report being deceived, having signed contracts for construction jobs or other services in what they believed to be safe areas, only to find themselves sent into combat zones. “There were cases of recruiters telling the prospective migrants about construction work assignments and that there would be very high salaries, but then they would take them to Mariupol and other occupied areas – and then they [labor migrants] would be sent to dig trenches at the frontline,” the report quotes a Kyrgyz lawyer as saying.

This article first appeared on Eurasianet here.