I would like to understand more about the sources Russia is using to find fighters. This seems a lot of effort by the country to get 17-24 extra people.
I have read they have over a million dead -- shocking, ghastly, horrifying, I feel inhuman writing it; and yet a number against which two dozen brought from another country seems to make almost no difference. How can sourcing fighters (and effectively slavery) make any sense at this scale?
For those who don't know the background, she's one of the favourite daughters of an ex-president under which corruption soared to new heights. He was really pro-Russia during his time, but eventually several criminal charges against him started piling so high that the ruling party decided that he had to be replaced. He got angry and left, formed is own party and was joined by family members and some other loyalists.
A lot of other events transpired, such as him being found guilty of several things for which he had to go to prison. He did briefly go in but it wasn't to his liking, so he started pressuring all his old friends. A nation-wide unrest then erupted with mobs burning and looting all over, which is another thing for which his daughter is currently being implicated in and will probably go to trial over.
It got so bad that eventually he was pretty much just released (because of medical reasons). After that they just swiped it under the rug as if it never happened.
So back to the Russian angle, he's gone there several times for medical reasons and maybe this was some kind of test run to see if they could get a large number of men over there to fight. But as OP says, if you have to trick people into slavery then the numbers just doesn't make any sense.
There are a lot of very poor people here in South Africa, just promising them land (even if it doesn't exist) probably means that they could raise 100k or so people pretty easily, BUT the actual government isn't going to like that he's doing big moves behind their back so it might have been a test run to see what exactly they could or could not do.
It might not make any sense for the country as a whole, but it certainly does for individual recruiters who need to fulfill their quotas and individual commanders who can keep their more useful units this way (perhaps for a price). Also, over a million sounds implausibly high - estimates via opened inheritance cases gives a lower estimate of ~215000, which is of course still a huge number.
I have read they have over a million dead -- shocking, ghastly, horrifying, I feel inhuman writing it; and yet a number against which two dozen brought from another country seems to make almost no difference. How can sourcing fighters (and effectively slavery) make any sense at this scale?