Turan Research Center

Central Asian governments are willing to summon Russia's ambassadors. Over the past two years, Bishkek has done so over a police raid on a Moscow bathhouse that left Kyrgyz migrants beaten; Tashkent over the nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin's public musing about "annexing" Uzbek territory; Dushanbe over the murder of a Tajik schoolboy outside Moscow. These are not the gestures of states that cannot say no to the Kremlin. They are calibrated acts of protest, deployed when a grievance is visible enough at home that silence would cost more than the friction with Moscow.

One grievance never makes the list. Russia is drawing thousands of Central Asian citizens into its war against Ukraine, and on this, the foreign ministries of Astana, Bishkek, Dushanbe, and Tashkent have said nothing — not once, at least publicly. The contrast is the analytical puzzle worth explaining. These governments will confront Moscow over the mistreatment of their citizens, but not over their recruitment, and the reason is not weakness. It is that recruitment touches the one Russian interest these states judge too costly to contest: the Kremlin's need for manpower.

Why foreign recruitment matters to Moscow

The value of foreign recruits to Russia is best understood against the politics of its own mobilization. When Putin announced a "partial" mobilization in September 2022 — later claiming 318,000 men drafted against a stated target of 300,000 — the move triggered the outcome the Kremlin most feared: protests in dozens of cities and an exodus of working-age men, with credible estimates of those who left Russia that year ranging from the high hundreds of thousandsinto the low millions. The lesson Moscow drew was that announced conscription is politically radioactive. It pivoted to paid volunteers, offering signing bonuses and monthly allowances well above prevailing wages, and, increasingly, to foreigners.

Foreigners solve a specific problem. Battlefield attrition is severe — NATO estimates Russian losses at between 1.3 and 1.45 million total casualties, including roughly 500,000 dead — and those casualties are themselves a source of domestic resentment. Recruiting abroad lets the Kremlin generate frontline manpower while keeping the human cost outside Russian households. A joint study by the International Federation for Human Rights, Truth Hounds, and the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, published in April 2026, found that Russia has recruited at least 27,000 foreign nationals from more than 130 countries since the full-scale invasion — a force comparable in size to the standing army of the Czech Republic, and one the report concludes is increasingly sustained through deception and coercion rather than ideology. Central Asians are the largest national contingent.

Moscow has also signaled how much it values this pipeline. In March 2026, Russia adopted legislation shielding foreign nationals who served under contract from extradition and administrative deportation, voiding such measures retroactively. The message to a recruit weighing the risk of prosecution back home is plain: serve, and Russia will not hand you over. For the sending states, that is the tell. Recruitment is not a peripheral irritant in the relationship; it is wired into Russia's capacity to keep fighting, which is why pressing on it carries a different order of risk than protesting a bathhouse raid.

How Central Asians end up in the war

The exact number of regional citizens fighting for Russia is unknown — Moscow conceals it, and distinguishing current nationals from naturalized former migrants is difficult. In May 2025 the head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, spoke of 20,000 Central Asian natives with acquired Russian citizenship sent to the front. The most-cited running tally comes from Ukraine's I Want to Live project, which operates within Kyiv's Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War and draws on Ukrainian military intelligence — a source with an evident interest in the issue, and one whose figures are best read as identifications rather than settled counts. As of May 2026, it had named 12,919 Central Asian citizens under contract with the Russian defense ministry: Uzbekistan accounts for the most at roughly 4,955, followed by Tajikistan (3,489), Kazakhstan (2,420), Kyrgyzstan (1,474), and Turkmenistan (581).

The distribution tracks labor migration. Russia recruits overwhelmingly from foreigners already on its territory, and Uzbek and Tajik migrants form the largest such communities — by official accounts roughly 1.3 million Uzbeks and around a million Tajiks. The methods range from inducement to outright coercion. Recruiters advertise large signing payments and fast-tracked citizenship; the Uzbek migrant Gulomjon Adizov told the project Shaman TV he enlisted expecting an accelerated passport. Others are pressed: detainees nearing release are moved and offered contracts, migrants caught in fabricated drug cases are given a choice between prison and a contract, and labor disputes are resolved with the same ultimatum. The pattern is consistent — Russia converts legal and economic vulnerability into frontline manpower.

That dynamic also explains why captured Central Asians linger in Ukrainian camps. Kyiv treats all Russian-army personnel as combatants regardless of nationality, and under the Geneva Conventions returns prisoners to the power on which they depend — Russia. But Moscow prioritizes its own citizens in exchanges and, by the I Want to Live project's account, has never specifically sought the return of a Central Asian national; the handful exchanged held Russian passports as well. The men fall into a gap no state with leverage is working to close — including their own governments, which is the same forbearance visible at the diplomatic level.

What the states do at home

The claim that these governments simply submit to Russia does not survive contact with their own courtrooms, and the variation between them is itself informative. All five criminalize mercenary activity and participation in foreign conflicts; enforcement diverges sharply.

Kazakhstan is the most active. Its code offers two charges — mercenaryism, carrying seven to ten years (and up to life where deaths result), and the easier-to-prove participation in foreign armed conflicts, at five to nine. Investigators lean on the latter, since mercenaryism requires proving financial motive; of twenty rulings between 2023 and 2025, nineteen used the participation charge. In 2025, Kazakh authorities opened 709 cases for participation and 28 for mercenaryism, according to Mediazona and the Farewell to Arms project. Sentences, though, often fell below the statutory minimum on guilty pleas — leniency that, as the human-rights lawyer Artur Alkhastov notes, does little to deter.

The others show lighter or near-absent enforcement. Kyrgyzstan has handed down at least sixteen mercenaryism sentences and detained four people for recruitment in April 2025 — but released two of them to house arrest after the Russian ambassador met the head of its security service, and has revisited convictions under Russian pressure. Uzbekistan opened 338 cases since 2022 yet imprisoned defendants in only five of fifteen reviewed verdicts, favoring restrictions on freedom. Tajikistan's prosecutor general confirmed in February 2026 that not a single Tajik had been held to account. In Turkmenistan, a returning fighter reportedly avoided punishment through a bribe.

The spread maps onto exposure and capacity, not onto a single posture toward Moscow. But every government converges on the same line: prosecute at home, where the audience is domestic, and stay silent abroad, where the audience is the Kremlin.

Ukraine's approach as a probe

Kyiv has tested where that line sits, with a good-cop, bad-cop division of labor. Its diplomats keep the public conversation positive — Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha used a May 2026 interview to discuss Kazakh participation in Ukraine's reconstruction while saying nothing about Kazakh citizens at the front, and Deputy Foreign Minister Oleksandr Mishchenko, pressed in Tashkent in April 2026, offered only that Ukraine would handle cases individually with Uzbek authorities. The pressure comes instead from I Want to Live, which publishes lists of identified and killed mercenaries — pointedly timing one release to the Central Asian leaders who attended Moscow's Victory Day parade — and sets out demands the diplomats avoid voicing: direct pressure on Russia, prosecution of recruiters and fighters, and public warnings to migrants. The split lets Kyiv apply pressure without spending its own diplomatic capital, and the muted official response from the region marks the limit it has reached: these states will quietly verify lists and prosecute at home, but will not be drawn into a public reckoning with Moscow.

Why the silence holds

To attribute that silence to dependence alone would be too simple, given how readily the same governments protest other Russian conduct. The forbearance is better read as a cost calculation that comes out differently for recruitment than for anything else.

Recruitment is the issue Moscow has signaled it cares about most, having legislated to keep foreign fighters beyond the reach of their home courts; contesting it invites disproportionate retaliation — intensified recruitment, trade pressure, or the propaganda machine turned on regional leaders. It also runs through the migrants themselves, whose remittances and absence from domestic labor markets these economies depend on; a Russian move to expel them would import unemployment and unrest. And some governments are themselves profiting from the war economy: Kyrgyzstan posted roughly 10 percent GDP growth in the first nine months of 2025 on a re-export boom, the same boom that in April 2026 made it the first country ever targeted by the EU's anti-circumvention tool. Set against all that, the recruitment of several thousand citizens — many of whom, officials privately note, went for the money — is a cost these states have decided to absorb rather than fight.

The cost deferred

That decision is a present choice with a future price, which is where its real significance lies. The men being recruited now will, in numbers, eventually come home with combat experience and a habit of settling matters by force. Russia's own experience is the warning: the SOC ACE program documents a nearly seventeenfold rise in murder and attempted-murder convictions involving military personnel inside Russia between 2021 and 2025. In a region where interstate violence still flares — the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan border clashes of 2022 are only the most recent example, despite a 2025 demarcation deal — a population of battle-hardened returnees is a destabilizing input that each government will eventually have to manage. The same states now choosing not to confront Moscow over recruitment are, by that choice, deferring the security problem they will face when the recruits return.

Grigorii is a Ukrainian journalist originally from Kyrgyzstan. He has more than 15 years of experience working with Ukrainian and international media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. His primary areas of focus are the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, war crimes investigations, and Ukrainian relations with Central Asia.