New Delhi: A group of seven Indian men claimed in a new video that Russia forces them to fight Ukraine war.
The claim is made days after India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said it was trying for an ‘ early discharge’ of nearly 20 Indians working among the support staff to the Russian army, The Indian Express reported. The footage showed seven men, wearing army outfits, inside a room.
As six of them stood apart in a corner, one man narrated their situation in the viral video.
‘We came to visit Russia as tourists for the New Year on December 27 and met an agent who helped us visit different places. He offered to take us to Belarus, but we were not aware we would need a visa for the country. We went to Belarus where we gave money to him, but he demanded more money. He abandoned us on a highway as we didn’t have the money to pay him,” one man said in Hindi.
He claimed that police caught and handed them over to the Russian army and were subsequently locked in ‘some unknown place for around three to four days’.
‘They later forced us to sign a contract with them to work as helpers, drivers, and cooks and threatened to send us to jail for 10 years if we didn’t. The contract was in their language which we could not understand, but we signed it. They enrolled us in a training centre and we realised later that they had cheated us. They enrolled us in their army and gave training,’ the man reportedly claimed.
The man further claimed that after training, Russian army dropped off them in Ukraine and put some of their friends on the frontline, according to The Indian Express.
‘We are not ready for any war and we cannot even hold guns properly, but they are forcing us to fight in the war against Ukraine,’ he was quoted as saying.