When the mercenaries stop showing signs of life on WhatsApp, their families in Nepal can only entrust themselves to astrologers. The war in Ukraine also creates orphans in the Himalayan republic and what was an open secret is no longer one. Last Friday, authorities in Kyiv publicly exposed eight prisoners of war and five of them were Nepalis.
This same week, Russia has recognized sixteen new fatalities among mercenaries from Nepal who fight in its ranks, which is why it has called on their families to compare their DNA. The Russian good disposition is due to a call, a few days before, from the Foreign Minister of Nepal to his counterpart in Moscow, demanding that Russia stop enlisting its fellow citizens, that it do more to identify the dead and locate the missing and that then compensate their families. Minister Kai Shrestha extracted the promise of about 48,000 euros per death, a fortune in Nepal, but several times less than what Ukraine would be paying - with foreign funds - to the families of the mercenaries of its foreign legion who died in combat.
Kritu Bhandari, a Kathmandu politician who works with families affected by the war in Ukraine, has been able to collect data on a thousand Nepalese fighters in the Russian ranks, but there would be many more. The death in combat of 33 would have been confirmed, but reality must multiply this figure, since there are a minimum of 274 missing, as well as 116 wounded.
There are Gorkhas - as this Nepalese warrior caste is known - fighting in Ukraine since 2022. In fact, about four thousand Nepalis were caught by the start of the invasion in Kyiv or other Ukrainian cities, in many cases studying casually, waiting to cross illegally into Western Europe. Many took advantage of the initial chaos to do so. But quite a few decided to stay and enroll in the foreign legion formed by Volodimir Zelensky.
To do this, they rely on the martial tradition of several Mongoloid nations in the northwest and northeast of Nepal, the famous Gorkhas, who often carry the surname "Bahadur" (brave) and who were already recruited by the British colonial armies in the 19th century. After the emancipation of British India, the United Kingdom was left with a third of the Gorkha regiments and India with the rest.
Today, tens of thousands of young Nepalis fight for the two hundred annual places in the British army in the Singapore Police Force. Until two years ago, they also did it for the 1,400 posts in seven Indian Gorkha regiments. However, the introduction of legislative changes in New Delhi - which no longer guarantees a ten-year military career, extendable, at a stretch - and the return of the Maoists to power in Kathmandu has put this recruitment on the freezer, as already happened between 2007 and 2009.
The Maoists are directly opposed to their citizens joining foreign armies. In the Ukrainian war, moreover, with the added risk of finding themselves in opposite trenches. It is not a conviction born of pacifism, but of direct knowledge of the horrors of war. Nepali Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias Prachanda, spent more than a decade in the bush as a guerrilla leader before donning a tie.
But Nepal is one of the countries with the highest birth rate in Asia and can barely retain one in five young people of age to enter the job market. The rest increase the unemployment rate or emigrate to the Persian Gulf, among other destinations. Many of the so-called Gorkhas allowed themselves to be convinced that they would earn much more money fighting Russia than working as security guards in a supermarket in Oman.
The seduction work began on social networks, with the videos of the first to join the Russian ranks, in such a greedy and deceptive way that Nepal decided last year to ban TikTok "for the sake of social peace." The clamp is completed with the dozens of Nepalese recruitment agents that swarm around Kathmandu. These promise a salary of more than two thousand euros a month, but they ask for triple the entrance fee to obtain tickets and obtain visas (which, in reality, are tourist ones) via Dubai and often Minsk.
Once in Russia, many discover that the reality of the front, due to the conditions and weapons used, can be worse than the worst nightmare. Many were sent to the painful capture of Bakhmut, which ended last May. The stories of those who decided to pay bribes to escape that catastrophe and be able to tell it are horrifying. They must have had some effect on his country or countries of origin, when Putin had to add, to the desirable salary, the offer of a Russian passport for minimum one-year contracts. He offers that in 2024 he has to extend to the wife, children and parents of the fighter.
Those who have returned explain that Nepalis are not the only foreigners in the Russian ranks and that there are also many mercenaries from Central Asia, Africa and even India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A few days ago, a group of seven Indians were asking for help online to leave Russia, as if they had been tricked into fighting. But any Indian, upon reading their names (almost all Sikhs surnamed Singh), realizes that they were there for the same reason as the Gorkhas, as members of the "martial races of India" - in colonial vocabulary - taking Their allegations that they were going to work as cooks were laughed at.
In any case, the damage has already been done and need will continue to plague many in Nepal and encourage them to turn a deaf ear to those who have become scaled. Some Himalayan towns admit to having up to a dozen young people fighting on the Russian side.
A reality that Nepal handles tactfully, balancing the fact that, thanks to the Gorkhas, they are also the second country that contributes the largest number of troops to UN peacekeeping missions. Many of them also join the ranks of the US Army (a thousand have obtained nationality in this way in the last five years) and the French Legion (a few hundred), despite the fact that there is no bilateral treaty such as the one regulating recruitment in India or the United Kingdom, something that displeases the authorities in Kathmandu.
Ukraine, moreover, cannot cast the first stone. Recently, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has had to clarify that his government has nothing to do with the hundreds of Colombian mercenaries - with military or paramilitary training - who go to Ukraine "in their personal capacity" to fight the orders from Kyiv.
The fact is that the risk of internationalization and privatization of the war, as it lengthens, is increasingly evident. With a growing resort to mercenaries, out of necessity or virtue. A scenario that does not seem to worry Russia too much, with an apparent advantage in orchestrating its sympathies in parts of Asia and Africa, with or without Wagner's music.
