Bolivia investigates recruiters who lured citizens to fight for Russia
Bolivia has become the third Andean country this year to discover its own citizens fighting – and dying – in Russia's war on Ukraine. Prosecutors in La Paz opened a criminal investigation on July 14 into a recruitment network accused of luring Bolivian men abroad with fake construction jobs, then handing them a rifle instead.
Attorney General Roger Mariaca said his office would investigate "de oficio", meaning without waiting for a formal complaint, after relatives of two Bolivian cousins came forward. José María Soleto, 29, and Iván Valdivia, 28, worked as a bricklayer and a plumber in Santa Cruz before intermediaries offered them up to $16,000 to travel to Russia in April for construction work. Within weeks, they had received a month of military training and been sent to the front. Both are now presumed dead. Soleto's wife told local broadcaster Red Uno she received nothing more than notice of his death, with no details of how or where.
Deputy Foreign Minister for Consular Affairs Hector Huanca put the number of Bolivians potentially caught up in the scheme at around 16, though he cautioned the figure is preliminary, based on relatives who came to the foreign ministry for help rather than any official count. Bolivia's embassy in Moscow has filed a formal request with Russian authorities for information and has already repatriated one Bolivian who backed out before deployment.
Russia rejects trafficking allegations and points finger back at Kyiv
Russia's embassy in La Paz rejected the accusations outright. It said it has no link to the organisations or individuals allegedly running the recruitment and no knowledge that such structures even exist. Requests for help, it added, must go through official channels via Bolivia's foreign ministry, not the embassy directly.
The same statement then turned the question around. It cited Russian defence ministry figures claiming Bolivian citizens were serving in Ukraine's armed forces as of March 2024, several of whom died, and asked why that had drawn less attention. Bolivian officials have not confirmed those figures either way. Russia's embassy in Bogota has used a near-identical line, accusing Ukraine's own embassy there of running a rival recruitment channel for Colombians. Both Kyiv and Moscow recruit foreigners for the gruelling four-year conflict, but neither has offered independently verifiable numbers for how many or under what terms.
A Bolivian daily, Brújula Digital, traced the recruitment to a single community: Loma Alta, in Santa Cruz department, where as many as 30 young men were approached with the same job offer. One woman who filed a trafficking complaint said her brother left with a cousin and several neighbours, hoping to raise money for his son's medical treatment. Contact ended once the group crossed into a combat zone. Word of a fatal drone strike reached the family later, relayed by another Bolivian still in Russia. It remains unconfirmed.
Russia builds massive Latin American recruitment pipeline to feed Ukraine war
Bolivia is not pioneering anything. It is the latest country to run into a scheme already well-documented next door. A report presented in Kyiv on April 29 by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the investigative group Truth Hounds, and Kazakhstan's International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law (KIBHR) put Russia's foreign recruitment since February 2022 at roughly 27,000 people from over 130 countries, of whom 1,000 to 8,000 are Latin American. That is a small slice of a much larger machine, but Kyiv expects Moscow to add another 18,500 foreign recruits before the end of 2026, on top of growth of more than 30