A man scrolling through Facebook or searching on Google sees an advertisement from what looks like an ordinary staffing agency, promising construction work, a security job, a film role or help getting a Russian visa. Clicking through, he arrives at a polished recruitment website. Some even carry the logos of Western news organizations such as the BBC, falsely suggesting an endorsement.
Behind this systematic online manipulation campaign is a Russian war recruitment machine — and much of it is running on Western digital channels, servers and other tech infrastructure. A new report shared with POLITICO by Code for Africa, a non-profit African network of digital democracy labs, shows that Russia-linked military recruitment relied on advertising and tracking technology from Meta and Google to reach potential recruits and measure their campaigns, targeting workers in some of the world's poorest labor markets. Researchers identified 89 websites, seven social media or Facebook accounts and 39 messaging accounts or channels used by the operations, with new ones popping up daily.
The recruiters target young men facing unemployment or precarious work, offering salaries that typically dwarf what they could earn at home. In an ad reviewed by POLITICO, a "global casting call" for a new movie project seeks African male actors, with an artificial intelligence-generated picture of Black men dressed as soldiers, above the words "shooting in 2025." The advert was found on a Facebook page based in Germany. Another advert sponsored by "IRC Russian Bear" showed a Black soldier with Russian flags stitched to his khakis, promising $15,000 immediately upon signing the contract and a $3,000 monthly salary.
"A chance to change your life," the ad reads. Beyond social channels, the investigation found that the core of the operation rested on Western tech. The flagship recruitment brand was hosted on a server in Amsterdam; websites across the network were built using AI tools from companies in the United States and Sweden; and when prospective recruits filled in application forms, software from an Austrian company collected their personal information before it was sent to Russia.
"Behind that Western layer sit ordinary Russian commercial hosts, and behind those a bulletproof-hosting tier built to survive complaints," the researchers wrote. "The result is that a war sold to Africans, Asians and Belarusians is sold with the tools of the countries that publicly oppose it." Code for Africa said Western technology companies could easily remove accounts, advertisements and services being exploited by the networks — and many of the recruitment sites aren't exactly hiding from view. Meta has so far taken down more than 300 ad campaigns linked to these recruiters, Justin Arenstein, director of Code for Africa, said.
Searches conducted from inside the EU for "contract service" or "engineer contract for foreigners" in Russian or "join Russian army as a foreigner legal benefits citizenship" in English lead users directly to recruitment websites. The researchers also found a striking difference in how Google's AI-generated search summaries presented the schemes depending on language. In EU languages, warnings about the risks were displayed prominently, while in other languages those warnings appeared much further down.
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