In the midst of Kathmandu, Nepal, Ramchandra Khadka stood in front of a shrine and offered prayers for his fellow citizens who are serving Russia in the country’s conflict with Ukraine.He lit candles and presented flowers to a deity as the bells of the ceremony chimed and the fragrant scent of incense enveloped the room. His only concern is his Nepali buddies’ survival during the gruelling conflict. After sustaining wounds while serving on the front lines in Ukraine, the 37-year-old just made his way back to Nepal. He regretted his choice to enlist as a foreign mercenary in the Kremlin army after seeing horrifying events.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is not the first battle Khadka has fought. He was among Nepal’s Maoist rebels, who fought a bloody war with the country’s forces for 10 years from the mid-1990s. He then went to Afghanistan after being hired by a private military contractor to assist NATO forces in the country. He thought he had experienced it all in his lifetime – bloodshed, death and pain. But, some 17 years after the Maoist war ended, with no hope of a job in Nepal, he decided to fly to Russia to join the country’s military for money.
“I didn’t join the Russian military for pleasure. I didn’t have any job opportunities in Nepal. But in hindsight, it wasn’t the right decision. We didn’t realize we would be sent to the frontlines that quickly and how horrible the situation would be,” Khadka said.He arrived in Moscow in September last year. After only two weeks of training, he said, he was sent to the front lines in Bakhmut – a town in eastern Ukraine that saw some of the heaviest fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces – with a gun and a basic kit.
“There isn’t an inch of land in Bakhmut that’s not affected by bombs. All the trees, shrubs, and greenery… they are all gone. Most of the houses have been destroyed. The situation there is so gruesome that it makes you want to cry,” he recalled. Khadka was deployed to Bakhmut twice and spent a total of one month there. During his second deployment, he was struck by a bullet in his hip. After he was rescued and taken a few hundred meters back from the front line, he was hit by shrapnel from a cluster bomb.
“I still get a headache when I think about the terrible scenes I saw in the war zone,” he said. He is one of as many as 15,000 Nepali men to have joined the Russian military, multiple sources have told CNN, after the Russian government last year announced a lucrative package for foreign fighters to join the country’s military.
The package included at least $2,000 salary a month and a fast-tracked process to obtain a Russian passport. Nepal’s passport is ranked one of the worst in the world for global mobility, below North Korea, according to an index created by global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners, and the Himalayan nation is among the world’s poorest, with a per capita GDP of $1,336 for 2022, according to World Bank data.
Source: Here
