Now black soldiers are scared and want to go home.
One of the South Africans who found himself in the Donbas, as he claims, due to deception, spoke about the horrors he had to endure in the war. "What you see in movies, we see in real life," he says.
This is a translation of material from BBC correspondents. After the original version of this material was published in English, it became known that Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla had resigned from her position as a member of the South African Parliament from the MK party, led by her father Jacob Zuma.
The 40-year-old man sends voice messages to his family. They are filled with despair. He says he was lured into the war under false pretenses and he desperately wants to go home.
The BBC does not reveal his identity for safety reasons. In this material, he is referred to as Sipho, and his brother, who is in South Africa and is trying to help bring him home, is Ksolani.
"He lives in constant fear because he doesn’t know what awaits him and how the night will go, as they are in a combat zone," Ksolani says.
The BBC listened to the voice messages that Sipho sent to his family. He says he was recruited by two people, one of whom is Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, the daughter of former South African President Jacob Zuma, who now leads the country’s main opposition party uMkhonto weSizwe (MK; in Zulu, the name means "Spear of the Nation"). Zuma-Sambudla denies that she intentionally misled people and says that she herself became a victim of deception and manipulation and is now "deeply shocked" by what happened.
"They (the alleged recruiters) even bought us plane tickets so we could get here (to Russia)," Sipho says in one of the messages.
Ksolani recounts that his brother left South Africa on July 8, thinking he was going to undergo training as a bodyguard for the MK party. The MK party was established in 2023. It is named after the now-defunct military wing of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which fought against the racist apartheid system in South Africa. Zuma was a long-time member of the ANC but later left it after a serious conflict with his successor Cyril Ramaphosa and created his own party before the parliamentary elections, which took third place in the elections.
