The travel agent, the hairdresser, and the war Two Russian women recruited Cubans to fight in Ukraine. Then they were sent to the front themselves.
The investigative outlet Sistema has published an investigation into how citizens of Cuba and Sri Lanka were recruited to join the Russian army and fight in Ukraine. Journalists found that two women from Ryazan, in western Russia, were behind the scheme — a travel agent and a hairdresser. Both were later jailed on theft charges and eventually sent to the front themselves. Meduza summarizes Sistema’s key findings.
Reports that Cubans were being recruited to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine first surfaced in September 2023, when the Cuban government announced it had uncovered a human trafficking network involved in the effort. Seventeen suspects were arrested. Officials said both Cubans living in Russia and on the island itself were being recruited. This October, U.S. authorities estimated that between 1,000 and 5,000 Cubans were fighting in Ukraine.
In May 2024, Sri Lanka’s government launched its own investigation into similar recruitment schemes after the Foreign Ministry received hundreds of complaints from citizens who said they had been lured to Russia with false promises of high salaries and citizenship. Officials confirmed receiving 455 formal reports but said the actual number of recruits was likely much higher.
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In 2023, Cuban media told the story of two young men, Alex Vega and Andorf Velasquez, who said they traveled to Russia for construction work, but were instead sent to the front. They said they signed contracts to “dig trenches” and do other manual labor, with no mention of combat. A Cuban woman and two Russian women helped them buy tickets and complete their paperwork. According to Vega and Velasquez, about 200 other Cubans were on their flight to Moscow, all hoping to make money the same way.
At the airport, they were met by a Russian woman and a Cuban soldier who offered them one-year contracts with the Russian army. The deal promised salaries of 200,000 rubles (around $2,500) a month and Russian citizenship for them and their families. Their Cuban passports were confiscated, supposedly to process their citizenship paperwork. Soon after signing, Vega and Velasquez were sent to a military training camp — and then to Ukraine, where they dug trenches in a forest.
One channel for recruitment was reportedly a Facebook group called Cubanos en Moscú (“Cubans in Moscow”). Most of the posts encouraging Cubans to enlist in the Russian army were shared by a user named Yelena Shuvalova, who offered the same salary and citizenship benefits Vega and Velasquez mentioned. In 2023, she told The Moscow Times that she did indeed help arrange contracts, including for undocumented migrants.
Journalists from Sistema identified the woman behind the Facebook profile “Yelena Shuvalova” as 41-year-old Yelena Smirnova from Ryazan, a former travel agent who speaks six languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish. According to the outlet’s investigation, Smirnova’s children from her first marriage were cared for by a Cuban nanny. Allegedly, Smirnova’s father later married the nanny to help her obtain legal status in Russia. Then, in 2022, Smirnova herself married the father of the nanny’s children, a Cuban man, so he could receive Russian citizenship.
By 2023, Smirnova had begun recruiting citizens of Cuba and Sri Lanka who were looking for work, connecting them with Russian military officials offering contracts with the army. She reportedly paid for their flights, transportation, and housing in Russia, expecting reimbursement once they enlisted. The recruits signed their contracts at a military enlistment office in Ryazan. But according to Sistema, some refused to repay her after realizing they had been deceived about being sent to fight in the war. Several also said they never received their full salaries and suspected that the recruiters were taking a cut. In April 2024, several Cubans filed police reports in Russia, and Smirnova was arrested on theft charges and placed in pre-trial detention.
A letter from her lawyer to Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova claimed that Smirnova had sent more than 3,000 foreign nationals to fight in Ukraine — a figure also cited by one of her acquaintances. The defense insisted that Smirnova stole nothing and that if she withdrew any extra funds from recruits’ accounts, the money went to Russian soldiers as “humanitarian aid.” The lawyer also alleged that the 11 Cubans who reported Smirnova to the police did so “under pressure from operatives.”
Another woman accused by Cuban recruits of stealing money, 40-year-old Olga Shilyaeva, was also arrested. Her husband is a serviceman, and at the time she met Smirnova in 2023, she was working part-time as a hairdresser. According to a mutual acquaintance who spoke to Sistema, the two met by chance outside a fast-food restaurant in Ryazan. Smirnova allegedly offered Shilyaeva work helping the families of foreign fighters legalize their stay in Russia, saying she couldn’t manage it all alone.
At first, Shilyaeva worked only with families, but she soon began handling recruitment contracts as well. Together, the two women reportedly spent nearly all their time at Ryazan’s enlistment center, sending 30–40 people to the front each day.
According to her lawyer’s letter, while in detention Smirnova “lost faith in the fairness of the investigation” and submitted a written request to sign her own contract with the Defense Ministry and go fight in Ukraine. The exact timing is unclear, but the lawyer’s letter was dated October 23, 2024.
A mutual acquaintance told Sistema that both women are now serving in the “Storm V” assault unit, made up of inmate recruits. Shilyaeva reportedly believes her prosecution and deployment were revenge by military officials for helping some Cubans challenge what she described as unlawful dismissals. Shilyaeva’s sister later wrote in a VKontakte comment that Olga had been “sent to war under false pretenses.” She said her sister was deployed to the village of Zaitseve in the Luhansk region, where there is allegedly an unlawful detention site for Russian soldiers who refused to fight.
Neither Shilyaeva nor Smirnova responded to Sistema’s requests for comment.
