Russia targeted South African video gamers as part of a recruitment drive for its war in Ukraine, according to documents involving two men who left to fight.<\/p>\n
The men in their 20s left South Africa in July last year after talking about joining the Russian military to a gamer over an app called Discord, based on email exchanges with diplomats by a friend seeking information on their whereabouts and well-being.<\/p>\n
The South Africans regularly used Discord while playing the military game Arma 3, a person familiar with how they were recruited said, asking not to be identified. Within weeks of signing a military contract near St. Petersburg, a medical certificate showed one of them was killed fighting in Ukraine, according to the person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia targeted South African video gamers as part of a recruitment drive for its war in Ukraine, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[6202,584,6204,131,6203,6201],"class_list":{"0":"post-8846","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-south-africa","8":"tag-gaming","9":"tag-russia","10":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","11":"tag-south-africa","12":"tag-ukraine","13":"tag-video-games"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}