Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to protect identities.

In 2024, Mohammed* flew into St Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, on his first trip abroad.

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With its perfect grid, imposing imperial palaces and “white nights”, when the proximity to the Arctic Circle makes darkness disappear in late summer, St Petersburg was a far cry from home.

Mohammed arrived from Dushanbe, the sun-parched and overpopulated capital of Tajikistan, the poorest nation of ex-Soviet Central Asia.

He saw the trip as a way of boosting his income and sending remittances home, like millions of Central Asian economic migrants who travel to Russia each year or live there full-time.

He entered Russia visa-free, paid 6,000 rubles ($74) a month for a renewable work permit, and shared a shabby rented apartment with six others while working at a food stall.

But months after arriving, the life he had carefully carved out was shattered.

He told Al Jazeera that, having forgotten to pay the fee for the work permit, he was rounded up by police, beaten and denied food. In detention, Russian military officers forced him to sign up to the army, he said.

He said he had no choice but to serve.

He travelled to Ukraine and fought alongside Russian troops and foreign fighters on Moscow’s side.

Earlier this year, however, Ukrainian troops captured him. He is now a prisoner of war (PoW).

Ukraine’s military gave Al Jazeera rare access to Mohammed, one of dozens of Central Asian prisoners of war. Al Jazeera did not witness Mohammed speaking under duress, however an officer was present at the interview in a prison, in a town close to the front line.

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Al Jazeera is concealing Mohammed’s identity for safety reasons.

According to international laws, prisoners of war must be treated humanely.

But several former PoWs interviewed in Ukraine and swapped later have been sentenced to jail for “spreading fake news”. Both Kyiv and Moscow have also traded accusations of mistreatment, torture and execution of PoWs. Some of the claims have been confirmed by gruesome videos posted online or on Telegram channels.

Mohammed lamented Russia during the interview. In addition to alleging police brutality, he claimed to have observed anti-Muslim discrimination at military training centres.

Russia and Ukraine have swapped thousands of prisoners of war since the start of the conflict in early 2022. There is no official data on the number of PoWs each side holds. Mohammed said he hopes he is not transferred back to Russia and is allowed to fight on Ukraine’s side instead.

It is a claim that feels familiar in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. In July, Russian lawmaker Viktor Vodolatsky said that a number of Ukrainian PoWs refused to return and wanted to fight for Moscow. An activist said at the time that it was “very unlikely, or almost impossible, that prisoners would agree to this sort of thing voluntarily”.

Mohammed said that back in Russia, he realised he had signed a one-year military service contract with a signing bonus of 1.6 million rubles ($19,644) and a monthly salary of 210,000 rubles ($2,580) – only after he was allegedly forced to do so.

The officers promised he would serve as a “guard” far from the front line and would receive a Russian passport in six months.

“They fooled me,” he said.

He then spent weeks training in western Russia. The training was perfunctory, he said. His AK-47 assault rifle was old and kept jamming.

“My weapon didn’t work, I swear. Seriously,” he said.

‘Kremlin’s policy of recruiting manpower’

Russia has long been accused of forcibly conscripting Central Asian migrants, allegedly with a heavy hand.

Like Mohammed, others who have survived to tell their stories say they were promised hefty salaries, “safe” jobs far from the front line, and Russian citizenship.

“Behind all that is the Kremlin’s policy of recruiting manpower by any means necessary and avoiding the forced mobilisation of Russians,” Alisher Ilkhamov, the head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.

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In the training centres, where dozens of recruits slept in unheated barracks, there were other Muslims from outside Russia – including nationals of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan.

Some volunteered, but most were forced to enlist, Mohammed said.

He claimed that the Muslims were not allowed to pray and were subject to daily racial and religious slurs from drill officers, who allegedly forced them to shave off their beards and clean toilets in and out of the barracks.

The number of Russians was low and limited to convicts who volunteered to serve in exchange for presidential pardons, he said.

Moscow denies racially or religiously profiling potential recruits, but has emphasised the “duty” of economic migrants who have received or desire Russian citizenship to serve their new home.

In May 2023, Russia’s top prosecutor Aleksander Bastrykin said that “while Russians are on the front lines, the migrants are attacking our rear… If they are Russian nationals, have citizenship, please, go to the front line. If you don’t fulfil your duty, go back to your motherland.”

A year later, he said forced recruitment is “a good feature that led to the situation when migrants started slowly leaving Russia”.

After the training, Mohammed was taken to an eastern Ukraine region that was home to heavy fighting. He was handed an assault rifle, magazines and hand grenades.

He was partnered with another foreign fighter, who told him he had volunteered in exchange for a Russian passport.

‘Tactic of extra-small storm groups’

The pair appeared to have become part of Moscow’s new stratagem of dispatching handfuls of servicemen to infiltrate Ukrainian positions and amass manpower and ammunition before clashing with Ukrainian forces.

“This is a tactic of extra-small storm groups; it has been used since spring, in certain locations since late last year,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University, who has authored copious analytical reports on the Russian-Ukrainian war, told Al Jazeera.

“It decreases losses, especially if there’s foliage” that hides the troops “and sharply increases the means to destroy them, around tenfold”, he said.

Mohammed and other servicemen had their phones, documents and debit cards taken away by their officers.

They received cheap smartphones with just one app – Alpine Quest, a topographic programme that lets users move around using coded coordinates without web access and GPS.

They did not know the names of the villages and farms they were tasked to move to by their commanding officer, who radioed them from a distance and whose name or whereabouts they never found out.

Every day, they walked for hours in small groups. One of the servicemen carried a backpack with a portable jamming system that immobilised Ukrainian drones.

He said he saw several killed Russian soldiers: “Some had no heads, some no arms.”

They trudged on despite hunger and thirst – drone-delivered rations consisted of a small bottle of water and two or three chocolate bars a day.

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When Mohammed saw a gravely wounded, bleeding Russian soldier, his commanding officer warned him by radio against helping him.

To Mohammed, that was the moment of a harrowing revelation – his life meant nothing, and he might also be left to die.

Amid a spell of intense fighting, Mohammed and his partner were ordered to hide in an abandoned, fire-damaged Ukrainian village.

With no drone-delivered food for days, they rummaged through kitchens and basements only to find some pasta, which they chewed raw.

But Ukrainian drones tracked them down.

‘Mohammed expressed a wish to serve for Ukraine’

Mohammed claimed that during his time in the army, he did not fire his gun or throw a single grenade. Ukrainians take such claims with a grain of salt.

“In the years of my service since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no Russian prisoner of war has ever admitted he’d killed Ukrainian servicemen, civilians. Not a single one,” the Ukrainian officer who oversaw Mohammed told Al Jazeera.

Mohammed “was a Russian storm-trooper. He was captured while storming Ukrainian positions in Donetsk,” the officer said.

Mohammed said he was fearful of Ukrainian detention, having heard rumours that Russian captives had been tortured and mutilated.

He has been treated better than he had expected, he said.

“I swear, they give me whatever I want – cigarettes any time, food, drinks. They say, ‘Take it, little brother,’” he said.

He also called his father for the first time: “My dad cried a little, said, ‘What matters is that you’re alive.’”

He fears the possibility of being swapped, as Russia, according to human rights groups and ex-soldiers, has disregarded international rules by returning prisoners of war to the front line.

“They will get me back to the war, 100 percent, until I die or lose an arm or a leg,” he said.

He cannot return to Tajikistan, either, as he could face 12 years in jail for joining another nation’s army.

Hochu Jit (I Want to Live), a Ukrainian government group that monitors and helps PoWs, said in April it had verified the names of 931 Tajik nationals aged 18 to 70 fighting for Russia. It said 196 of them had died, as their life expectancy on the front lines was 140 days, and specified that the real number could be “much higher”.

Mohammed believes his only way to survive is to enlist in the Ukrainian army to obtain Ukrainian citizenship and get his family out of Tajikistan.

“When the war is over – if the war is over – I will tell my dad in Tajikistan: Come on, sell the house, come to Ukraine, buy a house here,” he said.

The officer overseeing Mohammed said his enlistment plea is being considered.

Dozens of Russian PoWs have volunteered to fight for Ukraine since 2022, and many joined two military units that consist of Russian nationals.

“Seeing Ukrainian servicemen’s normal attitude towards him, and comparing it with the Russians’ attitude, Mohammed expressed a wish to serve for the Ukrainian forces, so that he doesn’t return to Russia to experience racial and ethnic discrimination,” the officer said.