A Zambian student sent to prison in Russia wound up dead in Ukraine, suggesting Russia is conscripting prisoners from other nations to fight

• A Zambian student serving a prison sentence in Russia wound up dead after fighting in the war in Ukraine.
• The 23-year-old man was serving a nine-year-and-six-month sentence for an unspecified crime.

A Zambian student who was serving a prison sentence in Moscow was roped into fighting for Putin in Russia's war against Ukraine — and ended up dead in the fighting, according to the Zambian government.

The man — identified as Lemekhani Nathan Nyirenda — was a 23-year-old studying nuclear engineering at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in Russia, according to Zambia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stanley K. Kakubo.

In April 2020, Nyirenda committed an unspecified crime, Zambia said in a statement, landing him in a Russian prison to serve a nine-year-and-six-month sentence. He was being held at Tyler Medium Security Prison on the outskirts of Moscow, the statement said.

On November 9, the Zambian Foreign Ministry was made aware that Nyirenda died "at the battlefront of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine."

According to the statement, Nyirenda died on September 22 and his remains have since been taken to a Russian border town to be transported back to Zambia.

The Zambian government said in the statement that they don't know how a foreign prisoner ended up fighting for Russia in the war, suggesting Russia may be conscripting prisoners from other countries to the frontlines to fight for them.

"The Zambian Government has requested the Russian authorities to urgently provide information on the circumstances under which a Zambian citizen, serving a prison sentence in Moscow, could have been recruited to fight in Ukraine and subsequently lose his life," the statement said.

Russia has already been recruiting prisoners to fight in their military in exchange for freedom, an August CNN investigation found.

"They will accept murderers, but not rapists, pedophiles, extremists, or terrorists," one prisoner told CNN at the time. "Amnesty or a pardon in six months is on offer. Somebody talks about 100,000 rubles a month, another 200,000. Everything is different."