Africans recruited for Russian jobs say they were tricked into building Ukraine drones

The social media ads promised the young African women a free plane ticket, money and a faraway adventure in Europe. Just complete a computer game and a 100-word Russian vocabulary test.

However, instead of a work-study program in fields like hospitality and catering, some of them learned only after arriving on the steppes of Russia’s Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of…