Nonkululeko Patricia Mantula, a 39-year-old host on South Africa’s SAFM state radio network, was arrested and brought into court on Monday to face charges of recruiting South African men to fight for Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine.

South Africa’s Russian recruiting scandal erupted in early November, when the government began investigating complaints from relatives of men who were allegedly duped into traveling to Russia for what they thought was bodyguard training, only to find themselves pressed into service with the Russian military and flung onto the bloody battlefields of Ukraine.

Similar recruiting schemes have been exposed in several other countries, including India, Cuba, and Kenya. The twist that made the South African story into such a major scandal was that former

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