Ryazan residents Elena Smirnova and Olga Shilyayeva recruited Cubans and Lankans to fight in the war against Ukraine. They were later accused of fraud and sent to fight at the front.
This is stated in the investigation of the "Sistema" project, which is part of the "Nastoyaschee Vremya" media.
Elena Smirnova
Elena Smirnova is 41 years old. She has worked in tourism for most of her life. In 2023, the tour operator began finding Cuban and Sri Lankan citizens who wanted to earn money and leave their countries. She set them up with the military, who handed the seekers of big money a contract with the Russian army.
The terms that Elena offered to foreigners looked more than attractive: a one-time payment, then a salary of about $2 000 and, in the future, Russian citizenship.
The scheme was supposed to look like this. Elena independently pays for the future contract workerʼs flight, travel, accommodation in Russia and related expenses. And the mercenary returns these funds to her after signing the contract.
For convenience and with the recruitʼs consent, Elena and her colleagues make a copy of his bank card and withdraw the first payment from it — to cover their expenses.
Pretty soon the scheme began to fail. Some of the recruits simply did not return Elenaʼs money. Some complained that no one had warned them about the war, that they were going to a construction site, and they were sent to the training center and the trenches by force and deception. Some said that they had signed the contract without knowing Russian and without understanding what was written there.
Some Cubans complained that the promised payments were not fully credited to their cards and suspected that the “recruiters” were taking some of the money for themselves. One recruit said that he had looked at his bank statement and suspected that some of the money from the account might have ended up in the pockets of the recruiters.
As a result, several Cubans filed complaints with the Russian police in late April 2024. A criminal case was opened against Smirnova for theft and she was sent to a pre-trial detention center.
Elenaʼs lawyer claims in a letter that she sent over three thousand foreigners to the war with Ukraine. Approximately the same figure was given to “Sistema” by an acquaintance of Elena, who preferred to remain anonymous.
Olga Shilyaeva
Olga Shilyaeva (40) met Elena in May 2023. Olga noticed a car with an unfamiliar flag and the letter “Z” — Elena was driving the minivan. The women started talking about a parking space, and then Olga asked what kind of blue and white flag with a star was hanging on the car.
Then Elena burst into tears and began to tell me that she was helping Cubans get through the Ryazan selection point for war. That it was very difficult for her alone and she could not cope with the volume of tasks. Olga asked how she could help, and then Elena said that she needed help with the legalization of the families of foreigners who were fighting in the Russian Armed Forces.
Olgaʼs husband — Roman Shilyaev — is a military man. Since 2018, he has listed military unit 41495-2 as his place of work. There are few references to a military unit with this number in open sources, but the address given is a street next to the Diaghilev military airfield. The 43rd Center for Combat Application and Retraining of Air Staff is based there and strategic bombers are stationed there.
According to an acquaintance, at first Olga dealt only with the issues of the mercenariesʼ families, but later she began to deal with everything, including military contracts. Both Olga and Elena spent a lot of time at the Ryazan contract signing point and could send 30-40 foreigners to war in a day. The women even had a separate office in the regional transport department, not far from the selection point.
Olgaʼs acquaintance claims that at first she knew nothing about the fraud of foreigners, and the Cubans were allegedly warned in detail that they would have to pay the first payment to the "travel agents" — and some, according to her, even wrote a receipt about it in Russian and Spanish. Elena Smirnovaʼs lawyer also wrote about this in his appeal.
But one day, the translator told Olga about an overheard conversation between Elena and her clients. It implied that the Sri Lankan citizens whom Elena recruited were unaware that they would have to pay their first payment to the “agents”.
Later, Olga learned that their "firm" was deceiving not only Sri Lankans. According to her acquaintance, at least some of the Cubans, when they came to Russia, did not know that they were going to war — they thought they were going to construction or some similar work, and as a result they ended up at the front. And this was not the result of a misunderstanding or a language barrier, but a well-thought-out business scheme.
From the pre-trial detention center to the front
Elena Smirnovaʼs lawyer wrote to the Russian human rights commissioner. According to him, during the months spent in custody, the travel agent-recruiter felt "viciousness and distrust of an objective investigation", "took for granted the inevitability of a long-term prison sentence", and wrote a statement to the investigator asking to be allowed to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense and go to war — for example, in radio intelligence units as a translator.
The lawyer asked the commissioner to facilitate this. It is not known exactly when Elena asked to go to war — the lawyerʼs letter is dated October 23, 2024.
The sister of her colleague Olga Shilyaeva claims that Olga was sent from the pre-trial detention center to the war "by deception". Judging by this message, Olga ended up at the war no later than May 2025. The sisterʼs message suggests that already in the army, Shilyaeva ended up in the "Zaitseve" prison — this is the name of the basement torture chamber in the occupied part of the Luhansk region, where conscientious objectors and punished military personnel are imprisoned.
Olga Shilyayeva at the front.
An acquaintance of Shilyayeva and Smirnova confirmed that both women are currently serving in the “Storm V” assault company of one of the brigades of the 1st Tank Army.
It remains unknown whether the women organized and ran the recruitment scheme on their own initiative, or whether they were actually working for the Russian intelligence services and the Ministry of Defense. Russian authorities have never commented on the participation of Cubans and Sri Lankans in the war against Ukraine.
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