When an unemployed father of three received a phone call in July, asking if he wanted to do a yearlong bodyguard training program in Russia, he says he jumped at the opportunity.

He said the woman on the other line identified herself as a daughter of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president. He said she told him that after completing the program, he would be given a job working security for her father’s political party, for which she held a seat in Parliament.

But within six weeks of arriving in Russia, the man, 46, sensed that something was off. His supposed bodyguard trainers gave him military fatigues and a rifle and took him to the southern city of Rostov. A short time later, he said, he was on the front line of the war in Ukraine, sleeping in trenches in mud-soaked battlefields in the Donbas region and surrounded by tanks, drones and raging gunfire.

“We had been lied to,” said the man, who said he was still stuck in Russia and requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. “There was no bodyguard training. We were going to war.”

Seventeen South Africans have sent distress signals to their government this month asking to be rescued from the grinding battle in Ukraine, according to the office of President Cyril Ramaphosa. Mr. Ramaphosa has announced an investigation into how the men ended up there, and an elite police unit says it is looking into criminal charges against Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, Mr. Zuma’s daughter, who has been accused by one of her own sisters of tricking the men into joining the Russian battle.

The scandal has exposed a rift among the Zumas, one of South Africa’s best-known political families. The sister filed a criminal complaint against Ms. Zuma-Sambudla, accusing her of handing the men over to a Russian mercenary group without their knowledge or consent, according to the police.

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