(Zero Hedge)—European security authorities have recently been loudly warning of Russian military or intelligence recruitment scams targeting unsuspecting citizens of the EU, by offering promises of jobs or money transfers, during which time the individuals are said to be ‘recruited’ by Moscow. This is apparently happening on the African continent as well, with a new Reuters investigation documenting that South Africans are being lured into the Russian armed forces under false pretenses.
People are allegedly promised high-level jobs and elite training in Russia, only to find out they’ve unwittingly joined the Russian military, and eventually find themselves fighting in Ukraine soon after documents are hastily signed. In these cases the implication is that these South African individuals are in desperate financial straits.
Reuters details the story of South African father-of-three Dubandlela, who was initially thrilled when his 20-year-old son signed up last summer to receive specialized training as a VIP bodyguard in Russia.
The family had struggled financially, couldn’t provide university tuition for their son, and when an opportunity for a fast-tracked and solid job in Russia presented itself, the young man jumped at it as a path to a lucrative career.
And then, “Five months later, Dubandlela is in despair. His son had fallen for an alleged recruitment scam in which he and at least 16 other SA men say they were conscripted by an unspecified mercenary group and sent to join Russian forces in Ukraine.”
While the South African government’s relations with Russia has remained generally warm and positive even throughout nearly four years of the Ukraine war, the scandal has created strain at the highest levels.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office has recently stepped in – given that several young men – possibly dozens, have been ‘scammed’ into joining the Russian military. Presidential spokesman Vincent Magwenya issued a statement saying the Dubandlela case is “receiving the highest possible attention.”
In some cases the fate of the South African citizens is unknown given the fluid and dangerous nature of a battlefield environment. “The process to retrieve those young men remains a very sensitive process,” he said. “They are facing grave, grave danger to their lives and we are still in discussions with various authorities, both in Russia as well as in Ukraine, to see how we can free them from the situation they are in.”
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The spokesman further sought to address the reality that many South Africans have also traveled to fight for Ukrainian forces. He suggested that this is less of an issue because it was more transparent they were either volunteering or getting paid specifically to fight on behalf of Ukraine.
“In fact, the emphasis is more with the authorities in Russia and less so with the authorities in the Ukraine, because the information that we have is that they were bungled into the Russian military forces,” Magwenya told a press briefing.
While it would be hard to verify, the South African recruits are reportedly thrust into extreme conditions with lacking supplies and necessities given by the Russian military command:
On Dubandlela’s phone are photos that he said his son had sent earlier this month from what he said was a location near the front line in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas.
One shows his son in combat fatigues, awkwardly holding an AK-47 assault rifle. Another shows his son trying to sleep in his underwear on the concrete floor of a cupboard-sized basement after taking cover from Ukrainian drones. He looks so thin that his ribs are visible.
They reportedly are also given low-level positions like trench-diggers or tasked with hauling ammo or high risk logistical endeavors – all while “dodging bullets” according to the report.
Western officials have warned that social media platforms are rife with these types of deceptive recruitment campaigns. For example, Telegram is one specific platform named by European authorities as being used by Russian intelligence to recruit unwitting actors.
In the case of the South African recruits, to many it might seem more obvious or common sense that any program advertising itself as a ‘private security training course’ inside Russia during an active war on its border would very likely signal that it is tied to the military and the need for extra manpower in Ukraine.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.