Refusing to serve in Ukraine, he deserted the Russian army

“It was an ordinary pit — two by two metres in size and three meters deep, with a wooden floor. In the mornings, we dug pits for dugouts, where the others were living; at night, we slept on the wooden floor under the open sky. There were eight stormtroopers who told me I was 100 per cent going into assaults. That’s how I have been living for two weeks,” recalls 21-year-old Maksim, who deserted the Russian army (a pseudonym used for security reasons).

A Russian serviceman can end up in a “pit” at any time of the year as a punishment for refusing to follow orders from commanders, according to the independent Russian media group “Vazhnie Istorii” (“Important Stories”). This “pit” can be a simple hole dug in the ground or a dark basement room.

Maksim is not entirely sure why he was placed in the pit. However, last year, he did a lot to try and leave the occupied parts of Ukraine and terminate his contract with the Russian military.

Why do they even sign a military contract?

Being expelled from the university and growing up without a father — he lost him at four — in a region near the Ural Mountains, Maksim was drafted for compulsory military service in December 2021. Once in the army, he quickly realized the power of propaganda despite never being interested in a military career. “Even I started to think it was great to serve the motherland,” he admits.

He explained that in early February 2022 all contract soldiers from his military unit were sent to Belarus for so-called training. “Then, in the third week of February 2022, we were gathered daily to watch propaganda videos claiming that Ukraine was a fascist state, portraying the state as self-proclaimed descendants of the Third Reich,” he recalls, describing the days leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Being a soldier of compulsory military service, he was unable to have constant access to independent media and free information on the Internet. As a result, when the full-scale war started, he did not realize what was happening in Ukraine.

In May 2022, Maksim was offered to sign a military contract, and he agreed. For him it was practical — he was guaranteed to be paid “a good salary” (around 800 euros per month at that exchange rate — ed.). He was promised not to participate in military action but to drive “some cargo” within Russia. Maksim was also assured he could terminate the contract any time after three months and be reassigned as part of his compulsory military service again. He explains that it was an option to save money and have some stability.

He got everything — except stability.

Expectations versus reality

In June 2022, Maksim was ordered to begin his service in Luhansk, a regional centre in Ukraine that had been under Russian occupation since 2014. Once a week, he travelled approximately 200 kilometres to Russian cities to purchase food supplies. While his commanders assured him that Luhansk was a safe base, the reality was different — he often heard explosions at night and felt the constant tension of a city at war.

He recalls that in the evenings, the streets were utterly dark there — without a single streetlight, cars, or people in sight. He noticed several burned-out, windowless houses destroyed by the war.

“Senior officers propagated among us that Ukraine was under a fascist regime that was killing children,” Maksim says.

However, his interactions with young locals in Luhansk painted a different picture. “They didn’t talk about such things,” he states. Instead, they told him about constant power and water outages since 2014 and how their relatives had been forcibly sent to fight. “They asked why we had come, saying it was better without us. I told them it wasn’t my choice to be there, and they treated me normally,” he claims.

In late September 2022, Maksim asked to return to compulsory military service, as promised. However, the commander declined his request, and in a few days, Vladimir Putin declared a “partial” mobilization in Russia. Legally terminating a military contract since that time became almost impossible.

Being a serviceman in occupied Luhansk, Maksim began reading news from his phone (it was illegal to have it for contracted servicemen, so he had to hide it) from independent media outlets and different Telegram channels. They frequently reported on the harsh realities of life in the Russian army and the cruelty towards Ukrainian war prisoners. And Maksim realized that he did not want “to be part of this anymore”.

There are some options to do just that.

“I decided that I’d rather go to prison than fight in Ukraine”

The non-profit organization “Idite Lesom” (“Get Lost”) has been assisting Russians in avoiding involvement in the full-scale war in Ukraine since September 2022. Last year, it was financed by 4,000 donations and small grants, primarily from European foundations. Founded by Grigory Sverdlin, a 46-year-old resident of St Petersburg and former head of a charity for homeless people, the NGO has helped more than 53,000 individuals avoid military service and facilitated the desertion of more than 1,460 soldiers.

Since the start of the mobilization in Russia (formally, it has continued because no official Putin order has declared its end), there have been three legal ways to terminate a military contract with the Ministry of Defence.

The first one is being seriously wounded and declared unfit for subsequent service. The second one is committing a crime, such as a wilful failure to comply with orders. Moreover, soldiers and officers may terminate their contracts when they turn 65. Indeed, there is always an option to desert, which is punishable by lengthy prison terms in Russia.

Maksim tried some of these ways.

In March 2024, he transferred at will to another brigade in Siberia, hoping to wait out the end of mobilization. At that time, having learned about “Get Lost” on a Telegram channel, he decided to contact the NGO and ask about any options he could use as a contracted member of the military. The organization recommended him to take a flight abroad. “But then, I was too scared to cross the border as a soldier, I didn’t dare act,” he says.

Two months later, Maksim was informed that he had to join a new assault regiment that was directly involved in combat in Ukraine. He signed a statement refusing to obey the order, fled the military unit, and confessed to the investigating authorities, following his lawyer’s advice. He thought it would help him to terminate his contract. 

The prison sentence for this criminal offence is up to three years in a penal colony, where conditions are somewhat more manageable. It is also possible to be released on probation. “I decided that I’d rather go to prison than fight in Ukraine,” Maksim admits.

The investigative authorities refused to initiate proceedings against him. “I think it was unfavourable for them,” assumes Maksim. But then the FSB became interested in him.

They suspected him of attempting to defect to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The siloviki tried to force him to confess on camera, threatening to shoot him in the knees. Maksim refused, and the FSB did not pursue him further, stating it was just a warning.

A couple of days later, he was informed that he would be transferred to a tank regiment, which had been fighting near a town in the Luhansk region occupied by the Russian army since spring 2022. New Eastern Europe verified the source’s story against a map of the fighting in Ukraine and knows the exact location of his unit. However, it cannot disclose this information for security reasons. Maksim claims that he once again wrote a refusal to be transferred but was forcibly shoved into a military vehicle and taken to the regiment’s position.

It was then that he was put in a pit and thought that he would be forced to go on an assault.

Long way to desert

The exact prevalence of this practice remains unclear, but reports about it have been emerging in independent Russian media and Telegram channels. Soldiers who have experienced this form of punishment have told journalists that they were forced to sleep on bare ground, wooden planks, or concrete floors and had to use plastic bottles as makeshift toilets.

According to Maksim, the military police also beat him up and took his phone away. The command tried to intimidate him with threats of “zeroing” — a term used to mean execution. This practice has been reported by other Russian soldiers as well. “But I openly told the stormtroopers that letting them kill me was better than going into assaults,” he admits.

While there, Maksim repeatedly asked every commander if they needed a driver, hoping to avoid being sent to the front line as a stormtrooper. Eventually, he was assigned as a driver in an engineer-sapper company. His job was to transport anti-tank mines to the line of contact.

Maksim insists he did not participate in military battles and served only as a driver. Sverdlin explains that “Get Lost” verifies a person’s background and story, checks his documents, and asks him to provide photos or videos that may confirm his words. The same procedure was implemented in Maksim’s case by “Get Lost”.

This is only possible due to the work of nine people who have full-time jobs in “Get Lost” and the hundreds of others who are volunteers (including designers, psychologists, lawyers, etc). Besides assisting the Russian military personnel in many aspects, the NGO also reviews any possible involvement in war crimes. For instance, the organization cooperates with UN investigative teams, and more than ten individuals who have been helped by “Get Lost” to escape Russia have already provided testimony about war crimes allegedly committed by the Russian army.

Maksim says that as soon as he became a driver, he immediately decided to run away at the first opportunity. Last September, luck was on his side.

New life as an immigrant

He managed to desert from the Russian army during a short assignment to collect a new excavator in a southern Russian city.

He simply asked the officer in charge, who had been drinking all night — a common practice in the Russian army alongside using drugs to cope with stress — if he could take a short walk in the city. With the officer’s permission to stroll, Maksim used the chance to book a ride on the “BlaBlaCar” app and disappeared. The commander tried to reach him by phone, but Maksim was hiding in Russia for the next three months, living off the money he had saved during his military service.

“It was tough to stay hidden, almost impossible to leave the house. So, I contacted “Get Lost”, and they advised me to leave the country again. My relatives supported this decision,” he says. Sverdlin notes that “Get Lost” is observing a steady monthly increase in requests from Russian military personnel seeking help to defect, with several hundred inquiries each month.

Maksim managed to cross the border unhindered and now lives outside Russia. This is the first foreign country he has ever been in. New Eastern Europe knows his whereabouts, how he reached that place, and his route but will not disclose them for security reasons.

In the last year, he has found a job as a driver and a place to live. “Everything is the same as before, except I don’t deliver objects that can kill other people,” he says.

In his spare time, Maksim learns English. He sees his current country of residence as temporary. He said that as a teenager, he dreamed of living in Canada and studying interior design, which interests him. He also finds pleasure in drawing.

“I’m not proud of deserting the Russian army and leaving my country, but I don’t regret it. I believe it was the right decision,” says Maksim.

Despite everything that has happened, Maksim has not seen a psychologist and does not plan to. “I miss my loved ones, but I will return to Russia only if everything changes dramatically, including the people. Being alone in a foreign country without family or friends is not easy. But I thought this would be much better for me. Yes, difficulties exist, but when you get through them, you become stronger,” he concludes.

This text was prepared in the framework of the 2024/2025 edition of the Solidarity Academy, an international project of the European Solidarity Centre, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Warsaw, and New Eastern Europe. The project aims to inspire and support the development of young leaders across Europe.