A farewell to Putin’s arms: Russian deserters tell their stories

Georgy is 28 years old, but looks younger. He smiles politely, and speaks faltering but serviceable French. I meet with Georgy and his partner Sergey, 30, one April afternoon. They have come to France with the help of Russie-Libertés, which, together with other associations like inTransit in Germany, works to support the Russian opposition. 

Georgy is a senior lieutenant in the Russian army. He entered the army in 2017. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, he was invited to join the armed forces for his military service, while continuing to practice programming, for which he had trained.

His family were supportive: it could be the beginning of a military career, meaning a reliable position and salary. Besides, working for the military’s IT section had many practical advantages: an office job, no operations in the field and no use of weapons, for example. 

The following year, at the end of his service, the army offered Georgy a five-year contract, “promising that none of my responsibilities would change”. However, only a little while later he was told that the position for which he was recruited no longer existed, that he would be stationed elsewhere, and that it was impossible, in any case, to prematurely terminate his contract. 

Then the conflicts with his superiors began, even over trivial matters. And there was also the fact that Georgy is gay, which carries a serious stigma in a country where homophobia is state policy. Russia’s first law against “LGBT+ propaganda” was passed in 2013, and in 2022 it was reinforced, with grave consequences for gay rights activists and associations. “Back then”, says Georgy, “I was already in disagreement with the country’s domestic policy, with the values of the army, where it is compulsory to support the state”.

In 2021 his first official letter of resignation was rejected, because it was “impossible to leave the army” before the end of his contract. Other letters, documents and reports followed. “All my requests were ignored”, explains Georgy. Then he tried absenteeism, and even obtained proof - by means of a psychiatrist’s certificate diagnosing him with depression - that he was unable to remain in his post. But the fact was that there was simply no solution.

At a certain point he was summoned. There was indeed a way for him to leave the army: by means of a judicial procedure, a trial. A dossier with his name on it, accusing him of theft and corruption, had even been prepared. Leaving the army was therefore possible, but the only exit led to prison. There was no solution.

A major shift occurred on 24 February 2022, when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. “I will always remember that morning: I was on the metro and I saw the bombardment of Ukraine on my phone”. Up to that point he hadn’t been aware of what was going on: his depression had been getting worse and worse. “The next day there was a protest in Moscow against the war.” Despite being prohibited from doing so due to his military status, Georgy attended the protest “to show that those who are against it are not alone”. Georgy doesn’t remember much about the spring that followed. “I had started to drink a lot; I had become an alcoholic”. 

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‘I would have to find some way to leave the army, because it was out of the question that I would participate in any of this’ – Georgy

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In June of that year he was assigned to work on the files of those who had volunteered to fight in the war in Ukraine, which gave him access to data on those who freely chose to enlist. The divergence between the numbers he had before his eyes and those suggested by the political discourse was impossible to miss. “I realised that not only were my friends and acquaintances against the war and the country’s politics, but now I also saw that the official figures were being inflated”. 

The Russian armed forces have four main sources of recruitment. The first is conscription: the men who are obliged to undertake one year of military service. The second group is composed of “contract soldiers” who have agreed to participate by signing a contract with the Ministry of Defence. Then there are the people mobilised by the decree of Vladimir Putin on 21 September 2022 to fight in Ukraine. Finally, there are the “volunteers”, or the people who have voluntarily offered to participate in the war, through volunteer organisations affiliated with the Ministry of Defence, including private military companies, as explained by the analysis of Yuri Fedorov, an expert in military and political issues in Russia for the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), and a journalist based in the Czech Republic. 

It was precisely Putin’s decree that Georgy was talking to me about. The decree also established that those who already had an existing contract with the army would have it extended “until the end of the war”. At this point, he explains, “I understood that I had very few options. I knew that my moment was coming: either war or prison”.

Anna Colin-Lebedev is a lecturer and researcher in political science. Her work is focused on the relationship between citizens and the state in post-Soviet society. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she published Jamais frères? (”Never brothers?”, Seuil, 2022), an analysis of the similarities and differences between Russian and Ukrainian society. 

Colin-Lebedev talked to me about the delicate and painful question of conscripts, the young people who undertake compulsory military service. While it remains a taboo for the Kremlin - thanks to campaigns by soldiers’ mothers in Russia, especially during the First Chechen War - the law authorises these men to be sent to the front. A decree by Boris Yeltsin which banned this practice was subsequently abolished.   

In order to be sent to war, they are no longer “conscripts”, but “soldiers”. What does this mean, exactly? “You are 18 years old and receive the call for your year of military service. Before, it would take at least four months before they asked you to sign a contract. Now it happens on day one”, explains Colin-Lebedev. “These are young people who have never held a weapon”. When they sign a contract they are now employees of the Ministry of Defence on an indefinite contract, that is, until the end of the war. And this transforms the status of these young people from conscripts to ‘contracted military personnel’. Like magic, there are now no conscripts on the front lines.

Or else, continues Colin-Lebedev, they are sent “into the border regions, or Kherson or Zaporizhzhia”. Since the government “considers these parts of Russia”, the young people officially never leave national territory, when in fact they are fighting on the frontline, and dying.  

This is a particularly vulnerable demographic, Colin-Lebedev says. First there is pressure from society and family, according to which a man is supposed to serve in the army. Moreover, at 18 years of age, these are people who have never worked for a real salary, and now they are suddenly offered a chance to earn big money. They also “have no way to communicate with lawyers, with their loved ones. And the officers exert a lot of pressure. This means that these are not people who want to serve, but rather have no way not to serve”.

The army focuses its recruiting efforts on the most disadvantaged classes, Colin-Lebedev adds. “First of all, when you are a student in university, you are exempt from service for the duration of your studies. Those who end up in the military at 18 are people who do not pursue further education. The army mainly recruits in small towns, where it is harder to hide; and then, the poorer you are, the less chance you have of bribing military personnel or buying a medical certificate. And for poorer families, the army is still seen as a way out of poverty”.    

War or prison. Or exile

Everything happened so fast for Georgy: “a few days after [the full-scale invasion] I received the order to leave my post in administration and report to the collection point where I would be shipped to who knows where - they don’t tell you - for who knows how long”. "What could I do?" Either war, prison, or “I would have to find some way to leave the army, because it was out of the question that I would participate in any of this”.

In the end, he chose exile. “I went to Sergey, to warn him that I’d be leaving. I was sure I’d never see him again”, Georgy says, turning to his partner seated beside him. Georgy took a train to Siberia, then a taxi driver with whom he had been put in touch helped him cross the Kazakhstan border, where he arrived three days later. He then informed Sergey, who left his job as a history professor and his life in Russia to join him. 

Kazakhstan, along with Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, are countries that are politically close with the Kremlin, and Russians only need an internal passport (the equivalent of our ID card) to enter. In many cases, soldiers do not have international passports, which are confiscated when they join the army. To exit the country they have to obtain the authorisation of their superiors and/or the secret service.  

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Kazakhstan is therefore not a safe place for a Russian soldier who has defected. And Georgy had no contacts. On the day of his arrival there were no beds available in the hotels and hostels, so he asked the girl in the kiosk where he bought a sim card for information. She offered to take him in, perhaps because she understood his situation. “It was wonderful; surprising and moving,” he says with a smile.

In the beginning, Georgy did not say he was a deserter - for which there is a federal arrest warrant - but said that he had escaped mobilisation, and found work in a factory. The following January the police paid a visit to their apartment, Georgy says. “We considered escaping from the third-floor balcony”, Sergey adds with a laugh. Meanwhile, solutions had to be found. Sergey spent his days contacting associations and NGOs about how to get to safety and what to do. 

A farewell to arms: how to desert 

In May of 2023 they were invited to the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law (KIBHR), where they met Aleksandr, who in the meantime had joined us at our meeting and was seated next to Sergey. Aleksandr is 26 years old and is - was - a lieutenant in the Russian army.

“When I was 18, I entered the military academy, and politics began to affect me personally.” Aleksandr lists several examples, “we worked in the kitchen and the expiration date of the meat we ate was 1990. Why were we eating products that had expired so long ago?” Or, he continues, when “I learned about the salary of our instructors, who earned between 15 and 17 thousand rubles, or 150-170 euro. How could our education be any good when they were paid so little? So you wonder where all that money that is allocated to our academy goes. And so you start to ask yourself questions. And YouTube gave me answers: I watched the Russian opposition channels, especially. That’s when I started thinking it was possible.”

Together with others they met at KIBHR, Sergey, Georgy and Aleksandr began to discuss what they could do politically. Aleksandr and Sergey had the idea of creating a media project aimed at soldiers specifically, to tell their story and show them that it was possible to leave the army. A sort of “counter-propaganda for desertion”, they explain to me. The project is called “A Farewell To Arms/Прощай, оружие”. 

“We couldn’t remain silent, something had to be done. For us, it is essential to give a voice to people who leave the army and encourage those who have doubts to leave”, say Aleksandr. “It’s quite simple, really. We are what we consume, what we eat, but also what we hear and see. And this is the power of propaganda”. According to Sergey, “it is easier for a soldier to speak to soldiers, and easier for them to listen to a soldier than to a human rights defender or an ordinary citizen”.

A Farewell To Arms has Telegram and YouTube channels. They tell the stories of those who have deserted the army, explain how to desert, and write letters to political prisoners: because when prisons receive such letters it sends a message that these prisoners are remembered, making it harder for them to be made to disappear. “At the start of the war there were not many people in the Russian army who were genuinely, ideologically ready for this conflict. Very few believed the official version, according to which Ukraine had to be liberated from Nazis. There were those who followed orders, but in reality they didn’t agree with the ideology”. And it is to these people that A Farewell To Arms is addressed. “Yes, we are breaking the law, we take responsibility for our actions: it is important that it is known in Russia that deserters exist, that another path is possible”, Aleksandr explains. 

Aleksandr says that every person who contacts them is obviously vetted for security reasons. “Along the Russian/Ukrainian front lines there are camps where military personnel who try to escape are detained”, he adds.

I find confirmation of this in an analysis by Yuri Fedorov, who relates the testimony of a Russian soldier: “The most common measure is to put them in a large pit under the open sky, where they are sent for various ‘offenses’: drinking alcohol, conflicts with superiors, leaving their post without permission. There are times when a person is thrown into a basement, usually in abandoned buildings, like a school or a hospital, for refusing to fight. They are being tortured there. One month in such a ‘cell’ under inhumane conditions, a person will go anywhere”. 

According to Russian media sources, in December 2024 the number of Russian military personnel rose to around 2.4 million, of which 1.5 million are soldiers. On 31 May 2024, the British Ministry of Defence revealed that the total number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded since the start of the war was 500,000. Various independent media organisations are still trying to verify this data. According to Fedorov the number could be anywhere between 330,000 and 525,000 men.

The number of deserters - involving data that is difficult to verify – was, according to Fedorov, between 30,000 and 40,000 in 2023 alone. As explained by Regard sur l’Est, a review uniting various experts in the field, in 2023 “the Russian authorities reportedly launched the beta version of a database of people who may be liable for military service and/or mobilisation. This would allow the government to increase controls and prevent those who would like to avoid their military obligations from crossing the borders (since the start of the war, between 500,000 and one million people are thought to have done so)”.

In reality, Colin-Lebedev clarifies, getting recent figures on Russia is genuinely tricky: “The problem we have with the Russian army is that it puts out official data that has little connection with reality. That is, this figure [of 1.5 million soldiers] is in fact a target. This is how the Russian army would like to see itself”.

I ask what the actions of Aleksandr, Sergey and Georgy mean for them in economic terms. Judging by his facial expression, Aleksandr is surprised by my question. “It was never about money, we only had two choices: leave Russia and stay alive, or go to prison. And anyway, today, in prison they’re recruiting too, so whatever happens, in prison you still end up in the war”.

*The names in this article have been changed to protect the people mentioned. 

🤝 This article was written as part of the PULSE project. Angelina Davydova of n-ost collaborated in its production.