‘The point of no return’ One former Russian prisoner-turned-soldier describes deserting the army and fleeing to France
Since the summer of 2022, the Russian military has recruited thousands of inmates from the country’s prison system to fight in the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. One former Russian prisoner was sent to the front in the fall of 2023, where he soon realized just how under-equipped and unprepared he and his fellow Russian prison recruits really were. He sat down with journalists from BBC News Russian and told them about his journey from serving time in a Russian penal colony to seeking asylum in France.
Forty-two-year-old Andrey was serving a seven-year prison sentence for drug dealing when he decided to enlist in the Russian army; it was his second drug-related offense after a 2010 drug trafficking conviction. As soon as he was paroled from his first prison stint, the same Interior Ministry officers who had previously arrested him offered him a job as a police informant. In actuality, however, his Interior Ministry handlers had him facilitate bribe payments and deal drugs on their behalf. For this, Andrey was arrested by officers from a different government agency in the summer of 2021.
Andrey was still awaiting his verdict in a pre-trial detention facility when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Hearing rumors that prisoners might be sent to the front lines, he thought to himself: “Who in their right mind would want to give weapons to inmates?” After he was sentenced in December 2022, Andrey was sent to Moscow’s Lefortovo remand prison. The following summer, however, Andrey was transferred to a penal colony as punishment for attempting to sneak a message out of the prison. He thought that he’d be able to build a rapport with the new prison administration upon his arrival, but he was immediately attacked by a group of prisoners working with the prison leadership. After several hours of beatings and torture, Andrey says that he just kept repeating that he wanted to “go to war.” Andrey’s assailants passed his message along to the administration.
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In mid-September 2023, Andrey signed a year-long military contract, and he and his fellow inmates were shipped off for basic training in Ukraine’s Russian-annexed Luhansk region. Their military training lasted just 12 days, after which time Andrey was appointed commander of their “Storm V” military unit and they were sent into battle.
The mood started off light; the soldiers laughed and joked around as they began their 10-kilometer (about 6-mile) trek into the conflict zone. But after a few hours of lugging around heavy equipment, Andrey’s unit suddenly came under attack. He and two other Russian soldiers jumped into a trench to take cover, but a Ukrainian drone soon flew overhead and dropped a grenade on them. One soldier’s head exploded right before his eyes.
Concussed, Andrey managed to escape, but when he returned to base, he was ordered back to the front. His unit once again came under fire as they crawled through a minefield, and they were forced to retreat to the trenches. There, he managed to get some sleep, but a drone attack woke him early the next morning, and Andrey suffered another concussion. Andrey was sent to work as part of an evacuation crew for most of his final missions, and he maintains that he didn’t kill anyone in the month that he spent at the front.
Andrey says almost all of the inmates he fought with on the front lines regretted their decision to go to war. But they didn’t discuss their role in killing Ukrainians, or even what they were fighting for. “It’s like a switch goes off in your brain,” Andrey explains. “You’re trying to stay alive, and other people are trying to kill you. How you got here is neither here nor there. It’s the point of no return. No one is thinking about those details anymore; there isn’t any kind of deep reflection going on.”
After a month of fighting, the disparities between Russian forces and their Ukrainian counterparts seemed quite stark to Andrey. For one thing, Ukrainian forces were much better equipped. Weapons, uniforms, medicine — everything the Ukrainian military had was of better quality. Another difference he saw between the armies was their motivations. Ukrainian soldiers were defending their homeland; but Russians, as Andrey puts it, “were fighting…just because. Because that’s life.”
At the end of October 2023, Andrey contracted pneumonia, but he was still sent on another assault mission. “It felt like they were intentionally sending us to our deaths,” he recalls. They just wrote us off.” After several days at the front, Andrey was finally sent to a hospital for treatment — first in Luhansk, and then in the Russian border region of Belgorod. At this point, he knew he couldn’t return to his “Storm V” unit. He started putting in for transfers to another division, but each time his request was denied due to his prisoner status. After he had exhausted all his options for a transfer, he began seriously considering deserting and reached out to “Get Lost,” an organization that helps Russian soldiers defect from the army.
But escaping from the hospital wouldn’t be so easy; he was under constant supervision. Andrey managed to bribe the doctors to transfer him to a hospital with less security. In the end, however, all that proved unnecessary; after he was discharged from the hospital, the army granted him a short leave. By January 2024, Andrey had resolved to get out of the military by any means necessary.
Despite serving time in prison, Andrey had managed to hold onto his international passport, which had an active visa granting him entry into multiple European countries inside. He made his way to France where he turned himself in to local police and formally requested asylum. Andrey says that his fellow soldiers supported his decision to desert, but only one person he confided in also expressed interest in deserting. He describes them as reasoning: “We got ourselves into this, we’re in it till the end.”
Andrey claims that not one of the 105 soldiers he fought alongside in “Storm V” at the beginning of his service in October 2023 is still serving. BBC News Russian notes that the entire five-square-kilometer (nearly two-square-mile) territory taken by Andrey’s brigade has since been recaptured by the Ukrainian army.