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‘You wanted to go to Russia? Then go die for it.’ How a Moscow IT worker got roped into the war while visiting his mother in Donetsk

Source: Verstka

Artyom is an IT worker from eastern Ukraine who has lived in Moscow for nearly a decade. In February 2022, he was visiting his disabled mother in Donetsk when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Despite not being a Russian citizen, Artyom was quickly rounded up along with a group of other men and taken to an army recruitment center. In the months that followed, he worked as an IT consultant for the Russian military and helped enlist prisoners into the army — all while trying to get away from the front. Now, Artyom is hiding in Moscow, where he lives in fear of the authorities catching him and sending him back to the war. Meduza shares an abridged translation of an article from the outlet Verstka about Artyom’s experience.

Though he’s effectively stateless now, Artyom was born in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. “I traveled around all of Ukraine when I was in college,” he tells Verstka over Zoom. “I even lived in western Ukraine for several years: I found a girlfriend there and started putting down roots.”

Eventually, he and his girlfriend broke up, so he went back east. By then, Russia had annexed Crimea and fomented war in Ukraine’s Donbas region. “I returned home to a town that I just didn’t recognize — and that I no longer wanted to live in,” he recalls.

Artyom he decided to move to Kyiv. But when his landlady there learned that he was from the Donetsk region, he says, she called him a “scumbag” and refused to rent to him. “I realized I didn’t want to live in a country that treats its citizens that way,” Artyom tells Verstka. “At that point, I hadn’t done anything to be considered a criminal — I hadn’t voted in the referendum, for example. All it took was me showing my address.”

Disappointed by his experience in Kyiv, Artyom decided to try moving to a different capital. His first impression of Moscow was that of a “civilized society” that he “would like to live in,” and though the high prices spooked him at first, he was pleasantly surprised to find that his IT skills were in high demand. He quickly found a job and settled in to the city, where he lived happily for the next eight years.

In the meantime, Artyom made regular trips to see his mother, who had vowed never to leave Donetsk after she suffered a stroke. He tried to visit her every three months, bringing her groceries and money to live on.

The last one of these trips was in early 2022, when he decided to bring her some souvenirs for her birthday after taking a vacation in Egypt. Then, on February 23, he was loaded onto a bus with a group of other men and taken to an enlistment office that had been set up at a local movie theater.

‘I’m an IT guy — I can’t shoot or kill’

“Don’t worry, nobody’s going to send you to fight,” Artyom recounts the military officers telling him. “You’re just going to help — loading ammunition, for example. It’ll take 15–20 days.”

Artyom tried desperately to convince the recruiters that they’d made a mistake and that he was “not a military guy.” He even offering to “assist” the Russian army on other, less binding conditions until the borders reopened and he could return to Moscow. “I told them I might be useful to them if they needed my help [with IT issues] while I was still in the DNR [Donetsk People’s Republic],” he says.

According to Artyom, the officers agreed that his skills could come in handy. Nonetheless, the next day, he was loaded into a bus with other men and taken to the town of Novoazovsk, where they were told they would receive weapons the following day.

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“It was at this point that I tried to put a stop to the whole thing, because I had no intention of joining any war,” Artyom says. “I started explaining that there’d been a mistake: I’m an IT guy. I can’t shoot or kill, sorry.”

Eventually, according to Artyom, his pleading appeared to work, and the army seemed ready to let him return to Donetsk. But when he heard that men back in the city were being forcibly taken from their homes and sent to the front, he realized he would likely be in even more danger there. So when a captain in Novoazovsk offered him work as an off-contract computer assistant, he agreed.

‘We’ll take Ukraine in three days, a week, 15 days…’

Though he was required to wear a military uniform to blend in, Artyom didn’t directly participate in combat, and his work for the army really did seem temporary at first, he tells Verstka. The fact that he hadn’t signed a contract gave him hope that he would be able to leave Ukraine at the first opportunity — and that the Russian authorities would have no legal grounds to detain him in the future.

At the same time, he says, he hoped his work for the Russian military would help bring peace to Donetsk. “I thought that pretty soon here, people would be able to start living normal lives,” he explains.

A month into his work for the army, Artyom went on his first “assignment” — to the outskirts of Mariupol. Just a few miles away from the seaside city he’d visited numerous times as a teenager, he was now working on maps and setting up a communications center, because Russia’s invasion had left the city with no Internet.

“That trip was very hard on me,” he says. “This Mariupol was very different from the city I’d known, and now, seeing the city under heavy bombardment, I was just in shock. […] But I was working in the [Russian military] headquarters, so I couldn’t reveal my emotions to anyone, of course.”

After two months in Mariupol, Artyom thought he would finally be able to return home, as his commanders had promised. Instead, however, they sent him on two other trips: first to the Zaporizhzhia region, then to the Avdiivka front.

By the time August rolled around, Artyom was eager to return to Moscow — but his family talked him out of even trying. “You won’t face any danger [doing IT work for the Russian army], and the experience might help you out in the future,” he recalls them saying. When his landlady back in Moscow learned he was at the front, she told him he didn’t need to pay rent for his empty apartment.

Living luxuriously while waging war

The conditions in which Russia’s high-ranking officers lived in Mariupol while the rank-and-file soldiers were digging trenches reminded Artyom of a resort. Their headquarters was in a large three-story house with a sauna, a pool, and a jacuzzi.

“It’s paradoxical, but I’ve never lived more comfortably in my life than I did during this time,” he says. “But it was hard to be there in Mariupol and to see people from my own culture dying. I just couldn’t understand how all of this was happening.”

Six months into his service, Artyom was offered a promotion that he says would have provided a “path to the FSB.” But while he admits he was tempted by the stability it would have brought, he ultimately decided against it to avoid signing a contract. Meanwhile, he had started getting compensated for his work: his first payment, he says, came in the form of 70,000 rubles (about $800), “basically in an envelope.”

Ultimately, it was Artyom’s inability to adjust to army life, even in the relatively luxurious conditions of the Mariupol command headquarters, that brought an end to his service. The more his commanders learned to deal with IT issues on their own, he explains, the more obvious it became that somebody as straight-laced as him was out of place.

“If it’s one of the officers, it would be cognac or whiskey. I never saw vodka, to be honest,” he recounts. “It’s the ‘proper’ way to end the workday, as they see it. Sometimes they’d actually force me to drink, and it made me feel awful.”

Eventually, one of Artyom’s commanders got offended by his refusal to drink. “This sparked a big scandal, with them basically saying I was a rat. He said my service was over and that I was no longer needed, basically telling me to just leave. And that was exactly what I’d been waiting for. I packed my things and left,” he says.

Artyom went to stay with his mother, who had lost movement in half of her body after her stroke. After two months of him living there and taking care of her, two armed soldiers showed up at the door. They took him to their commander’s office, where he learned he’d been declared AWOL and was required to return to the front.

‘How far have I fallen?’

“You wanted to go to Russia? Then go and die for it,” Artyom remembers a commander from Russia’s 9th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade telling him. Despite this, he continued to refuse to sign an army contract — but this only led to him being forced to serve unofficially in a small company that was regularly sent to carry out assaults. While he didn’t take part in combat himself, it was the first time he saw the war up close.

“People would come back mutilated and broken. It was horrifying, just horrifying,” he tells Verstka. “Some of the bulletproof vests didn’t have plates in them. And the helmets were so thin that bullets went right through them.”

When winter came around, convicts who had been recruited from prison were sent to Artyom’s company. He was tasked with counting them and preparing reports on those who returned to the unit after attempting to flee.

“I saw that if a person is from Donetsk, deserting the front is a hopeless situation. It’s impossible to live without money, they’ll be searching for you constantly if you go home, and your neighbors will be encouraged to turn you in. At best, you’ll be found, detained, and sent back. And worst, they’ll beat you up and then take you right back to your unit,” he explains.

Asked whether he personally talked volunteers into signing contracts with the army, Artyom says only that he would drive those who were willing to the military headquarters to fill out their documents.

In the last group of convicts that arrived, he recounts, there were 10 men who enlisted voluntarily. “Out of those 10, only two knew how to write. That’s the kind of people who end up there. On the way [to the headquarters], they talked to me, but I barely understood them. It seemed like they’d spent their entire lives either in prison or drinking,” he says.

The first group of prisoners sent to carry out an assault, according to Artyom, consisted of 56 people. Only six of them returned. One of the survivors was a former colonel named Yevgeny who had gone to prison for shooting his commander in 2017.

Soon after, in January 2023, Yevgeny was offered a position as commander of a new regiment. He knew that Artyom was able to adjust drones’ frequencies and “make them less vulnerable to being shot down,” and he proposed teaming up to create a battalion dedicated solely to quadcopter operations.

“The fact that I didn’t have a contract and that I hadn’t even been mobilized really bothered me,” Artyom says. “I thought, how far have I fallen that I’m now going to be working under a person who did time in prison for murder? And what if I do something wrong? He’ll crush me.”

When it came time for Artyom to sign a contract with the new formation, he left.

‘I’m close to losing my mind’

After his time in the war, Artyom found it hard to live in bustling central Moscow. Two days after returning, he moved to an apartment outside the city that was surrounded by forest on three sides. “At first, I just stayed inside and tried to recover. Then I really started liking to walk through the forest. I needed time to become a normal person again,” he says.

Eventually, he returned to work. He also started dating someone, and before long, they decided to get married. Because Artyom’s DNR documents were set to expire, he first went to a migration office to apply for Russian citizenship. “They took my fingerprints, and I was supposed to get everything four days later,” he says.

When he returned to pick up his new passport, however, the woman working the desk told him that there had been a problem with his application and that he needed to submit a new one. Then, while he filled out the paperwork for the second time, the woman pressed an alarm button. Two “burly guys” appeared in the room, Artyom says, and told him they were taking him to the police: He was wanted for desertion.

When Artyom told the police that he had never signed a military contract and therefore wasn’t officially a serviceman, they didn’t let up. “Did you get money [from the military]? Then you’re a soldier,” he recalls one officer saying.

After his interrogation, Artyom was taken to a Moscow military base, where he spent the next two months waiting for his case to be investigated. When he was sent to a military medical board, he wrote a statement of refusal, arguing that he had no obligations to the Russian Defense Ministry. Despite this, he was issued an order to return to Russia’s military unit No. 71443.

Artyom didn’t go. He currently spends most of his time in his apartment; the deadline for him to return to the front passed over a month ago. “I can’t shake the thought that someone could come and grab me at any moment,” he says. “Sometimes I’m afraid to leave the building, because they don’t have the right to break into my home, but they could catch me out on the street. I’m close to losing my mind. I’m trying to live a normal life, but I’m in total despair.”

Asked how he thinks about the fact that he worked for the Russian military despite having grown up in Ukraine, Artyom gives the following explanation: