‘Pay up and keep living’ A Russian draftee who refused to take up arms recounts military life, torture in prison, and desertion — Mediazona
The war against Ukraine came for Sergey Savchenko about a month after Vladimir Putin ordered a “partial” mobilization of Russia’s fighting men. Refusing to take up arms, Savchenko spent his first year as a draftee serving in a medical unit on the front lines in Ukraine’s Luhansk region. The military later trained him against his will as an officer and made him a platoon commander. When Savchenko refused to lead his unit in an assault, his superiors locked him in a basement for disobedient soldiers. After returning to the front, he bribed his way into a position evacuating the wounded. Six months later, in exchange for an even larger bribe, Savchenko landed a job with Russia’s Investigative Committee in occupied Luhansk. After almost two years at the front, he finally managed to desert and flee Russia. Meduza in English summarizes Mediazona’s feature story about Savchenko’s grand escape.
Names in this story have been changed to protect the safety of the individuals involved.
Russia drafted Sergey Savchenko in October 2022. He says he was walking down the street in Moscow when police officers stopped him, checked his documents, and informed him that a draft notice awaited him at a military enlistment office in Nizhny Novgorod, where he’d once registered his residence. When Sergey refused to report for duty, the officers slipped a small bag into his pocket and called in witnesses.
The bag, it turned out, was full of the illegal drug mephedrone. The police threatened felony possession charges unless Sergey reported to the military. So he went.
At the enlistment center, Sergey explained that he refused to take up arms against anyone. “I told them that killing is a taboo for me. It’s terrible; I don’t want to live with it. Not just Ukrainians — anyone,” he said. Recruiters asked about his civilian profession, learned that he repaired household appliances, and sent him to a draftee training camp near Kostroma to serve as an electrician.
When Sergey later discovered he would be deployed not as an electrician but as a regular infantryman, he managed to talk his superiors into a job as an anesthesiologist in a medical unit. Savchenko says he successfully answered several basic medical questions by leaning on “the bit of expertise” he’d collected over the years. “What are the main causes of death in war? Well, it’s always shock, whether hemorrhagic, pain-induced, or anaphylactic,” he told Mediazona.
From October 2022 to May 2023, Sergey served in Luhansk’s Svatove district, where he witnessed an “overwhelming flow of wounded soldiers.” The military awarded him two medals, which Savchenko says became grounds to send him and everyone else in his regiment “who wasn’t a complete idiot” to officer training school. Refusal meant assignment to an assault unit, so he reluctantly complied.
Savchenko’s three-month training courses were held outside Moscow. When he returned to the front, he was made a platoon commander and ordered to storm Ukrainian fortifications. He refused. “I was ready to go to the front, but only to evacuate the wounded, nothing more. From the very beginning, I said I wouldn’t pull the trigger even once or order anyone else to fire a shot,” Savchenko recalled.
A few days later, military police arrested Sergey and eventually brought him to a small town outside Luhansk where, as the Telegram channel Astra reported, the Russian army operates an illegal prison for soldiers who refuse to carry out orders.
Savchenko says he spent 72 days locked up with other detainees in the basement of a former Ukrainian customs office. He told Mediazona that he was taken out and tortured every day:
It varied. Sometimes, they electrocuted me. They’d spray me with cold water straight from a hose for an hour or two. Other days, they’d just beat me. It wasn’t about getting a confession out of me or anything like that — it was just daily “special effects” to make you want desperately to leave that place, to go anywhere else.
On December 26, officials moved Savchenko and other conscientious objectors from the basement prison to Ukraine’s occupied Kharkiv region. They dumped him with Russia’s 25th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade two days later. When Sergey informed the deputy political officer that he refused to shoot at people, soldiers tied him to a tree overnight. The next morning, however, he was taken to the head of an assault unit’s medical wing and offered a role evacuating the wounded — for a bribe of 100,000 rubles ($950).
Savchenko was allowed to call his wife, who transferred the money to a personal Sberbank card linked to the officer’s phone, and the medical evacuee position was his. “Everyone there is constantly hustling for money. Basically, if you want to be a driver, buy yourself a minivan, and you’ll be a driver. If you want to skip today’s mission and live just a little longer, pay up and keep living,” Sergey said.
In March, after more than two months of evacuating the wounded, Savchenko was ordered to return to the front lines as an assault soldier. He says this is when he resolved to escape the army “at any cost.” He asked a driver to take him to the brigade’s headquarters, where he found an FSB counterintelligence officer attached to the unit and offered to testify about bribery in the military.
Following this, Savchenko was stuffed into an open-air cage (the kind designed for dogs) with 20-odd other detainees. After three nights, he was transferred to the brigade’s howitzer division.
All this time, says Sergey, his wife was writing appeals on his behalf to Russia’s Defense Ministry, Prosecutor General’s Office, and Federal Investigative Committee. In May, after yet another letter, officials forced Savchenko to sign a statement declaring that he had no complaints against the military. In the statement, he formally requested an end to any investigation based on his wife’s letters.
By this time, says Sergey, he was “wandering around the base like an unattached officer,” “keeping an eye out to make sure nobody was drinking too much.”
In June 2024, Savchenko overheard a soldier’s phone call and convinced him to share the number of the other line: a senior Investigative Committee officer in Luhansk. Sergey contacted the man and arranged to be transferred to his office for a million rubles ($9,500), which Savchenko’s wife borrowed from friends. In September, Investigative Committee officials collected him and brought him to Luhansk.
For a month, Sergey pulled 12-hour workdays without weekends or pay. Then, the department’s director returned from vacation, and Savchenko realized he knew nothing of the bribe that had facilitated his transfer. The director wouldn’t agree to a new arrangement and told Sergey that he’d soon be taken back to the brigade’s headquarters.
And so Savchenko made a run for it.
He concocted a cover story as a construction company manager based in Rostov-on-Don who had come to Luhansk to inspect reconstruction sites. He went to Rostov, boarded a train, got off at a random station where he deliberately “showed his face to the cameras,” and hitchhiked from there. In the fall, Sergey exited Russia with the help of the “Get Lost” project, a volunteer group that helps men escape Russian military service.
Savchenko told Mediazona that he discovered while working at the Investigative Committee branch in Luhansk that the military had listed him as missing in action since December 29, 2023 — the day he was transferred from the basement prison to the 25th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade. Soldiers in this brigade, it turns out, were systematically reported as missing. When he learned that the brigade commander, Alexey Ksenofontov, had been awarded a medal, “the puzzle pieces came together,” Sergey said.
“He was awarded the title Hero of Russia for storming enemy positions without losses, but these ‘zero-casualty assaults’ were possible because the guys were brought in, immediately declared missing in action, and then sent to the slaughter. That scum will later be promoted to major general, retire, and go into politics as some hotshot deputy. Meanwhile, thanks to him, 5,000 guys are lying out there — weeds sprouting up through their remains. They didn’t retrieve the bodies because that would cost money, and it would mean admitting that they’re dead,” said Savchenko.