Vladislav Balgrabsky surrendered to save five soldiers under his command. Now Russia is putting him on trial for treason.
The criminal case against Vladislav Balgrabsky, a 30-year-old who fought in the war, has reached the 2nd Western District Military Court, the independent Russian outlet Mediazona reported. He is charged with voluntarily surrendering to the enemy, desertion, and treason.
In April 2025, Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov published a video of Balgrabsky in which the Russian officer said he had signed a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry in the summer of 2024 and had served as a company commander in the 7th Motorized Rifle Regiment.
Balgrabsky said he surrendered to Ukrainian forces along with five soldiers after receiving an order that was clearly impossible to carry out. “I decided to surrender in order to survive, to be able to see my family, my child. I’ll just stay alive and keep the guys alive. […] These people trusted me, and they survived,” he said in the video. At the end of the video, he called on other Russian servicemen to surrender as well.
The video drew more than 990,000 views. Eight months after it appeared, in December 2025, a case card showing that Balgrabsky’s detention had been extended was posted on the website of the Moscow Garrison Military Court. His detention was extended twice more after that. According to Mediazona, this usually means that a person is in custody and that their case is being heard in person rather than in absentia.
Balgrabsky appears to have been returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange sometime between April and December 2025 — a period in which Russia and Ukraine carried out at least seven such exchanges.
The article criminalizing voluntary surrender was added to Russia’s Criminal Code in 2022, after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the mobilization campaign. Russia’s Supreme Court has said that a surrender counts as voluntary when a person surrenders knowingly and has the ability to put up “decisive resistance.”
The first conviction under the statute came in April 2025, when Junior Sergeant Roman Ivanishin received a 15-year sentence in a penal colony. He had surrendered to Ukrainian forces in 2023 and appeared in a video urging other Russian servicemen to flee their units. He was later returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange.
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