What happened to the Russians Putin mobilized four years ago? Meduza follows two of them — one still at the front, the other now a deserter in Spain.

The “partial mobilization” announced four years ago remains in effect: no decree has ever ended it. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, more than 300,000 people were drafted to fight in the fall of 2022. At least 20,000 have died. Among those mobilized were Maxim, a resident of Pskov (his name and city have been changed), and Temirzhan Bayanov from Omsk. Before he was sent to the front, Maxim had little interest in the war; now he sees Ukrainians as enemies. Temirzhan tried to avoid mobilization and was caught, but eventually managed to flee abroad. Meduza publishes their accounts of the past four years.

Warning: This article contains profanity.

Maxim

38 years old

Editor’s note: Maxim is taking part in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We are withholding his real name for his safety. We understand that some of his statements may anger readers. His account, however, shows that propaganda remains effective. His testimony may also be subjective: people at the front judge what is happening chiefly by what they see in their own units and often lack a view of the broader situation. Meduza condemns Russia’s invasion and holds Russia responsible for this war.

‘It was like I’d ended up on a reality show’

Before mobilization, I had an ordinary life: family, friends, work. I worked — or still work, I don’t know how to put it, since I haven’t been fired — as a refrigeration equipment engineer. I also ran a small air-conditioning installation business. I was happy with my life and didn’t think about the war. It seemed far away, and I wasn’t very interested in it.

My son was born on September 11, 2022. There were rumors about mobilization, but I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t believe it could affect me. What would they need me for? I wasn’t a professional soldier. If anything, I figured I’d just get in the way. We had this huge, great army, after all, and everything looked terrific on the news.

It was funny watching grown men shake with fear when they hadn’t even gotten a draft notice. One of my colleagues, for instance, quit and went either to Abkhazia or Georgia. Notices came for friends and acquaintances. Some got out of it through work exemptions; others called me and said, “Well, shall we go?” It was like you started seeing what people were really like. Guys I’d never imagined holding a rifle went without hesitation. The ones who used to beat their chests and say, “I’d rip them apart for Russia,” went quiet instead. Quite a few guys I knew decided to go, and that made me feel better, calmer.

Then October came. A lot of draft notices arrived at work because it’s a fairly large company. But the business couldn’t have kept running if every employee who got a notice had been mobilized, so the company’s chief executive went to the local authorities and sorted it out. Half my colleagues got exemptions, but only the older ones, those 50 or older. I was 34 then and, unfortunately, didn’t get one.

So on October 2, human resources called me in and handed me a draft notice, saying, “Sign it or you’ll go to jail.” I had to report to the draft office for a medical examination three days later. I’m a responsible guy, so I signed. I left work thinking, “What am I going to tell my wife?” Our baby was a month old.

I went to the draft office. They gave me a mobilization order telling me to report on October 11. I told the military commissar my son had just been born and asked for at least a deferment. He patted me on the shoulder and said, “Who is there to fight? You’ll be home in three months.” I thought, “Okay, three months it is.”

I went home. My wife was in shock. There was a huge fight, tears; she didn’t speak to me for a week. I understood, so I just kept quiet. What worried me more was money: how was my family going to eat? Nobody had ever mentioned one-time payments for mobilized men. They said we’d be paid according to rank and position, and maybe get combat pay if we were sent to the front.

A private’s pay didn’t work for me at all. I didn’t make much at my regular job — 90,000 rubles. My business brought in most of my income. Altogether, I made a little more each month than a soldier’s salary.

I had no choice. I packed the essentials in my old backpack — my company helped me buy them, by the way — hugged my wife, called a taxi, and went to the departure point.

There were other poor bastards like me there. On October 11, they loaded us onto buses and took us to a training center. I was in a daze — it was like I’d ended up on a reality show. I thought they’d take one look at us and say, “Go home, guys. We’ve got special forces and the National Guard. We can manage without you.” Right up until the bus doors closed, I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. But nobody was going to let me go.

I can’t say the training was bad. Some of the instructors were pretty good and explained things clearly. Some guys were interested; others pretended they already knew everything. My attitude was, “Well, show me your machine gun, since I’m here anyway.” They put us through our paces for two weeks. It was interesting, and I learned things.

Our unit was made up entirely of mobilized men, mostly from Veliky Novgorod and the surrounding region, as well as St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the Moscow region. They told us, “You’re mobilized. You won’t be sent into battle. You’ll be in territorial defense.” We were happy to believe them. I’d driven a truck during my compulsory military service, so I reassured myself that they definitely wouldn’t have me launching missiles.

After two weeks of training, they had us line up. A priest came and held a service. Then they put us on a train without telling us where we were going or why. Some thought we were headed to Crimea to man checkpoints. But the train sure as hell didn’t go to Crimea. It turned toward the Luhansk People’s Republic. That’s when we started to suspect we weren’t going to be in territorial defense after all, and that we weren’t being sent to man a checkpoint.

‘We learned what war really is’

At a station in the Luhansk People’s Republic, they transferred us to military Ural trucks. We rode along having fun until we reached the first city, Sievierodonetsk. There, we saw a horrifying scene: houses burning here and there, wrecked vehicles, people with their heads down. It looked, I imagine, like besieged Leningrad. Everyone in the truck went quiet. We were terrified. That’s how I ended up at the war.

We drove through Sievierodonetsk to Kreminna, where they assigned us to positions. They brought my group to a small patch of woods, gave us some provisions and a little ammunition, pointed into the trees, and said, “The enemy will come from there. Stay alert.”

We started digging and building, trying to settle in. It was hard at first. We had no supplies at all — just a pit covered with branches for the whole platoon. Thank God some of the guys were handy. We quickly made the place livable, insulated it, and put a roof on it. The hole became something like a dugout.

I can’t say the fighting in Kreminna was especially intense while I was there. Yes, the artillery fired, and we more or less got used to it. We had our first losses, and vehicles were blown up, but there were no direct clashes then. We spent six months fighting there.

The whole unit gets an assignment, and nobody cares who does what or how. Sometimes I crawl around with a machine gun. Sometimes I move into enemy-held territory ahead of an assault soldier, clear a dugout, and set up a post to watch the skies so the assault group behind me can get through safely. Other times, I carry out an assignment alongside the assault troops.

My formation is part of the Southern Group of Forces. We fought to liberate Bakhmut in the spring of 2023 and Kostiantynivka in the summer of 2026. Now we’re fighting toward Druzhkivka.

When the Wagner fighters took Bakhmut and were supposed to go rest, our formation was ordered to take over their positions immediately. The enemy figured that with the professionals gone and a bunch of mobilized rabble sent in to replace them, they should retake Bakhmut. That’s when we learned what war really was.

Hi, I’m Vladislav Gorin.

I’m the host of Meduza’s daily Russian-language daily news podcast. This summer, the Russian authorities opened a criminal case against me — not for committing a crime, but for telling the truth about Russia and its war against Ukraine.

Because the Kremlin has branded me a criminal, I can’t go home. I also can’t safely travel to countries like Turkey — even though it’s a NATO member — because I could be arrested and extradited to Russia. I can’t even renew my passport at the consulate anymore. 

None of this is going to stop me. I know there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia who don’t want this war and who still believe in freedom and democracy, and they deserve access to independent journalism. Please support Meduza so I can keep reaching them. 

None of us really knew how to fight for real, but an order is an order. We stood our ground and held the line. It was very hard, and we suffered heavy losses, but none of us abandoned our positions.

Bakhmut was covered in swastikas and all kinds of fascist symbols. I talked to locals. I know how they [Ukrainian soldiers] terrorized and robbed their own people. And how they killed locals in Kostiantynivka whom our guys were trying to evacuate [Meduza cannot verify all of these claims]. That, to me, is fascism.

I don’t lump them all together. Of course, some of them are decent guys who were forced into the trenches. As a rule, they don’t even want to fight and surrender right away. But sometimes you run into real hard cases, especially younger guys — stubborn bastards. I remember one asshole well. We had him pinned down and told him, “Surrender, you idiot.” But he kept shooting and wounded two of our guys. When he ran out of ammunition, he threw down his rifle and yelled, “I surrender!” Seriously? You ignored us, shot at us, and now it’s “I surrender”?

‘As long as they can still get something out of you, no one will let you leave’

Then the war started changing — the first drones appeared. They made life miserable for us from the start. FPV drones are small, but one is enough to disable a vehicle or maim someone. I got my first wound — I’ve had several — from an FPV drone. It flew out of the bushes and blew up my vehicle, peppering my leg with small fragments. It was a minor wound; I didn’t even seek treatment. But I realized the war had changed. We couldn’t go racing around on top of a tank anymore, shooting at enemy infantry as if we were on safari. The drone war had begun.

Over time, drones kept evolving. Now drones of every kind have taken over the war. One cheap little Chinese gadget can easily burn up equipment worth millions [of rubles]. Charging in with a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle doesn’t work anymore — they simply won’t make it there. So most of the fighting falls to the infantry. People are expendable. If you’re lucky and they don’t spot you, you make it through. If they do spot you, you’re out of luck.

There are so many drones. They [the Ukrainian armed forces] usually have a surveillance drone hovering overhead. When it spots movement, a few FPV drones might come in and pin you down in cover, maybe in some bushes, so you can’t get out. Then the so-called “Baba Yaga” arrives — a big agricultural drone with a heavier explosive payload — and starts tearing you apart. You have very little chance against that tactic. Somehow we keep fighting.

Of course I tried to get evaluated by a military medical board and discharged, but here there are “no sick people.” My eardrum was blown out, so I can’t hear at all in that ear, and I can’t see out of one eye. But the board told me, “You can see with the other one. You can hear with the other one.” Nobody gives a fuck about your health — or about you, period. Getting discharged is almost impossible. You can go home if you’re very badly wounded, with limbs blown off, or as a “200” — dead. As long as they can still get something out of you, no one will let you leave.

Everyone’s probably thought about taking off, running away, not coming back from leave. It’s so hard to leave home. Every time you walk out the door and picture where you’re going again… I can’t explain it. I think people being led to an execution must feel the same way.

The first reason I kept going back [to the war] was the guys I serve with. If I didn’t return, they’d have problems. They might lose their leave because of me — that happens a lot. They have families too, people waiting for them. And every person counts. If I don’t come back, one of my comrades has to do his own job and mine.

Second, how could I look my wife in the eye if I hid behind her skirt every time I heard a noise in the stairwell? I’d be ashamed to face my whole family. Though I know they’d actually support me if I made that choice.

Third, where would I run? I’ve known people who spent one, two, even three years on the run. They were caught, and almost all of them are dead or missing now. So no. I’ve got myself into this mess, and I’ll see it through.

It’s a stupid war. Two Slavic peoples have been pitted against each other, and people are making money off it. Someone has no interest in ending it quickly. But then you see what those bastards [Maxim’s term for Ukrainian soldiers] are doing, how they strike civilians, their own people, how they promote fascism, and it makes you angry. I don’t understand why we’re dragging this out. All we do is threaten them and do nothing, just push ahead with infantry. Where are our much-vaunted missiles and navy? Why not flatten all of it [Ukraine] and plant corn there?

Related reading

‘Prepare to stand up for your convictions’ During mobilization, escaping the draft is a legal problem for many Russians. Here’s a military lawyer’s advice for those who don’t want to fight.

4 years ago

‘No brains? Storm buildings’

Everyone thinks we get paid a lot, but nobody realizes it’s peanuts once you factor in what we have to spend on army needs. If you manage to send even 100,000 rubles home, you’ve saved a hell of a lot that month.

We pay for the whole war ourselves: vehicles, gas, drone parts, food — you can’t live on standard army rations for long. The commanders [in our unit] don’t extort money, but we have a shared fund because we all understand that if we need something, nobody will give it to us, and we still have to carry out our assignments. We usually collect 20,000 rubles per person. Sometimes there are unexpected expenses: a vehicle needs repairs, or a drone pilot loses a “bird” [a drone]. Then the cost can top 50,000 rubles each.

The higher-ups don’t much care about our fund. They give you a mission, and how you carry it out is your problem. No transport? Carry the gear yourself. No “bird,” but you need to scout an area? You’ll have to go yourself. You could jump off a roof with a hang glider for all they care, as long as the job gets done. Otherwise, command can make your life miserable — by sending you on a more dangerous assignment.

Those missions mostly go to people who can’t handle their regular duties, who’ve started slacking off or screwing up. If their mistakes have serious consequences — losses of men or equipment — the response is swift: they go in ahead of the assault troops. “No brains? Storm buildings,” as we say.

If someone does his job without screwing up, nobody bothers him. Of course, he might get a riskier assignment and start yelling, “Oh no, they’ve sent me in with the assault troops.” Well, it’s a war. What do you expect?

I’ve heard that in some units you have to bribe the commander to get leave. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works with us. Our commanders find it easier just to deny you leave.

Commanders suggested I sign a contract with the Defense Ministry — they even tried to force me — but there’s no point. We’re a combat unit. Say I refuse. Where are you going to send me, to war? To the front line? I’m already here. In rear units, a lot of mobilized guys signed contracts because they didn’t want to lose their cushy posts. I haven’t signed and I won’t, for one reason: I’m sick of this army and I want to go home. If I become a contract soldier, they’ll tell me, “Where do you think you’re going? You signed the papers. Now keep serving.”

Most troops are contract soldiers now. There are hardly any mobilized men left.

Of the 35 mobilized men in my unit, only four are still alive. Some were discharged after serious wounds; most were killed.

‘We’re here, but it’s as if we’re not’

I don’t think there’ll be [another wave of] mobilization. It would be embarrassing for the state to admit that the army needs more people. And it really does. But everyone lies to everyone else, and I think that’s why we’ve gone four years without being rotated out.

I still don’t understand why the state has simply forgotten the mobilized men and is doing everything it can to hide the fact that mobilization ever happened. That men once quietly packed up and went off into the unknown — not for money or glory, but simply because they had to.

I watched the Wagner fighters go home. Other guys came to replace them, fought for six months, and then went home too, patting me on the shoulder like, “Hang in there.” Volunteers came and went home when their terms were up. But we’re treated like lepers throughout the Defense Ministry system. We have no idea what’s going to happen to us. There used to be talk about rotating us out, but that died down long ago. Nobody says anything. We’re here, but it’s as if we’re not.

I really hope all this ends soon because I’m running out of strength, mentally and physically. I don’t know where this ends. Do we fight until our legs get blown off so they’ll discharge us? Or until we’re killed?

Things were very hard for my family at first. My wife was left alone with a small child. Of course there were fights and tears. We nearly divorced. But thank God we’re both sensible people. Together, we’re waiting for the day they finally let me go or send someone to replace me. The trouble is, my son has already grown up without me. To him, Dad is just a face on a phone screen saying, “Hi, how are you?”

I don’t get leave as often as I’d like. Most of the time, I get leave because I’ve been wounded. I remember the first time was the strangest. They wouldn’t let me go for ages — I didn’t get leave until my eleventh month. Until then, we’d been living in a dugout in the woods the whole time. It was crazy. Then I came home and realized I wasn’t used to being in a city anymore. I was scared even to go to a store: it was so light and bright, with so many people. I walked around in a daze.

That’s the scariest part — how you get used to all of this [the war]. I honestly find myself thinking there never was another life. At first you wonder how you’ll sleep in a hole with none of the comforts of home. Then, after a couple of weeks, you get used to it. You get used to the shelling too. A tank can be firing nearby and I’ll sleep like the dead. But when it’s completely quiet, I can’t fall asleep, especially at home. Sometimes, when I’m on leave, I slip and say I’ll be going home soon, meaning my dugout. Now when I come home, I feel like a visitor. That’s sad.

Every day I try to stay alive, and I lose good comrades. Every time I lose a friend or fellow soldier, it leaves me depressed and stressed, especially if he dies in my arms. But the hardest part comes later, when relatives — a wife or a mother, say — call and ask you to tell them anything at all. I still get calls from families of men who died back in 2023. It’s very hard to talk to them. They’re sobbing.

So I try not to get too close to people. There are guys I serve with, and that’s enough for me. One time a new contract soldier arrived, a young guy of about 22. He’d come for the money. I looked at him and thought, “I’d give every penny I have to get out of here. And you came here without even knowing what you were getting into, because you fell for that slick picture they paint on Channel One. It’s different here.” By the time you realize you never needed that money in the first place, it might be too late.

Temirzhan Bayanov

41 years old

‘I’m not carrying that machine gun, and I don’t want to fight at all’

I’d been following the news about Ukraine since 2014. Even then, I realized the Russian authorities wouldn’t be satisfied with occupying Crimea and taking a bit of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. I knew there would be an escalation and a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was only a matter of time.

I worked for myself. In 2016, I moved from Omsk to Kaliningrad. I wanted somewhere warmer, but not too hot, and closer to Europe. I bought an apartment there. Then I went to the Balkans. In Serbia and Croatia, I bought fruit and vegetables for shipment to Russia, working as a middleman and taking a cut.

I returned to Kaliningrad in May 2022. I’d thought mobilization was possible, but I didn’t expect it to begin so soon. I didn’t expect the Russian army to screw up on every front.

A draft notice came in mid-October. I wasn’t home. My neighbors called and said some people had come by and asked them to pass the notice on to me, but they’d refused.

I’d graduated from law school in Omsk and knew what I needed to do. I went into hiding. I canceled my registration at my Kaliningrad apartment, moved to Omsk, and registered temporarily at someone else’s address there. But they found me anyway at the end of December.

I was planning to go to Novosibirsk. Police stopped me as I entered the train station in Omsk. They asked for my documents, checked something, and found out I’d been sent a mobilization notice. They called the military police, who were supposed to take me to the draft office. I signed some paper — I think it was a mobilization order — and asked to go home to get my documents. They let me go. I was afraid of criminal prosecution, so I got the documents and went to the draft office. They processed me there and took me to Omsk’s armored-vehicle engineering institute, which was serving as an assembly point for mobilized men from across the Siberian Federal District.

There were a lot of people, and there wasn’t enough room in the barracks. So they housed some men in big tents at a military training ground near the institute. Instead of generators for light and heat, the mobilized men had a stove. They fueled it with things sent as humanitarian aid — cookies, wafers, letters from children. I was surprised but didn’t ask why. Most likely they didn’t have enough firewood or coal. Later I learned that generators were being sent as aid too, but the regimental commander was selling them off to someone.

At the assembly point, they suggested I become a machine gunner. I said, “I’m not carrying that machine gun, and I don’t want to fight at all. Is there something easier?” The political officer suggested communications, and I agreed.

The place wasn’t guarded all that heavily, so there were ways to escape. But I knew that if I ran and they caught me, I’d go to prison. I wanted to get discharged on medical grounds instead. I used to play hockey, and once I got into a fight. I haven’t been able to see well out of my left eye since. But I couldn’t get a medical discharge; they only kept promising me an examination. A lot of people who didn’t want to fight because of health problems were sent [to the combat zone] anyway.

Around mid-January 2023, they put us on a train and took us to a training ground in Baranavichy. I was sent to headquarters as a communications specialist. There I started telling [other mobilized men] what I thought: that we’d be fighting for the elite’s interests, not our own. We had one patriotic signalman there who complained to the battalion commander, and they transferred me to the medical unit.

They started training us as medics, teaching us how to give first aid. Some people said our instructors were Wagner fighters, but I didn’t ask much, and they barely talked about themselves. They just showed us, very professionally, what to do and how.

‘They sent people into the combat zone every day’

In March or April [2023], they brought us to Khartsyzk in the Donetsk region, near the border with Russia. We spent about a month there, then went to some village near Vuhledar. We lived in dugouts along the second line of defense. Two strikes landed nearby, but we were all right.

Our whole regiment was made up of mobilized men. There weren’t many true believers among them. A lot of them said, “Why did we go to this war?” But once they started getting paid, they went wild — alcohol, drugs, prostitutes.

They tried to talk us into signing contracts. Recruiters came and told us about all sorts of perks, including one-time payments. I didn’t need any of that. I knew the contract had no end date. Then again, neither did mobilization — not until the war ended.

At the beginning of August, they moved us closer to Bakhmut, to Myronivskyi. Wagner had taken Bakhmut, Klishchiivka, and Lysa Hora and was holding them. Then Wagner left, the regular Russian military took over and, to put it bluntly, fucked it up. The Ukrainians seized the initiative and took Lysa Hora.

After that, the Ukrainians started moving into Klishchiivka and bombarding it. The first [Russian] company went in and got smashed. Our company and a third were supposed to go in after them. But almost all of us — about 100–150 men, myself included — ”became 500s” and started putting our refusals in writing. Commanders from the division and armed military police officers arrived. We took up our weapons too and said, “We’re not going.” They left us alone then, but by late August they started transferring a few men at a time to Bakhmut, supposedly to headquarters, and sending them on to Klishchiivka from there. Maybe they used threats to make them go. I don’t know.

I refused [to go to Bakhmut], and they locked me up in Myronivskyi. It was in a school or some kind of building used for children’s activities. They locked me and three other men who’d refused to fight in a room, basically to make us think it over. They kept us there for four days. They fed us and took us to the bathroom; they treated us fine.

After that, they gave me an assignment: set up a medical station for the severely wounded between Bakhmut and Klishchiivka. I followed the order and set one up in a dugout. Every day, they sent 20 to 100 people into the combat zone. About 15% came back for medical care — some without an arm, some without a leg. I bandaged wounds and put in IVs. I worked nonstop. It was frightening. That’s where I saw the full horror of war.

I understand that a Russian soldier is a killer and an occupier. So I was helping occupiers. On the other hand, there’s the human side of it: was I supposed to refuse to help the guys?

‘I didn’t try to escape because I was hoping we’d be demobilized’

A week or a week and a half later, in early September [2023], our medical station was hit by a round we call a “Polka” [a round from a Polish-made 60-millimeter mortar]. I got away with a mild concussion: I felt a little sick and my ears were ringing. They took me to the medical unit, gave me IV treatment, and sent me to regimental headquarters 10 days later. There they ordered me to set up a new evacuation point to replace the medical station the Ukrainian armed forces had discovered. I got some men together and showed them where to set it up, though I was still at the old site myself. A couple of weeks later, a 120-millimeter round landed near it. Another concussion, but this time a serious one: severe headaches and a stutter that lasted a month.

They took me to a hospital in Donetsk. After treatment, I got a referral to a military medical board in Novocherkassk, the nearest city [in Russia]. I went there, started seeing doctors, and realized nobody was going to discharge me. Near the city, in the village of Persianovsky, there are military units with barracks used as headquarters. They offered to let me stay and receive wounded soldiers coming from the hospital, since I was a medic. I had a good reputation and knew how to handle the paperwork. And I didn’t want to go back “across the line.” So I stayed in Persianovsky.

In October 2024, they transferred me again, this time to a board at 7/7 Mylnikova Street in Rostov that determined soldiers’ fitness for service. But there was no transfer order — only a request — so the move was unofficial.

On the board, I helped the guys. I found loopholes so they could get treatment at civilian hospitals if the [military] hospital wouldn’t admit them. Sometimes it worked. But the higher-ups needed to keep the numbers up because there weren’t enough men at the front. Say someone had an Ilizarov frame on an arm or leg: they’d send him to finish recovering somewhere other than Russia — a hospital in Debaltseve [in the Donetsk region], for instance. And there you have no rights. You’re expendable.

My superiors didn’t like my helping the guys, and I knew they might send me “across the line.” In February 2025, some people I knew called to warn me that men from my unit were already on their way to pick me up. I found a BlaBlaCar ride to Moscow and flew from there to Kaliningrad. They put me on the federal wanted list and opened a criminal investigation. They went to my mother’s place in Omsk and threatened to send me to prison. But she didn’t know where I was.

About six months later, they caught me at the North Station in Kaliningrad. As I understand it, they tracked me through security cameras. The police took me to a station. Military police from the commandant’s office came there and took me to an assembly point for men who had refused to fight. They gave me a choice: serve at least three years in prison or go to war. I didn’t want prison, and I didn’t want to fight either. I chose prison.

Instead, the military police took me and several others on a flight to Luhansk to send us to the front. There I tried again to get discharged because of my eye. I went to an ophthalmologist and asked for a referral to Belgorod. The headquarters staff and I got along, so they let me go. From Belgorod I returned to Kaliningrad, planning to leave for Europe from there. ChatGPT suggested Tverdy Znak. I contacted them, and they planned a route. That’s how I got to Spain, where I plan to apply for asylum.

I hadn’t tried to escape earlier because I was hoping we’d be demobilized. All the mobilized men hoped for that and tried to find some way to stay in Russia instead of being in the combat zone. Some people paid bribes; I just did my job well. I didn’t go to lawyers either because I knew it was pointless. The war machine was already running, and everyone was working for it. There are no rules, no laws. The Russian army is a bunch of complete fucking assholes, and Putin and everyone at the top with him are a gang of bandits, thieves, crooks, and murderers.

But of course I wish I’d escaped even earlier. I wouldn’t be like I am now. My mental health is a mess after those two concussions. I sleep badly. I get anxious and lose my temper over nothing. I never used to be like this.