‘They knock you out and put you on the plane’

To keep its ranks filled, Russia is imprisoning objectors and sending them to war at gunpoint

Hundreds of Russian draftees who have opted to face prison time rather than return to the war in Ukraine are being systematically imprisoned and then forcibly sent back to the front, according to new reporting from the independent outlet Verstka. Those who resist are bound, beaten, and boarded onto planes at gunpoint before being sent to Ukraine and forced to join assault units. Meduza shares the story of one of the draftee detention facilities detailed in the article.

Sergey Krugly decided not to return to the war after he became plagued by hallucinations of the human heads he’d been forced to collect after battles. A 29-year-old from Russia’s Sverdlovsk region, he’d been drafted in the fall of 2022 and went on leave in March of 2023. When he returned home, he didn’t sleep for an entire month.

One day, Sergey’s mother called her sister in distress at about 5:00 in the morning. “I don’t know what to do with him,” she said. When Sergey’s aunt came over to help, she saw her sleep-deprived nephew going around the house, smashing everything he could find. When they finally managed to calm him down, he dropped to his knees and began repeating: “They’re right there, Aunt Katya, flying around! Close the window, close the window!”

“The windows are closed, Sergey!” she told him.

“But the drones, they’re flying around!” he pleaded. “Aunt Katya, I walked all around the field, collecting heads. One of them had these white teeth. It was smiling. His head was in my hands and it was smiling.”

“It broke my heart,” Katya tells Verstka. “This guy had a tough time even before all of this — his mom had problems with alcohol and men, and he never knew his father. It was his grandmother who raised him.”

Now, as if the family didn’t have enough problems, Sergey’s mother found herself unable to hold down a job. Sergey and his mother began going from hospital to hospital, trying to get Sergey registered as the family’s sole breadwinner, which would secure him an exemption from further military service. “But they soon realized that the conscription offices had made it clear to all of the doctors that they weren’t to issue any medical certificates for draftees’ relatives, and that everyone was to be sent back to the war,” says a friend of Sergey.

But Sergey didn’t go back to the front. He spent the next year living at home and taking care of his mother. Hoping to keep everything above board, he sent all of the documents verifying her inability to work to the local conscription office and prosecutor’s office. Eventually, his payments from the Defense Ministry ran out.

“Over time, he began to calm down a bit. His psychotic episodes only returned when his mother started drinking,” Sergey’s friends told Verstka. His Aunt Katya tried to be supportive, reassuring him that everything would be fine. But in October 2023, police officers showed up at the family’s apartment and told him he needed to come in to give a statement on his abandonment of his unit. He went with them.

‘I want to live’

When Vladimir Muronova was mobilized, he was assigned to be an orderly in a medical unit. According to his relatives, however, he served in this position for less than a day: almost immediately, his superiors began sending him into combat missions, and, afterward, to collect the bodies of the dead.

“You’re on duty for three days at a time, and then there’s a shift change, if you survive. Any more than that and you’ll lose your mind. The corpses are just piled up everywhere. They started to feel like my friends. It’s fucked up,” he wrote.

Vladimir first went on leave in June 2023. He returned home with constant tremors, his arms shaking even as he hugged his two children. Each time a car passed by outside, he would look up to the sky in search of drones, missiles, or bombs. Eventually, he decided he couldn’t go back, explaining to his family: “I want to live.” His mother, in-laws, wife, and sister all supported his decision.

“He knew that he’d really stepped in it, that there would be consequences, but he resolved to take responsibility within the legal framework. We thought the legal framework would be upheld. If there’s an article [in the Criminal Code], there will [theoretically] be a trial and a sentence,” said one of his relatives.

Vladimir decided to wait until the end of the summer before turning himself in for desertion. In the meantime, his unit called his phone constantly, demanding that he return to the front. He soon learned that at least some of his fellow unit members had also refused to go back.

During this period, while Vladimir was still living at home, his wife became pregnant with their third child. But Vladimir wouldn’t be around for the birth: in October 2023, military police showed up at the family’s home and left their phone number. When Vladimir called, he was told to come to the city of Svobodny to give an official explanation for his absence. The authorities promised he’d be allowed to return home afterward.

Trapped

After giving the authorities his statement, Vladimir was taken to Russia’s Military Town No. 32 in Yekaterinburg, where he was sent to live in a four-story building with other men accused of abandoning their units in Ukraine. It was there that he met Sergey, who was being held in the same compound.

Sergey and his fellow AWOL soldiers were “warehoused and locked in,” his relatives say. He told the family that there were so many people in the facility that many had to sleep on the floor, on windowsills, and in hallways, with new men arriving every week. According to official documents obtained by Verstka, the building was one of the military’s holding centers for draftees who had active warrants and were listed among the 800 soldiers accused of abandoning their posts as of January 2024.

“They were holding them captive; even prisoners are kept in better conditions,” a relative of one of the draftees told Verstka. The food at the facility was poor, though the men were allowed to use delivery apps to order groceries from a convenience store. None of them had officially been arrested.

When asked whether the men were given any explanation for their imprisonment, the same relative recounts:

They were told that if they went back to Ukraine, their felony charges would be dropped and their allowances, salaries, and benefits would be reinstated. Their other option was to stay there and await their trials. Almost everybody chose the latter option.

“These were people who were prepared to do time for their refusal to serve; they were willing to accept all of the punishments for their actions. They didn’t want to evade responsibility; they were ready to accept it, to go to trial and be sentenced,” says the sister of one of the objectors.

Around New Year, a new commandant was appointed, and things got “totally out of control,” according to the men’s family members. First, the authorities started charging 30,000 rubles (about $330) for holiday leave permits; later, even brief meetings with relatives were temporarily banned. The authorities also started using violence towards the men, beating up to six of them at a time in hopes that they would finally give in and agree to return to war.

Many of the men began trying to escape. Some of them tied their bedsheets together and used them to climb down from their fourth-floor windows, but the attempt was called off when a few of them broke their arms and legs.

Others were lucky enough to “slip away through the kitchen” — but some of the successful escapees ended up returning, fearing the consequences would be even worse if they were caught a second time.

Still others took advantage of their 15-minute visits with relatives. After passing through the military checkpoint and retrieving the bags of cigarettes and snacks that their wives had brought them, they would jump into nearby cars or taxis and flee the premises.

In most cases, the authorities wouldn’t pursue them immediately. According to one of the men’s wives, however, it’s unclear what options the escapees had after leaving the facility: the police would find them if they went home, and they wouldn’t be able to get a job anywhere in the country.

Sergey wanted to escape, but never managed to do so successfully. Vladimir didn’t even try; he felt that staying in the barracks and waiting for his trial was the right thing to do. In April 2024, when his daughter was born, he only saw her from photographs sent by his wife.

An appeal for help

In early May, about 40 soldiers armed with rifles and batons entered the facility where the alleged AWOL soldiers were being held and forced an entire floor of objectors — about 170–180 people, according to relatives — to leave the building. The men were bussed to a military airfield, and from there, they were flown straight to the warzone.

The remaining men at the facility began to panic. One of them, desperate not to be sent back to the battlefield, slashed his wrists and neck, according to Verstka’s sources. He left the facility in an ambulance.

Vladimir called the investigator in his case. “How can they do this?” he asked him. “One of these guys had his sentencing hearing scheduled for May 6! And they sent him [to Ukraine]! How is that possible?”

Vladimir’s court date was scheduled for July, so the investigator told him to inform the military authorities that he was restricted from traveling if they tried to forcibly send him back to war. “They shouldn’t take you,” he assured Vladimir. He also sent the base an official statement confirming that Vladimir was banned from leaving the area.

None of this helped. Sergey and Vladimir’s group was told that it would be next.

At this point, nearly 70 of the objectors decided to send a collective appeal to the Sverdlovsk region’s human rights commissioner, Tatiana Merzlyakova. Identifying themselves as “citizens of Russia suspected of leaving their units without permission,” the men wrote that many of them had not set foot beyond their barracks and the facility’s mess hall for over six months. They noted that they’d been restricted from seeing their children, wives, and parents, and that in the brief meetings with relatives that had been allowed, they’d often had to wear handcuffs. Some of the men, the letter said, had struggled with thoughts of suicide.

The wife of one of the men told Verstka that she called Merzlyakova’s office and told a representative that her husband had been denied medical treatment despite losing 10 teeth, developing abscesses on his body and mouth, and experiencing problems defecating. She summarizes the office’s response as follows: “‘Everybody wants to find an excuse and take the easy way out. I don’t know what these guys are, but they’re not men; they can’t even go to war.’”

“That’s what a representative of the committee for the protection of human rights told me,” the woman said. “Can you even imagine? I told them to go to the trenches themselves then, or to send their own husbands and children.”

According to the website of the Sverdlovsk Regional Human Rights Commissioner’s Office, on May 6, Merzlyakova paid a visit to the facility where the alleged AWOL soldiers were being held. “We received no complaints about any violations of civil rights by the collection point’s leadership,” she said afterward. “The visit was very valuable for both the servicemen and for my staff because we made sure that they’re being provided with everything they need.”

Verstka reached out to Merzlyakova’s office for comment but had not received a response at the time of this story’s publication.

Not an isolated phenomenon

Verstka learned that draftees who refuse to join the war have been held captive at military bases in various Russian regions in recent months, not just in Yekaterinburg. The military began forcibly deploying them on a large scale in May. The wife of one of these objectors was told by an investigator: “We didn’t come up with this policy; it’s an order from Moscow.”

‘He’ll be gunned down in a week or two’

Vladimir’s wife was initially opposed to the idea of him trying to escape, but she eventually became overwhelmed by the uncertainty and told him to flee “at any opportunity.” He told his family that this was unrealistic, however, explaining: “Forty guys with batons come in, and if you refuse to go, they knock you out and put you on the plane unconscious.” Additionally, after the men’s appeal to Merzlyakova, surveillance measures at the facility intensified, with military police stationed in the building to prevent escapes.

On the morning of May 16, Vladimir wrote to his wife that his name was on the list of people to be sent to the war that day. “He wrote that he was being taken to board the plane, “ she recounts.

Sergey’s name was also on the list. When he messaged his Aunt Katya to inform her, she initially didn’t believe him. Then he called her via video and showed her how 70 people were being herded onto buses in front of soldiers armed with assault rifles.

Vladimir’s sister, desperate to save her brother, asked him to share his phone’s location with her so that she could drive to the airfield where the men were being taken. When she found the airfield, she went up to the gates and demanded that Vladimir be released in accordance with his court-mandated travel restrictions. In response, the garrison commander told her he had received orders to terminate Vladimir’s case and that Vladimir was being deployed to Ukraine, though he refused to show her the documents. “I have 170 of these people right now. Am I supposed to go through this with each one of them?” he told her.

The commander’s explanation suggests that at least 170 men who refused to fight in Ukraine were denied their right to a trial and effectively removed from the legal system without the knowledge of their lawyers, investigators, or prosecutors. “Nobody knows what the basis for these orders was. These guys don’t want to fight — they’ve already refused once, and they’re prepared to go to prison for it. But instead, the charges are being dropped and they’re being shipped off,” said one of the men’s relatives.

After her conversation with the commander, Vladimir’s sister was allowed a brief visit with her brother. “He’d changed so much!” she tells Verstka. “He looked like a hard labor convict. He was so much skinnier and looked so much older — like a skeleton. It was as if he’d been in prison for years with no food.”

About thirty minutes later, Vladimir was flown to Ukraine. “To be honest, I know we’ve seen each other for the last time,” his sister says. She continues, starting to cry:

He’ll be no use there. He can barely stand. They sent him there to finish him off. He won’t survive. He’ll be gunned down in a week, maybe two. They just sent him there as cannon fodder. And for what? So that these scumbags can keep riding around in their luxury cars and sitting on their asses.

Reporting by Olesya Gerasimenko for Verstka

Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale