Under the Weight of Cargo 500

At the end of 2024, two lists of alleged deserters appeared online at once — in the Russian army, they are called Cargo 500. IStories verified this data and found that at least 49,000 servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces have been declared deserters or as having gone AWOL.

Whether these leaks can be trusted, who is recognized as a deserter, and why the number of those wanted for fleeing the front may exceed 50,000 people over the course of the war?

Where did the data on deserters come from?

In December 2024, the Telegram channel Mobilization DPR published a file titled “SOCh YuVO 2024 Database” [AWOL from units in the Southern Military District]. The publication claimed that the tables contained the names of more than 26,000 people who had left service in units of the Southern Military District (YuVO).

The author of the Telegram channel Mobilization DPR, Vladimir (name changed for security reasons), told IStories that he received this database from a source, but does not know for certain where the leak originated. He assumes the tables were intended for Donetsk military commandant offices and that the database may have been compiled by the command of the DPR military commandant regiment.

Vladimir published this list to help those being sought by law enforcement: “I know that statistically, those detained for AWOL are often turned in by acquaintances,” says the administrator of the Mobilization DPR channel. “But I hope that first and foremost this information will reach those being sought: it pushes them to change addresses and hide better.”

The second source of data on deserters is the project of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine, I Want to Live. It published a list of 36,000 names of servicemen against whom criminal cases for desertion and AWOL have been opened in Russia. The authors claim to have received the document from a source in the command of one of the military districts of the Russian Armed Forces.

Can these databases be trusted?

To verify the SOCh YuVO database, we compared it with a list of deserters from the 20th Motor Rifle Division (a part of the Southern Military District), which we verified in November 2024. 652 out of 1,010 names on this list also appear in the SOCh YuVO database, and the names of the servicemen are sorted in the same order. Most likely, the sorting was done by the date of leaving service — usually from the most recent cases of desertion to earlier ones.

The earliest entries in the SOCh YuVO database concern servicemen declared AWOL in November–December 2022, and the last entries were made at the end of June 2024.

We also compared the names of alleged deserters from the SOCh YuVO database with data from military garrison courts and found that more than 1,100 full names listed in the database have already been sentenced for AWOL (1,062 people) or desertion (98 people).

In addition, 50 rows in this leak contain information about sentences from military courts. Using random sampling, we checked 10 cases: the case numbers and dates of verdicts listed in the database match the information published on official court websites.

Earlier, journalists from Mediazona discovered that at least 2,850 people from the SOCh YuVO database were declared federally wanted in Russia.

Half of the entries from SOCh YuVO (14,000 records) also appeared in the second leak published by I Want to Live. It is likely that the I Want to Live database is compiled from several databases created at different times. This is indicated by the repeated inclusion of the same servicemen, but with different ranks. However, the sources of the SOCh YuVO and I Want to Live leaks are probably not the same — this is suggested by various errors in the data about the same people.

In the I Want to Live database, the dates when servicemen were declared AWOL are not indicated, so it is difficult to say exactly what period it covers. The earliest cases of desertion in the leak that have already been publicly reported occurred in September 2022. For example, the database contains information about Andrey Amonov and Alexander Sterlyadnikov, current volunteers of the deserter organization Farewell to Arms. The most recent AWOL cases from the leak that we were able to confirm date to June 2024.

Aleksey Alshansky, an analyst at Farewell to Arms, checked the names of deserters known to his team in the leaked databases at the request of IStories. He found only 15 out of 20 people who had left the Russian Armed Forces. At least two participants of Farewell to Arms who appeared in the leaks had not been publicly known. One of them was involved in intercepting communications and did not participate in combat. He deserted in October 2023 and left Russia. Another ex-serviceman fled his unit in September 2022. Both deserters are on the federal wanted list of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, IStories confirmed.

As Alshansky notes, five who did not appear in the deserter databases are also wanted in Russia. Their absence from the leaks cannot be explained by any general pattern: they left units from different military districts, and the lists include not only those who fled directly from the front line — for example, the databases did not include a deserter who left a permanent deployment point, but did include people who left both frontline positions and a military hospital. This suggests that not all real deserters ended up in the leaks.

Who is declared AWOL, and for what?

Not all servicemen who ended up in the leaked databases actually evaded service. Both public cases uncovered by IStories and the data from the leaks themselves indicate this — over time, nearly 300 people were recognized as killed, captured, or missing, according to notes in the database. Thus, the leaked lists do not reflect the real number of deserters and refuseniks.

The fact that obviously erroneous entries are not excluded from the database is illustrated by the case of Alexander Azarenkov. Since February 2023, the Ministry of Defense has considered him a deserter, and in September a criminal case was opened. However, two weeks later, according to the notes in the database, investigators found Azarenkov — all this time he had been in captivity, which became publicly known back in March 2023. At that time, he appeared in a video on the Ukrainian YouTube channel Lviv Media. With the corresponding status “captivity,” Azarenkov ended up in the SOCh YuVO leak.

The Cargo 200 status (killed) in the database is held by 235 people, and the deaths of some of them can be confirmed by public obituaries. At the same time, the data includes Russians whose deaths had not previously been reported in the media. For example, next to the name of Nikolai Dmitriev from the settlement of Knevitsy is the note “did not return from leave,” and nearby: “03.12.2023 burned in a car. Info from Sokolov A.R. 08.12.2023” (punctuation preserved). Probate records confirm that Dmitriev died on December 3, 2023. On that day, local news reported on two burned cars, one of which claimed a life. A resident of Knevitsy clarified in the comments that “a young guy died” who “had just returned from the special military operation.”

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Death while on leave is an exceptional case, but the logic of the military command can be understood by studying the data from the “AWOL Circumstances” column. Nearly 500 servicemen were declared AWOL precisely after failing to return from leave. One of them has the comment: “Did not return from leave, using sick wife as an excuse.”

According to the leaks, the main reasons for being declared wanted are leaving positions at the front, fleeing from the territory of a military unit, and refusing to return to service after treatment. In some cases, the database compilers provide additional details: “mother won’t let him go because she thinks he hasn’t recovered,” “Did not return from treatment, category D, heel injury. Did not submit documents for removal from unit lists in time,” “Did not return from recovery to the convalescent battalion,” “Broke his leg the morning before departure by train. Hospitalized in Omsk. Did not return from treatment.”

At least four servicemen, according to entries in the database, “did not return from a mission escorting cargo 200.” One note explains the reason for refusing to fight as follows: “Fear for one’s own life, consequences of negative informational and psychological influence by the enemy.”

In some cases, being declared wanted and the opening of a criminal case occurs after servicemen transfer to another unit. Apparently, this happened with the team of drone operators Tyl-22, assembled by the ultranationalist publishing house Black Hundred.

According to the leaked database, on November 16, 2023, the founder of Black Hundred Dmitry Bastrakov, the publishing house’s editor Timur Venkov, designer Nikita Lukinsky, author of the book “85 Days of Slavyansk” Alexander Zhuchkovsky, and publicist Andrey Nikitin, who is close to the publishing house, were declared AWOL. Two days earlier, the Tyl-22 Telegram channel reported that the team had been reassigned to another DPR unit — OBTF Cascade.

If the information in the database is accurate, already by November 23 the files on the five volunteers had been submitted to the military police, and a month later, the DPR opened criminal cases against them. The founder of Black Hundred, Dmitry Bastrakov, read the message from an IStories journalist but did not respond.

How many Russian soldiers have deserted?

To create a unified database of deserters, we removed duplicates and clarified information about servicemen from other public leaks. After processing, the table contained 49,001 unique entries. This number almost matches the estimate of the Ukrainian OSINT community Frontelligence Insight — 50,500 deserters. In March 2025, they published a slide that, according to them, was used in an internal Ministry of Defense presentation on desertion. The caption on the slide states that the data is current as of December 15, 2024.

However, the Farewell to Arms organization believes that the leaked name lists do not reflect the real scale of desertion: “Based on these databases, we can say that over the entire course of the war, the number of deserters and those who went AWOL is more than 50,000 people. But these lists also cannot be used to draw conclusions about the number of deserters in Russia at this moment,” says Aleksey Alshansky. One reason is obvious gaps in the data, which show that the databases are missing some people who actually fled the front. In addition, the leaks do not cover the last year of the war, during which several thousand more people could have deserted.

Human rights activists from Get Lost observe a steady flow of inquiries from Russian servicemen who want to flee military service, Ivan Chuvilyaev, a representative of the organization, told IStories. In 2024 alone, more than 3,800 people reached out to them — the number of consultations for those wishing to desert grew 2.5 times in a year. Since January 2025, the organization has helped 250–300 servicemen each month, but it is not known exactly how many of them followed the advice.

If you want to check your name in the deserter lists, send requests to: efeoktistov@istories.media.

Editor: Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya