A Runaway Regiment

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More than a thousand Russian servicemen of the 20th Motorized Rifle Division went AWOL, IStories found out. What happened to them?

Доступно на русскомDate19 Nov 2024AuthorsIrina Dolinina, Polina Uzhvak

The names of the characters in the text have been changed for their safety

In the spring of 2024, the authorities of Russian regions received a letter from the command of the 20th Guards Motorized Rifle Division asking for help in tracking down military personnel who had escaped from the front. In the list prepared by the command, to which IStories managed to get access, there were more than a thousand servicemen of the division — contract servicemen, mobilized and even conscripts. Data on the number of deserters and so-called “sochniks” (those who left the unit unauthorized) in the Russian army are not officially disclosed. It is also impossible to rely on the statistics of cases initiated under the articles on desertion and AWOL — not all cases of deserters reach the court. The list at the disposal of IStories shows the real amount of escape from the Russian army during the war.

More than a thousand people escaped from one division alone, while at least two dozen divisions are involved in the war against Ukraine (the exact data is classified). The IStories’ journalists Irina Dolinina and Polina Uzhvak managed to confirm the authenticity of this list. We also found several escaped soldiers of the division and their relatives and gained access to other documents of the unit. This is a story about the Russian army on the example of one division: how the military prepared for the invasion of Ukraine, why they run away from the front, how the army punishes those who refuse to fight, why the entire command of the division died and what losses there were, and why some of the escaped military return to the war.

How we verified the list

The document in our disposal is a list titled “Military personnel listed as having unauthorizedly left their units (places of service), including locations where combat (special) tasks were being carried out” from the 20th Motorized Rifle Division. The list includes 1,010 individuals with full names, dates of birth, military ranks, and other details. The document is signed by Acting Head of the Volgograd territorial garrison, Guards Colonel Shamil Yagudin (whose identity we have verified). The list was compiled no later than April 2024. For the safety of our source, we are not publishing the document or disclosing further details about its origin.

We obtained a separate registry of the combat and personnel roster of the 20th Division for spring 2022 from another independent source. 31 individuals from the division’s list matched by name with those in the deserter list. The rest of the deserters were likely added to the roster after spring 2022, as the division was severely understaffed at the start of the full-scale war, with over 1,000 vacancies.

We also fully verified the identities of 65 soldiers listed. We spoke to four of them (three were under the care of Get Lost, an organization that helps Russian soldiers leave the front lines), and they confirmed that they had indeed deserted. Additionally, we spoke with relatives and acquaintances of some soldiers: some confirmed that their loved ones were listed as deserters, while others said their relatives had been reported killed or missing in action, with no knowledge of desertion.

38 individuals from the deserter list were found to be on the federal wanted list. Furthermore, at least 96 names matching those of the deserters from the 20th Division appeared in verdicts from garrison courts for cases of unauthorized absence from service.

To Crimea, “for exercises”

The 20th Guards Motorized Rifle Division from Volgograd has a reputation as one of the worst in the army — it treats servicemen very badly, Mikhail says. He is 28 years old, after graduating from a military institute in 2017, he got into the 20th Division. The soldier is convinced that it was revenge by the battalion commander in charge of assignments, with whom he had a conflict.

In the army service Mikhail was disappointed after six months, but his applications for dismissal were ignored. In January 2022, he was sent to Crimea “for exercises.” “When we were already there, in the Crimea, we thought that this is such a peculiar rattling of weapons. That is, we are here marking ourselves, how formidable we are. No one thought anything more,” he says.

Just over 2,100 servicemen were sent to the Opuk training range in Crimea, according to a document on the combat and numerical composition of the division, which is at the editorial board’s disposal. This is the same figure cited by Mikhail in a conversation with IStories.

Only when, in mid-February, the command ordered Mikhail to investigate bridges and roads in a certain area in the Kherson Oblast — “to see the options of routes” — he realized that the invasion will happen. “And we were convinced of our suspicions when we arranged a false dispatch back. We received the command to load all the faulty equipment back on the echelon. That is, it was done specially for the media, for some observers: as if the division was leaving back to Volgograd. In fact, all the equipment was simply faulty, and four or five people went with it,” he says.

A few days before the invasion, members of the 20th Division began to believe that Ukrainian troops and foreign mercenary units were concentrated on the border. On Feb. 24, the 20th Division began its invasion of the Kherson Oblast in Ukraine. “When shells flew from our side — we were told that it was exactly on them, and that it was all a preventive strike. In general, everyone, including me, believed it. Probably because we wanted to believe it, but otherwise it was too scary,” Mikhail recalls.

When he and his unit crossed the border with Ukraine, he saw that there was no accumulation of troops and fierce resistance on the border: “There were a couple of torn bodies of border guards at the checkpoint. At that time, I already had a deep understanding of the lie, but I still did not admit it directly to myself, a psychological self-defense mechanism worked.”

The losses

“They promised ‘two weeks, you won’t be there longer,’ this is the word of an officer,” another serviceman of the 20th Division recalls the words of his command. Sergei is 22 years old, and unlike Mikhail, he is not a professional soldier. Sergei joined the 20th Division by conscription in 2021. According to him, on the third day he was offered to sign a contract — which he recklessly did, and then immediately regretted. At the end of January 2022, Sergei, already being a contract serviceman, first found himself in Crimea, and then went on the offensive in the Kherson Oblast. When it became clear that the war would not end in two weeks, as promised, out of his company of 80 men, 60 became the refusers, he told Get Lost — a human rights organization that helps deserters or draft evaders.

The commanders of the 33rd Regiment in which Sergei served tried to persuade the refusers: “They say, mobilization is coming, you will be mobilized again anyway, so stay and earn money.” Sergei did not heed the persuasions of his commanders. He was returned to compulsory service with two notes in his military ticket: “refused a special military operation on the territory of Ukraine” and “transferred to military service on conscript.”

In the 255th Regiment, part of the 20th Division, the situation was much more tense. In a month or so of fighting in this regiment, 15 servicemen were killed and 91 wounded. 151 servicemen “refused to fulfill the combat mission and left the area of combat operations,” according to the certificate of casualties, which came to the IStories’ disposal. The same data was given by the division command in an explanatory note on the analysis of the current situation to the leadership of the group of troops “South” on April 5, 2022, which is also at the disposal of the editorial board. Division commander Alexander Gorobets and chief of staff Sergei Kens indicated in the note that the division requires reinforcement as soon as possible because of “unsatisfactory morale and psychological condition of the personnel and understaffing of units with personnel.”

Mikhail also wanted to quit — in the first six months of the war contracts with the Ministry of Defense could still be terminated. But what was done to soldiers who refused to fight frightened him. “A refuser was brought to the commander of the 225th Regiment, and the commander made a chop out of him. The soldier was being carried away from him. And the chief of staff said directly that if anyone from the staff refused to serve, they dug a zindan [underground “prison”] nearby: ‘You will sit there thinking about your behavior.’ Or they could just leave them somewhere, from there it was 100 kilometers to Crimea, and the soldier had no orders, nothing. Or petty officers could not accept soldier’s weapons intentionally.”

At the same time, according to Mikhail, at that time the staff command was still “more or less adequate:” “For example, the division commander [Alexander Gorobets] forbade strikes even near populated areas with artillery, because it was not very accurate, it could miss by a kilometer. He forbade any contact with local residents, that is, to enter settlements at all.” But in the summer of 2022, the entire command of the 20th Division was killed.

The base destruction

The base of the 20th Guards Motorized Rifle Division, along with other command and supply units of the Russian forces in Kherson Oblast, was located on the territory of Kherson International Airport in the village of Chornobaivka. Russian troops captured it on February 27 and turned it into a large base with staff, warehouses and equipment. However, the base became an easy target for Ukrainian artillerymen, who regularly shelled the airport from Mykolaiv.

The Ukrainian army’s numerous precision strikes on Chornobaivka generated many jokes among Ukrainian Internet users. By the end of March 2022, the AFU had hit the airport 8 times. However, local residents did not laugh at the memes on this topic at all. If there were prohibitions of the division commander, which the interlocutor of IStories tells about, they were clearly not followed by all servicemen. During the occupation about 30 residents of Chornobaivka were killed, and even teenagers told about torture by the Russian military.

Despite everything, the command of the 20th Division did not change its dislocation. On the morning of July 9, 2022, during another shelling of the airport by the Ukrainian army, the division was essentially decapitated: the division commander, Colonel Alexander Gorobets, his deputies, chief of staff and chief of operations were killed. The obituaries of the dead in the Russian media did not contain any details of the circumstances of their deaths — the Russian authorities were silent about the shelling of the base, while the Ukrainian media wrote about the shelling with HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and the death of the division commander and his deputy.

Mikhail witnessed what happened: “After the first shelling, the building started to fold up. As soon as everything stopped, everyone around rushed to rake up the ruins — from there you could still hear the survivors’ screams. And then the alarm sounded again. Everyone scattered to their hiding places. And shells began to fall into the ruins for the second time. After that, there were no survivors left. Only bodies were taken out. Almost the whole staff was destroyed: about 30 dead.”

The newly appointed division commander, according to Mikhail’s memories, was even worse than the previous one. “He had insulting names for everyone: for example, he called sappers one-timers, and scouts — fabulists.” Humanitarian goods for local residents, which were brought to the occupied territories by the forces of the 20th Division, under the new command ended up on store shelves, he claims. On the new chief of staff Mikhail says that “so stupid and incompetent military he met only among the soldiers, and even very rarely.”

By the end of the summer of 2022, about a quarter of the 20th Division’s military, about 500 men, had already died, Mikhail says. The number of those who decided to quit was also large. “Everyone was already tired, no one liked it all. For example, we were in one place, north of Aleksandrovka, and there is the front line along the canals. And here you go a kilometer, and there is no one,” recalls the serviceman. — “On one side of this kilometer there were two people, on the other side — three or four, that is, the front line was not even there. That’s why mobilization was really announced.”

“Everyone will be caught, everyone will be imprisoned”

After the announcement of the so-called partial mobilization in September 2022, contracts with the Ministry of Defense became indefinite — their validity was extended “until the end of the special military operation.” Previously, commanders personally came to the positions to persuade refusers not to quit, but now they could forget about quitting. At the same time, the authorities toughened the punishment for all “military” articles, and the maximum penalty for desertion increased to 15 years in prison.

Sergei, who managed to transfer to conscript service, then “from lack of adrenaline” returned to the contract — first as a truck driver, then “in the infantry, to the front line.” But after he quarreled with his commander, he decided to escape: “I reached the Crimean border, aroused suspicion, they took me for interrogation by counterintelligence. I confessed that I was a serviceman. They told me: ‘You are too late. Mobilization was announced, many soldiers were returning on their own before it, and they were allowed to pass, but now, sorry’”.

The military man’s escape was not forgiven for nothing. According to Sergei, the battalion commander forced him to walk 15 kilometers to his position in rubber boots, and he rode beside him. When Sergei sat down to take a break, the kombat shot him under his feet with a sports pistol. “After the kombat got tired of bringing me up in this way, he called the company commander. He took me away, swearing, yelling to put me in the pit. I ran and managed to get away from them: maybe it was because it was night, or just my fellow soldiers didn’t want to catch me.”

Sergei is on the list of wanted “sochniks” along with 1,009 other servicemen of the 20th Division. In total there are 858 contract servicemen (among them — 26 junior officers, one major and two lieutenant colonels), 150 mobilized and two conscripts. As of May 2024, in the federal wanted persons database collected by Mediazona, we found only 38 full names matching both the deserters’ names and birth years. Of these, 26 were added to the database after February 2024. This is likely because deserters often remain wanted for a long time only within specific cities.

We also found at least 96 individuals matching the identities of the “sochniks” from the 20th Division in garrison court verdicts on cases of unauthorized departure from their units. According to Ivan Chuvilyaev, a representative of the Get Lost organization, criminal cases are sometimes initiated against deserters already after they have been caught. “They ran away, hiding for about six months, then they are caught and offered: ‘Either we will open a case, or you just return to the unit and we will pretend that you did not disappear anywhere.’ Therefore, the statistics that we see on cases initiated for AWOL is, alas, not representative in this sense. It should at least be considered together with the classified statistics of the military prosecutor’s office,” Chuvilyaev said.

In total, since the beginning of the war, 11.7 thousand cases under the article on unauthorized abandonment of the unit have been brought to garrison courts. Their number has begun to grow actively since March 2023. In July 2024, it reached a maximum of almost a thousand cases per month. For each working day there were 40 new criminal cases for AWOL.

The Orenburg and Volgograd garrison courts are in the top in terms of the number of cases received. Since the beginning of the war each of them has processed more than 400 criminal cases of AWOL. It is in Volgograd that the 20th Motorized Rifle Division is based, and there is also the Prudboy training ground, from which some soldiers escaped.

Most criminal cases for desertion and AWOL end with suspended sentences, Mediazona wrote earlier. Those convicted of any military offense are much more likely to receive “probation” than those convicted under other articles. In the first half of 2024, 40% of convicted military personnel received a suspended sentence, while the share of such sentences among the total number of convicted persons is only 22%, according to the data of the Judicial Department. A suspended sentence allows a serviceman to return to the front sooner. Ivan Chuvilyaev said that it is not in the interests of the state to initiate cases against deserters during the war: “They want a person to simply return to the front. That is why they intimidate that everyone will be caught, everyone will be imprisoned, punished, execution will be introduced under this article.”

“Abducted and killed by his own comrades”

In June 2023, a post about Konstantin appeared in the VK group, where relatives are looking for missing servicemen: “In March, the last time he was in touch. Any information is important!”

Konstantin went to war as a volunteer and served under contract in the 33rd Regiment of the 20th Division. He called his family often — sometimes several times a day. He said that he had good relations with other soldiers and that command staff liked him. “The commander always admired him, saying: ‘I would have seven more men like you,’” his wife Olga recalls in a conversation with IStories.

From the very beginning of the service, Konstantin had problems with payments. He did not receive “Putin’s” money, and his salary was almost twice less than in civilian life, Olga claims. While on leave, Konstantin and his fellow servicemen wrote a collective statement about the payments to the military prosecutor's office in Volgograd. Then the complaining military men began to be threatened by the military police. According to Olga, they were given a condition: either take back the application and return to the front, or we will put them in jail and open a criminal case.

“My husband and the guys told the commanders: ‘We are not refusing to go back. You just pay us what is due. We signed a contract. Not only was it signed for three months, but due to partial mobilization it was automatically extended until the end of the war. All right, we agreed to that. But, damn it, pay what you’re supposed to pay. Why do they say it’s all good on TV? Or does Putin’s word mean nothing to you? How come? Who should we trust?’”

In the end, only three of the 18 refusers did not return to the front line. The court sentenced two of them to 3.5 and 5.5 years in prison for AWOL, and another soldier managed to escape, Olga says. Konstantin returned to the front. At the end of March 2023 Olga had a last conversation with her husband, he was very upset about something and promised to tell about what happened in the evening, during the next call. But after this conversation Konstantin did not call again and did not pick up the phone.

As the commander later described what happened to her, after the conversation with his wife, Konstantin went out into the street and did not return. A criminal case was opened against the man for unauthorized abandonment of the unit, representatives of the military prosecutor’s office and military police came to his home to check if he was hiding at his place of residence, and threatened to put him on the federal wanted list (at the time of publication of this text, Konstantin is indeed on the federal wanted list and on the list of “sochniks” of the division).

They said they couldn’t find any witnesses. Nobody goes for it, because witnesses are removed immediately. Everyone is afraid.

Widow of a Russian serviceman

Olga did not believe that her husband could leave the unit unauthorized. “I say to them, ‘Submit, submit [to the wanted list], find him — alive, dead!’ He was not mobilized, it was his wish. No matter how much he wanted to go home, he wouldn’t do that. He always told me that ‘when the war is over, I’ll come back, we’ll have a life, our children will get a green light.’” In addition, one of Konstantin’s fellow soldiers confessed to the woman that he had denigrated her husband, confirming during the interrogation the commander’s version that he escaped on his own.

As Olga told IStories, a year and a half after her husband’s disappearance, some “people with status” came to her. Judging by Olga’s description of these men, they could be representatives of the counterintelligence service, the military lawyer explained to IStories. However, we cannot verify this story.

“As I was told, he had a fight with his commanders, with which commanders, really, I don’t know. And he was abducted and killed by his own comrades. I said, ‘Why can’t you attach this to the case?’ They said they couldn’t find any witnesses. Nobody goes for it, because witnesses are removed immediately. Everyone is afraid,” says Olga.

Extrajudicial killings of Russian servicemen who refused to fight have been talked about since the beginning of the invasion. For example, in July 2022, five Russian officers disappeared. For their unwillingness to fight, they were first held in the so-called “camp of refusers” (in fact, a prison) in Bryanka, Luhansk Oblast, where the military were beaten and threatened with execution for refusing to return to the front line. And then the officers were taken away to an unknown destination, after which they were never seen again. One of the officers was reported to his parents as having been killed by a “direct hit from a 152mm shell in an open area.”

Later, on the territory of Donetsk Oblast, the Russian military deployed a real concentration camp for the refusers. On the territory of the abandoned Petrovskaya mine in the west of Donetsk, the military were brutally tortured, forcing even the seriously wounded to return to the front line: some of them stopped contacting their families after that, and the body of one of the soldiers was returned to his family “in a terrible condition.”

The unhealed sent to the front

IStories studied the verdicts of the courts on the cases of “sochniks” of the 20th Division to understand why they are leaving the front. Often servicemen say in courts that they left the unit to care for sick relatives or elderly parents, “to help with household chores,” and planned to return. Whether this is true or not is unknown. But with such testimony it is more difficult for the investigation to prove direct intent to leave the service to reclassify the article for AWOL to a more serious one — desertion.

The verdicts show that most of the “sochniks” whose cases go to trial do not try to hide and return to live at their place of residence, to their families. “Many think that they have valid reasons, for example, the family needs help or the wife is sick. They think they can come back and nothing will happen,” says human rights activist and head of the Movement of Conscientious Objectors Artyom Klyga.

Usually such AWOLs end with the servicemen themselves coming to the military enlistment office or returning to the unit, or the police coming for them.

But sometimes relatives may not know that their loved one left the unit, says a lawyer in military affairs, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity. During his service in the army, the interlocutor of IStories was engaged in the search for deserters and “sochniks.” According to his experience, at that time runaway soldiers often did not go home: “They hid with a woman or a local farmer — they drink and work.”

One story about the return of a prodigal soldier to his unit was widely discussed in the 20th Division. During the war, the division’s deputy technical commander could not be found for a month and a half, Mikhail told IStories. When he finally showed up, it turned out that he and his assistants had been stealing cars from the local residents and taking them to Crimea to sell them. “The division commander just scolded him, and that was all,” says Mikhail.

There are cases when soldiers escape the unit in bulk. We found 5 court verdicts when military men of the 20th Division escaped from the Prudboy training range in the Volgograd Oblast after the New Year holidays in 2023. Three returned to the unit on their own, while two were caught by police and representatives of the military commandant’s office. All received 3 to 5 years in prison, one received a suspended sentence.

According to the court verdicts, servicemen often run away from hospitals or during medical examinations after being wounded. Thus, it was the injury that helped Mikhail to make the decision to run away from the army. Before that, he had thought about wounding himself on his own, but did not dare because such cases, according to him, were thoroughly investigated. “The division commander tried to forbid my evacuation [due to wounding] so that I would stay put. But in the end I was evacuated anyway,” Mikhail says. — “In the hospital, the commander called me, asking me when I would return. And I couldn’t walk. And then I was told by doctors that there was an unofficial order to send officers even unhealed back [to the front]. Then I realized that I had no more options and it was time [to flee].”

It is easiest to desert from a hospital, while in Russia, confirms Artyom Klyga of the Movement of Conscientious Objectors: “The level of security there is like in a regular clinic. And overall, there’s no real pressure. But in a combat zone, you’re literally out in the field — with gunfire on one side and your commanders on the other. If you’re in the rear, though, there’s a high chance of running into military police.”

A serviceman who deserts while on civilian leave usually has two to three weeks to leave the country, a human rights advocate explains: “Simply because the police don’t react that quickly. It’s unclear how things will change once the electronic draft registry is fully operational and can be used to block exits, but for now, it’s not in place.”

Ivan Chuvilyaev of Get Lost also confirms that it is from hospitals that military personnel most often go AWOL or desert. The more intense the fighting and the more wounded, the more active the military appeal to Get Lost, asking for help in deserting, he says. Since spring of this year, they have been receiving a particularly high number of requests.

The number of people who have applied to Get Lost for the help in desertion is close to 2,500 people for the whole year 2024. The exact number of actual deserters is unknown — not all of them get in touch after getting a consultation. And only a few hundred of them left the country, Chuvilyaev notes (someone did not dare to escape, someone was detained). Deserters mostly flee to Kazakhstan or Armenia, since they have only internal passports.

The main motive for the deserters, in Chuvilyaev’s experience, has not changed over the course of the war — “they don’t want to kill and they don’t want to be killed.” “But once safe, many of them still remain in a nightmarish psychological state,” Chuvilyaev says. — “They are in limbo in emigration, can’t expect humanitarian visas, don’t understand what to expect and how much. PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] comes at them with full force. Some reach such despair that they go to the Russian embassy or to the Russian military unit in Gyumri [Armenia] to surrender.”

Those who deserted freedom

Anton, a mobilized “sochnik” from the 20th Division, whom IStories spoke to, is just one of those who plans to return to the front from going AWOL. He says that he left the unit “because of family problems” (he has two small children and he has not received his pay for a long time), and he is returning because “he does not want to be on the federal wanted list, to spoil relationships, so that his children will have problems with their careers in the future” and because “someone has to be there, there are not enough people [on the front]”.

Some return from AWOL after committing crimes in civilian life. One soldier of the 20th Division left the unit to “take revenge on his wife for a quarrel between them over her trip to Armenia and her ignoring his phone calls,” his court verdict said. The man reached his wife’s house, doused her car with gasoline and set it on fire before turning himself in to police. The serviceman received 3 years’ probation for AWOL and hooliganism.

As it follows from the court verdicts, voluntary return to the unit is not uncommon. As human rights activist Artyom Klyga explains, people realize the possible consequences after leaving the unit. “It seems to a person that here and now there is a possibility of a felony and prison, and abstract death [at war] is far away. Maybe there will be no death or injuries yet. And he thinks, ‘I will come back, and everything will be fine.’”

Moreover, Klyga notes that in his experience, many individuals who had already deserted realized they were not ready to leave Russia for good. “They have a feeling that ‘there’ I am at least earning money, doing some good, and also — now I’ll finish the war and come back, otherwise I’ll just go to jail, and that’s it.”

Mikhail, who witnessed the shelling of the 20th Division base and escaped after being wounded, has been hiding in Russia for a year and a half. At first he was wanted in several regions, then he was put on the federal wanted list. Then he realized that “it’s impossible to live like this” and started to find out how to leave the country with his status. He came to Get Lost and they helped him with consultations. Now Mikhail is waiting for an interview for asylum in one of the European countries.

Mikhail admits that it was also difficult for him to return to a peaceful life. There was no psychological help for him where he is: “But I was able to help myself. For example, I learned about breathing techniques and meditation.”

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Anton shares that many of his fellows left their unit unauthorized, but most eventually returned and negotiated with their commanders to avoid punishment: “They couldn’t find their place in civilian life. Out here, it’s all hustle and bustle, but there, it’s more familiar. They waited a long time, thinking about whether they wanted to go back or face prison. In the end, they chose to return. I’m in touch with most of them, and they’re all alive, none of them regret it. I’ve never heard of anyone ending up in court.”

Sergei describes his emotions after breaking his contract for the first time and transferring back to conscript service: “It was this strange feeling… You’d just come back from war yesterday, and something was missing. Adrenaline. Everything around was so calm, and that calmness started to crush me — no explosions, no gunfire.”

Eventually, he managed to escape from the front. For a year, Sergei hid in Russia, hoping he could “lay low until either Putin was gone or the war ended.” But he ultimately decided to flee and is now living abroad.

Editor: Maria Zholobova

Featuring Alina Danilina, Anastasia Korotkova, and Anastasia Kalashnikova

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