How to escape Russia’s army: Soldiers serving in Ukraine seek a way out

“I lost myself emotionally and physically, and began cutting my hands,” Oleg said.

At the time of publication, Russian authorities had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Vetting the deserters

Idite Lesom’s spokesman, Ivan Chuvilyaev, said Russia’s mobilisation effort “keeps mutating”.

In 2022, Moscow began an unpopular “partial” mobilisation, while large numbers of prisoners were promised pardons and died in droves during attempted assaults on Ukrainian positions.

Volunteers were offered signup bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars – and their families received sizeable “coffin” payments.

Most recently, economic migrants, university students and arrested men awaiting trial have become a new source of soldiers.

Some new soldiers, such as Oleg, are recruited through false promises of “safe” civilian jobs behind the frontline, or are duped into signing up, said Chuvilyaev, a former film critic who left Russia in 2022 because of his anti-war stance.

“This meat grinder keeps rolling non-stop,” he said.

His group operates online, receiving requests and vetting people who want to leave the army by checking their documents and details of service.

Sixty percent of deserters remain in Russia, living off the grid. The group instructs them to stop using their bank cards and SIM cards, and rent apartments.

Others, like Oleg, opt to leave Russia.

Free at last

In late March, he fled to Moscow, then to the western city of Belgorod, and then went south to cross into Georgia only to find out that he was barred from leaving Russia.

He felt fortunate not to have been detained at the border checkpoint.

Friends told him that police visited the apartment in Ufa where he was registered.

Idite Lesom instructed Oleg to follow a tried-and-tested evacuation route – travel by land to Minsk, the capital of former Soviet state Belarus, whose border with Russia is barely guarded, and then fly to Armenia.

He spent a whole day at Minsk airport thinking he had to be apprehended. It was only after landing in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, that his anxiety “went away”.

Oleg relocated to another country and awaits a humanitarian visa to a country in the European Union.

The frontline’s other side

In Ukraine, the desertion crisis is even more severe.

Defence Minister Mykhailo Fyodorov said in January that more than 200,000 soldiers, or more than 20 percent of active servicemen, have gone AWOL or deserted, and more than two million are evading the draft.

“For Ukrainian forces, this is a real crisis, and for the Russian army, it isn’t,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.

Ukrainian conscription officers often resort to violence to round up men of fighting age – and have been implicated dozens of times in corruption schemes.

Ukrainians may remember their President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mostly in connection with the “clumsy and corrupt conscription system that became one of his biggest and most obvious failures”, Mitrokhin said.

‘He didn’t want to be next to die’

Deserters cite mistreatment by officers, bad conditions and slow rotation of servicemen.

In mid-April, officers of the 14th Special Mechanised Brigade were fired after the publication of photos of emaciated soldiers who had not left their isolated frontline positions near the eastern town of Kupiansk for a year, drank melted snow, and nearly starved because food was infrequently delivered by drones.

For some servicemen, it is a case of desertion over likely death.

Olena, a 29-year-old mother of two, said her 31-year-old husband Arseny fled the army in February after eight months of service.

She said his friend was killed after receiving a “suicidal” mission order from a commanding officer he had argued with.

“He didn’t want to be the next to die for nothing.”