“Dumb Way to Fight”

Corporal Pavlov (names have been changed — Ed.) smoked half a pack of cigarettes overnight. In the morning, his platoon was to start an assault on Raihorodka, a village on the border between the Luhansk and Kharkiv Oblasts of Ukraine. Pavlov was anxious about this. 

“When they showed us the route, I thought it was some kind of crap. A no return journey,” corporal recalls. “I spent a long time thinking about it. Either this is my last combat mission, and that’s it, I’m dead. Or I have to find a way out.” 

Before going to war, Pavlov, originally from Irkutsk Oblast in Eastern Siberia, had been a roustabout, doing manual work at warehouses and storages: “Just like the others, a regular handyman”, he recalls. He spent all his spare cash on gambling. 

After he moved to Moscow, in the summer of 2024 Pavlov signed the military service contract with the Russian army. “I was tired of civilian life, it all just piled up, you know. I had no enthusiasm to live,” he says. “I just wanted to go to war. And, like, to die in a day or two, you know, to die a hero.”

For the first four months of his service, September to December, Pavlov’s platoon was storming Makiivka. His job as a BMP (infantry fighting vehicle — Ed.) gunner was to “cover” the assault troops after they were out. 

Pretty soon Pavlov understood it all wasn’t as easy as he had imagined.

He expected to be treated “as a human being” and to have a “wartime community” where everyone would “respect each other and work towards a common goal.” Instead, Pavlov discovered that soldiers were treated “like subhumans, like pieces of meat.” 

According to Pavlov, the Russian offensives at the front surrounding him were rarely successful. Often, his platoon would not even make it to the attack location. “Halfway there, the machines are already being attacked and fucking destroyed. Drones are flying around,” Pavlov says. 

In January 2025, Pavlov was deployed several kilometers north of Makiivka to storm Raihorodka. When his platoon was given the task, he realized that he would not return alive.

“A shattered wood strip, a field on the right, a field on the left. A straight line of ten kilometers of constant shelling,“ Pavlov describes. ”It’s impossible [to drive through]. It’s easy for the drone operators to attack — just fire at the vehicles. They can’t turn anywhere, can’t hide. Only stumps and trenches remain.”

By that point, Pavlov had become disillusioned with the concept of heroic death. “I now think this is a dumb way to fight. There are no proper tasks here. They just lead you like a stupid sheep to the slaughter,” he says. 

In a dugout right before the combat mission, Pavlov decided to desert.

Fleeing the front lines

According to human rights activists, soldiers who decide to flee the war usually don't attempt doing it right from the frontlines, like Pavlov did, as it’s extremely difficult. Usually they wait until they are sent on leave or wounded and are somewhere remote from the frontline.

Soldiers would flee right from the frontlines back in 2022, but since then, security in the rear has been significantly reinforced, says Sergei Krivenko, director of the “Citizen. Army. Law” human rights group.

“Back then, there were cases when the soldiers’ relatives would drive to the (Russia-occupied parts of) Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and take their loved ones away, helping them to escape. And the locals would help in some way, transporting [the deserters],” he says. “Now it's difficult. The entire [rear] area is filled with military police, checkpoints, and inspections. All the routes out are under control. The rear is a controlled area for the enemy not to get in, and for the Russians not to leave."

Even the taxi drivers in Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts are sometimes instructed to report deserters, says the "Mobilization DNR Live" Telegram channel admin. Deserters caught in the frontline zone are put in “pits” — which is the military slang for places where offenders are held, a field detention cell, essentially. 

Despite all these risks, Krivenko says, the basic “Citizen. Army. Law” activists’ recommendation is to flee the front by any means necessary. On vacation, after an injury, by bribing a commander, or even without any excuse at all: ”Yes, there is a risk that you will be put in a “pit.” And the terms there may be harsh, you will get beaten. But the alternative is to die.”

Pavlov’s escape

If a deserter intends to flee, he must do so without weapons—otherwise, the search for him will begin much sooner. Pavlov knew this and left his rifle in the dugout. He knew that there was a town called Svatove nearby, and he remembered the road. 

Pavlov would travel at night, and after the dawn broke, he would hide and sleep in abandoned houses. If a car drove by, he would hide in the grass. 

He had no food. Two days later, after reaching Svatove, Pavlov decided to take a risk and knocked on the door of a house where h e saw a light in the window. A young couple opened the door. He confessed to them that he was a deserter. The young man brought out some food — “meat pasta, bread, and a bottle of water.” 

Pavlov spent three nights in Svatove, sleeping in abandoned and half-destroyed houses. Every day, he would cautiously go to the bus station to try to find out how to get out of the city and where the checkpoints were. “[I knew that] no one could drive me because everyone there is afraid to,” Pavlov explains. He didn’t have any civilian clothes yet — only his military uniform, and no documents either. 

“They (many taxi drivers — Ed.) only agree to drive you if you show them documents proving that you are not a deserter,” says Pavlov. Cars are checked at the checkpoint on the way out of the city, and if a deserter is found, the driver also gets into trouble, explains Pavlov. So he had to walk again — almost 50 km to Starobilsk in the Luhansk Oblast. He would walk through the fields at night to circumvent checkpoints.

Starobelsk, unlike Svatove and other frontline towns, is more reminiscent of a normally living town. Even mobile internet works there, Pavlov notes. First, he went to the market, where he bought civilian clothes and a phone charger. Online he found an apartment and rented it for a few days to figure out what to do next, how to get out of the city and go on without having to pass checkpoints.

Pavlov wrote to the volunteers of Get Lost, an anti-war project that helps Russian soldiers desert. They said they could only help him if he manages to get back to Russia, as there aren’t many guides in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Get Lost have confirmed that Pavlov had indeed contacted them. 

The owners of the apartment quickly realized that Pavlov was a deserter and asked him to leave so as not to cause them any trouble. In Starobilsk, Pavlov managed to find a driver who agreed to take him to the Russian border: Pavlov told him he was going on vacation. He was lucky, as no one checked the car at the checkpoints on the way out of the town.

They arrived in Milove, a village on the very border between Luhansk Oblast and Russia. It is separated from Russia by barbed wire mesh fencing. Having waited until dark, Pavlov climbed through a hole in the fence and found himself in Rostov Oblast, Russia.

Pavlov’s second escape

First, Pavlov went to Moscow. From there, he hitchhiked to his native Irkutsk. There he got himself a new ID, an internal passport, as he had left his old one in the camp when he was fleeing. Once he got his new papers, he flew to Yerevan, as Russians can enter Armenia with an internal passport. However, Pavlov did not stay abroad for long. What happened is he ran out of money.

Then he decided to return to Russia and to go on hiding there. He found an organisation that recruits organizations to the army, told them he was ready to come and sign a contract, but he would need a plane ticket to Russia. They bought it for him. 

In July, he was detained at a train station near Moscow. The police told him that he was wanted and took him to the nearest military unit. “I made a big mistake. Literally the day before I bought a ticket to another city (using my name)”, Pavlov says.

He spent several days at the military unit. Handcuffed, he was forced to just remain standing at one place from dawn to dusk, waiting for someone from his own unit to arrive and take him back to the front.

Usually, there is no rush to open a criminal case against deserters. The priority is to get them back to the front, a Russian military lawyer explained.

Pavlov was taken to Voronezh. From there, he was taken back to the occupied territories in a truck. Pavlov knew that trenches and assaults would be ahead. When the truck was about to reach Svatove, he waited for the right moment, jumped out of the trunk and fled again. 

This time, he traveled the same route much faster — in just two days. He reached Starobilsk, found the same driver who had taken him before, and climbed through the fence in Milove again. 

From there Pavlov made his way to a friend who lives midway to Moscow and asked him to buy a SIM card. Then Pavlov left for another remote town: “far away from Moscow and St. Petersburg.” There he met some locals and confided to one of them he was a deserter. “He was very understanding. He is helping me with the money matters and has got me a job,” says Pavlov. “Well, some gigs. We do some work, some construction, but it won’t last long. Winter is coming soon, and there won’t be much work.”

Pavlov is hiding in Russia, still wanted by the federal authorities. “Now, of course, I think it would have been better to stay in Armenia, to find some way to make a living there”, says Pavlov. He is thinking about leaving Russia again — illegally this time. He is considering going to Germany through Belarus and Lithuania. He doesn't know how to do it yet. “If someone told me how, I could do it well. I am experienced now,” Pavlov says. 

How soldiers desert now

Neither conscripts nor contract soldiers can simply refuse to fight in Ukraine. “It is now a criminal offense,” says Sergei Krivenko. There are three articles of the Criminal Code that cover this: Article 332 (“Disobey”), Article 337 (“Unauthorized absence from unit or place of service”) and Article 338 (“Desertion”).

Therefore, one way to avoid returning to the front is to get a criminal case. Then there is a chance of getting a short sentence in a penal colony under the mildest charge, article 332, “Disobey.” We described this process in detail. 

Getting just a probation will not save a soldier from being sent to the front. According to the federal law, a soldier is subject to dismissal only after a court sentence of imprisonment comes into force.

By the end of 2024, at least 49 thousand soldiers had deserted the Russian army, according to our calculations. Most of the deserters are likely hiding in Russia, out of major cities, not living at their places of residence, and not using bank cards, volunteers and human rights activists say. Of all the deserters who got help by Get Lost, only 859 left Russia, while the other 1,288 deserters (60%) are hiding inside the country. 

Living in Russia as a military wanted by the authorities is possible, but not easy, says Krivenko. “We can probably expect an amnesty [for deserters] at some point, but the strategy for the next few years will be to lay low.”