Part 5, Stalk by Shadows. Though Ivan had his passport, he was still stuck. He needed a way to get off the base without a rousing suspicion, but he had taken all his vacation time already. He didn't think he could wait much longer. It was summer, and since the start of the invasion, Russia had taken heavy casualties on multiple fronts. 120,000 had been killed, and as many as 180,000 injured, according to U.S. officials. Roughly 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in the decade-long war in Afghanistan. After the Wagner coup in June when Yevgeny Pragosian marched his private army on the Kremlin and openly challenged the competency of Putin's military direction, there was a fear of the private contractors disbanding. The enlistment campaign had driven total spending on sign-up bonuses and salaries to a colossal level. It did not seem sustainable for the state. Rumors about another round of mobilization were constant. Ivan feared that there could be an order barring all men or service members in particular from leaving the country. He needed to move fast. When Ivan convinced the doctor to recommend surgery, it was in the hope that recovery would give him six months away from the front. But now he realized that it could be his ticket out of the country entirely. He had heard that Roman, whose legs failed at the S.V.O., had received permission to leave the base to have his surgery done privately. Ivan thought about it. "Why can't I do the same?" He went straight to the newest base commander. "Comrade Major," he said, "I've been walking with a cane for six months now. So far no one has sent the documents. They say there are no places. Let me go and get the surgery on my own dime. There's a good clinic and…" They do surgeries there like the one I need." "Okay," the commander replied, "Can I have 10 days vacation?" "Yes," permitted. In five minutes Ivan wrote the report and took it back. The commander, one of those same superiors who sat safe and pretty at the base as they forced Ivan against his will to the front line while tormenting him for not being a patriot, added his signature. "My friend, you've signed your own sentence now." Immediately Ivan booked a flight to Moscow. He printed the papers he needed, the things he didn't want found, like his international passport, he slipped into a compartment in his backpack that usually contained a retractable rain covering, which he had gingerly cut out of the lining. The border dance had to be executed carefully. Anton had repeatedly cautioned that under no circumstances should Ivan use his international passport or even admit to having one at the border between Russia and Belarus or at the Minsk airport as it could provoke additional checks. The most important crossing would be the exit from Minsk. The magazine is withholding certain details of the route at the request of a detail lesson. Belarus' borders were where the security systems were the most synchronized with Russia's and where people had been detained. But at the next airport, in the next country, he would be able to use his foreign passport to board a flight to Istanbul. From Istanbul he would fly on to his final destination. He did not have any of his flights booked in advance, so as not to light up the web. He would book each leg as he approached it. If everything went according to plan, he would arrive on Anna's birthday. Once Ivan got to Moscow, his closest childhood friend helped him exchange rubles for American dollars. He took $5,000 in cash and put the rest of his money in Bitcoin. His friend had bought him a new phone, but hadn't opened it. Ivan took his old phone to another friend's house and left it there. They bought a new unregistered SIM card in the subway, took the train to another part of Moscow, and turned the phone on, ensuring that the new one and the old one had never been next to each other. Ivan opened a new telegram account and subscribed to some pro-Russia channels to show how much he loved Putin. They went to buy a train ticket. While they waited, Ivan noticed the police talking to some of the people in line. Brother calmed down, as friend told him, he looked nervous as hell. Ivan realized his hands were trembling. Each step matters. He went to the bathroom. He forced himself to breathe. When he returned, the police were gone. He bought the ticket in cash and boarded. It was a standard Plotskart, the cheapest long-distance overnight option with an open carriage and rows of bunks. After all the stress and sleepless nights, Ivan fell asleep immediately. He woke up to daylight and checked his phone. It was roaming. They had crossed into Belarus, another step down. His bunkmate came down from the top bed and they chatted over tea. She told Ivan she was a civil servant. "What about you?" she asked. "I'm a web designer," Ivan said. "I'm going on vacation with coworkers," just saying the words aloud thrilled him. He wasn't just a web designer, but a web designer who traveled. Not a guy who posed for photo reports or killed people in war. How long had he lurked on the precipice of that life? Ivan knew what happened when someone deserted. At every evening meeting, the bass' duty officer reported on the last 24 hours, showing photo reports on the projector, including a slide that listed everyone who missed roll call that morning. Other slides listed those who were on rotation somewhere. Those at the SVO, those with a dispensation to receive medical treatment. Those who were on trips to take two hundreds from Rostov on Don and deliver the corpses to family members, and then those who were unaccounted for. He knew that once his leave ended, his name would flash on the final slide. "Did you call his parents," the colonel would demand. "Did you call his wife?" "What does the wife say?" "Personnel Department, what about the personnel file?" "Where do his parents live? Did you send a request to send someone to their address?" "Did they go there?" "Yes," they went to the address. "What did they report?" "They said the parents are out of a loop. They don't know where he is. He's not at the address." Ivan had seen the scenario repeatedly. They all knew about the guy who had been hiding in Syria for months, but like so much else in the Russian services, people tried not to talk about it. Another set of guys had been AWOL and Donetsk somewhere for half a year. Every week, their commander would call them and ask where they were. "Yeah, yeah. I'll be right there," they would answer, but never appear. These were all unofficial deserters. Not that the Russian authorities released any formal figures. No commanding officer wanted to officially declare a subordinate AWOL. He didn't want to get knocked by his superior because he had lost so many men. So everyone was trying to solve the situation on their own to avoid officially entering the soldier's name into the system. A commander may even have already reported the guy to his superior, but that superior did not want to have problems with his own superior, and so the two were in cahoots not to open a criminal case. Under Russian law, a deserter must have the intent to desert. So a man could be away from base for a long time and be charged with simply being AWOL, which carried a significantly shorter sentence than desertion. And so even under mobilization, long after the two days beyond which he could be declared AWOL had passed, or the eight more that carried a prison term of up to five years, or even the twenty more after that that increased the punishment to seven years, or even more than a month for a sentence of up to ten years, there was still no case at the military prosecutor's office. A deserter might never be charged with desertion at all, and could continue receiving his full salary for months. Because Ivan was a captain, he assumed that the base's FSB officer would be working on his case. Ivan knew the guy from school. How many times did we go to each other's houses with our wives and children? He would call around to ask Ivan's subordinates how they would characterize him, if he had any suspicious contacts, if he had any contacts in Ukraine, what his call sign was, whether he had told anyone of his plans to desert, whether he had expressed any opinions about the army or politics. Both before deployment and after his return, Ivan had himself been involved in the hunt for missing soldiers. One commander would call another, and ask him to check the registered house of someone from their unit who had gone AWOL. The commander would send his subordinates. Sometimes it was the military police, but sometimes it was just normal soldiers, borrowed from another unit. Everyone knew the routine. They could try a few times at different times of the day, morning, evening, night. They would bang on the door, and if no one answered, they would stand outside the house or sit in their car and wait for the lights to come on. Then they would report back what they saw. There were instances when the soldiers simply didn't show up to the S.V.O. transport. The bases military police or grunts from the base under other commanders would be dispatched to his apartment. They would see the man inside, but they had no right to break into the house. The soldier did not answer his phone, but there were methods to flush him out. They could cut his electricity at the panel in the stairwell. Let's say the guy is sitting inside, playing on the computer or something. He is surprised when the power fails and goes to check. He walks out into the entryway, and the men grab him. The hallway is in his apartment, and there the military has the right to use a certain amount of physical force. They take him, put him in the car, and bring him to the base commander. The base commander takes over. The guy ends up at the S.V.O. Ivan didn't spend time thinking about the morality of trying to flee despite sending other people to the front line. This was the automatic reflex of a well-developed muscle of moral ambiguity. That's not my area of expertise. I don't care why the person didn't show up for the service. The mere fact of not reporting for duty is a violation. I'm just doing my job. When Ivan got to the Minsk airport, he hung back, watching. This was the most crucial hurdle on the first international airport border he had ever been to. Ivan passed through the two white doors that led to the security screening. Beyond that was passport control. He called Anna. "I'm going. That's it," he told her. "I'll call you later." Once through security, he saw white cubicles with glass windows. Women sat looking through passports. He stayed back again to watch. He spotted a woman who looked as though she was in her forties with a brown bob and a pleasant face. Her line was moving quickly, and she seemed to be barely flipping through the pages. As he approached her, he breathed deeply. He told himself to become. "Smile." "Hello," he said. "Please remove your hat." Ivan took off his hat, smiling. He passed her his domestic passport. "Why domestic?" she asked. "Where's your foreign passport?" You can fly to... With a domestic one. "I don't know about that," she told him. "I'm going to check." She got up and left him standing there. Ivan tried to stay calm. Around him, people passed without any incident. Everyone clicked, clicked into the computer and out. "What is this absurdity? Why is she taking so long?" You can use a domestic one, she said, when she returned. "But do you have a foreign passport?" "No, I don't have a foreign passport, of course not domestic only. Only a domestic one. You don't have a foreign one by any chance." "Why are you suddenly asking that question so many times Ivan wanted to scream?" He started sweating. "No," he replied. "It's just faster to register a foreign passport." "No, I don't have one." She started to type in his information, but then began hitting the same button over and over again. "My computer is freezing," she announced. "Fuck," she is probably running me through the database, which is causing the computer to freeze. It will say something like, "Do not let him out, he is a service member, he is forbidden to leave. Fuck! Fuck!" Ivan began to shake. He focused all his energy on his hands and fingers, willing them to stay still. He wiggled his toes up and down, up and down, so no one would see him fidgeting. "They're scanning a database right now, that's it. They're just going to arrest me now," he waited, sweating, toes wiggling, wiggling. "What's going on?" the woman asked a co-worker. "Yeah, it's frozen for me too," her neighbor said. "It's the Russian passports." Ivan could not believe it, were they going to let him pass, take him to another room, his shirt was soaked. The woman kept hitting her keyboard. She reset something, took Ivan's photo a second time, and ran him through again. Ivan waited. And then she looked up at him from her computer and announced that he was free to pass. He was so dazed that he couldn't figure out how the door worked. Finally, he was out and in the transit zone. He ran to the bathroom in cold Anna, "I'm shaking," he told her, "but I got through, I got through, that's it. You can exhale now." Anna didn't believe it. Since Ivan left the base, she had been in a state of constant dread. She didn't sleep, she forced herself to breathe, to watch Sasha. She thought Ivan could be stopped at any moment. When he emerged from the bathroom, he chose a chair by his gate and sat down. "Damn. It's about time. I've been through the most important part now, a little more." It was only on the plane, buckled into the seat, taking off that Ivan felt he could exhale. He was, in his mind, free. The rest of the steps were a formality. Everything mentally complicated was done. The rest was physical, just fly, land, fly, land, fly, land. At the next airport, Ivan watched the sunrise. He nearly lost most of his money buying a fake plane ticket from a charlatan. He used cash at an airport office to buy a multi-leg ticket all the way through to his final destination, but when he looked at it closely, he saw that only the flight to Turkey was confirmed. The rest were just reservations. Some opportunists thought Ivan was a sucker who wouldn't notice until he was already on a layover. Ivan raised hell and threatened to call the police until someone found the guy, who slinked around to offer what Ivan was sure was a faint apology, claiming that he didn't realize he hadn't really made the booking. Anna was horrified. If Ivan hadn't been able to get the money back, they would have had nothing left to spend on plane tickets. But also, was he insane? Did he want to involve the police and flash his ID all over the CSTO? The flight to Istanbul was beautiful, clouds and more clouds. Ivan filmed it all. As the plane descended, he could see green water rippling around lush islands. But then the pilot jerked them up violently and climbed back into the clouds. "I can't believe this is happening. A moron at Minsk Passport control, a swindler at the next airport, a plane mishap in Turkey, just mine luck." They circled for a while and then landed on their second try. Ivan waited around all day in the enormous Istanbul airport, worried that his gate would suddenly change and he would have to run across five concourses and end up missing his next flight. When he eventually boarded, he fell asleep almost immediately. Exiting custom to his final destination, Ivan couldn't really believe it. Finally. It's finally happening, it's happening, it really worked. You were running from death, did you really succeed? He walked out into the arrivals hall. Anna and Sasha were waiting with a sign. "Welcome," it said, in the language of their new country. In the video, a friend took Anna looked drunk, her features melting. She was bawling, her frame collapsing in on herself. Ivan enveloped her and whispered into her ear, "It's okay, it's okay, I'm here. I arrived, calm down, it's okay, it's okay here." Anna couldn't stop crying. She knew there was a whole road ahead of them that still needed to be traversed. His papers, safety, a new life. But Ivan was there, he was in front of her, he stroked her hair. Anna had tasked herself with establishing their new lives in anticipation of Ivan's escape. As soon as she arrived, she said about learning the language, figuring out how to buy groceries, making friends, finding a daycare for Sasha. If each step Ivan took mattered, each counter step Anna took mattered just as much. The most important thing was to legalize their existence. She needed to find the right lawyer to make sure they could receive protected status. There were a lot of swindlers peddling assistance to the waves of desperate Russians who were fleeing their country. Anna decided that they didn't just need refugee status, they needed citizenship. An ironclad guarantee that they would never be sent back to Russian soil, or have to set foot in the Russian embassy for any reason ever again. But she couldn't just ask random Russians she met for help. Besides, their asylum claim was more complicated than most. Ivan was not a politically persecuted activist, or someone who had fled a draft notice. He had been involved in actual fighting. No matter how long other cases took, theirs would probably take longer. Deserters were not in touch with one another either. Edite Lesham helped soldiers escape Russia, but it was up to the individual to take it from there. They were almost entirely on their own. She spent weeks trying to understand the most mundane nuances of the logistics of life in this new place. Even renting an apartment was more difficult than she imagined. When she first arrived, she lucked out with a less than attentive landlord, but now they needed a bigger place, and many listings required renters to have a local guarantor. Anna saw the man's posts while scrolling telegram group chats for newly arrived Russians as she was researching rental law. He was so nice, joking, and offering advice to everyone about everything. His thoughtful replies drew tons of likes and grateful comments. She wrote him a direct message with a question about the guarantor's system. Right away, the man offered to call her to explain the details. He laid everything out systematically, explained things she had spent hours puzzling over. He was buoyant, made so many jokes, and suggested they grab a coffee and talk some more. Anna took Sasha. The man brought his pregnant wife. He made more jokes. They chatted and chatted about the weirdness of this new life in exile. He asked her about Sasha's daycare. "Is it a good one? I'm going to need one soon," he said, nudging his wife and laughing. Anna told him everything she knew about the education system. She was so happy to be useful to share something back after he had spent so long on the phone explaining the property system to her. After an hour and a half, he took her phone and started making calls to real estate agents for her. "I speak the language," he said, "don't worry about it, it's easy for me." He touched her arm, just a small gesture, but it meant so much. "Well, what's your deal?" he asked when he was done making the calls. "I know, it's hard for you here. Let me help you somehow. It doesn't cost me anything. I mean, really, people who know me around here, they all say you're a wizard. Here comes the wizard, you know?" Anna thought they were still bantering. "Don't you know there's no such thing as wizards in real life?" she asked. "You've just never met one in your life," he told her seriously. But anything is possible here. The stress of the last years sat in her bones. It curled inside the angry scars on her wrists. She looked at him and wondered, "Are there really people in the world who just help without asking for anything in return?" She felt for the first time in so long that maybe she could have some relief. Maybe he could find a way for them to get their paperwork done faster. "What's your status here?" he asked. "How are you going to get legalized?" "I don't know," she told him. "I thought about going to school to get a student visa, maybe university, but I don't have the language." "Look, that's a long time, four years of school," he told her. "Yeah, and we need to earn money to survive, too." "Damn, why is it so complicated?" he asked her, commiserating. "Who's your husband?" "My husband is complicated." "Why is it so hard?" he asked, but she stayed quiet. "Did you get caught in the vortex or something with the war?" "Yes." "Man, war in general is bullshit. Fuck, Putin. I've had so many friends end up there. I helped him to escape the war." She looked at him. "Our situation is so fucked," she whispered. "Shit, I know what you mean. I understand. Hey, is there anything I can do to help? I've already helped my guys get out of there. Can I help you translate documents and paperwork? I speak the language well." She promised to email him everything when she got home. "What about your husband?" he asked again. "Is he military?" Anna grew up amid Russia's Soviet hangover and came of age in Putin's Russia. Generations of dictatorship had given way to renewed autocracy. She knew you didn't talk to strangers. Instead, she burst into tears. "My girl, calm down, it's okay. I understand," he told her, "that Putin is a bastard." She agreed. She started speaking generally about the war, all the horrible things she felt about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Yeah, yeah, of course. But what's going on with you?" He asked kindly. Little by little she felt herself unfurling, relaxing. The layers came off. She told him that her husband was military, that they fled the war, that they barely made it here, that it was a miracle he had made it through Belarus, that he had almost been swindled of their savings trying to buy plane tickets. "Really? Holy shit, oh my God," he exclaimed. Once she started, she kept talking. She told him a lot of things, not Ivan's name, but that he was an officer. All the trouble they had been through, all the trouble he was in. It tumbled out of her without warning. She didn't even know how badly she had needed to talk to someone. Well, of course, treason against the motherland. He's looking at 20 to 25. The man wasn't joking around anymore. He was solemn, concerned. "Okay, let's think about how we can help him," he started. "Okay, so now he's got a criminal case pending against him. Let's say he gets new citizenship here, obtain some documents, and renounces Russian citizenship. He tears it up. He doesn't fucking need it. He renounces his citizenship altogether. How? In all her research, Anna had never heard of this. "Wait, I'll tell you everything. You and I are going to figure this out. It's possible. Yeah, it's complicated. Yeah, it's hard, but it's all being solved." He paused. Everything can be solved only in a different way. And then he looked at her and smiled, "Gotcha." Anna didn't understand. Your husband is ours now. I live in work here for guys like your husband. He took his cell phone and turned it to her, flashing his screen so quickly that she couldn't quite make it out. A black screen with a red cross was at the GRU. "I'm from this organization, so let's go. Call him. Bring him to me." She barely understood what was happening. She panicked. She stole it for time, trying to make sense of this. "Who?" she asked. "Your husband. He doesn't have a lot of options. Either he comes to me nicely, I'm going to supervise him here. He's going to do certain tasks for me. Or, do you know how it happens? What happens?" People just disappear. He was a man walking down the street. The wrong car drove by and the man was gone. Today the man is there, tomorrow he is not. Anna squirmed in her chair. She looked at him and didn't speak. She picked up a knife from the table. "You're going to take the knife and stab me in the neck like this, right?" "Ch-ch-ch-ch." He daunted. "I'd kill you right now," Anna replied. She called the Sasha, who was absorbed in the cake the man bought for them. "Let's go. Get ready," she said in her comments' voice. Slowly she started gathering their things. "Well, come on. Call him. Don't waste time," the man said. "I'm waiting." Anna looked at the man squarely. "You don't know my husband, you bastard. What were you trying to scare me to death? Do you know how much death I've seen this year? You bastard?" "I will help every person who is running from this war. Did you hear me? I'll help anyone because there shouldn't be people like you in this world. It's because of you this war is happening because of people like you." Anna was shaking, adrenaline mixed with rage awash with fear. She threw money at the waiter, took her child by the hand, and started walking. The man followed her out. He grabbed her hand hard, not letting go. "Come down. Calm down. Let's smoke. Calm down." Steared Sasha toward a taxi. By the time I met Anna and a person a few months later, her wrists were red and welded. She had been on the edge of happiness, but after the incident, her fear had redoubled. She worried that they would be found that this man would send someone for Ivan. The secret of who they were, what their life had been and the families they had left behind, the shadows stalked her. Therese was the guilt that she had been the one to give Ivan up. She had taken the happy ending they worked so hard for and smashed it. At any minute, he could be killed or hurt, and it was all her fault for opening up, for being herself, for trusting in fairy tales. She spent days weeping in bed. They wrote a detail lesson about the incident. The group offered Anna a few consultations with a volunteer psychologist who told her not to panic. The man was probably a grifter, one of the many Russians who played on the community's fear to make a quick buck. He would probably just have extorted them and returned for his silence. But when Anna asked her new friends if they knew this guy, they told her they thought he really was affiliated with the Russian embassy. He had been on the periphery of the diplomatic circle for years, operating in some gray area that no one understood. Ivan wasn't sure what to think. He just knew Anna was terrified. He started calling the man Michel Josia, two generic Russian names as a joke, so his specter would loosen its power over them. Whether Michel Josia was an agent of the Russian military intelligence service or just a grifter was almost beside the point. They knew the Russian state could reach them anywhere, or it wanted them to think it could. Either way, the result was the same. They were silenced. After a detail lesson put me in touch with Ivan, we chatted online until one day he apologized and disappeared. Then just as suddenly, a few weeks later, he was back. He explained that he had wanted to tell his story, but the incident with Michel Josia happened. Anna grew scared and asked him to stop speaking to me. They moved apartments. They tried again to change their lives. We agreed that I would keep the specifics of their biography vague enough so as to protect their security. Anna was at war with herself. All she had wanted was her little life. She didn't want their story publicized, but she knew it was important to Ivan, so she agreed. After that situation, I wanted to flatten myself to the floor so no one could see or hear me, she told me. "I'm talking to you and I realize internally, man, this is important." And as they say, "Am I a quivering, miserable creature, or do I have rights?" That's the eternal question, "Am I a quivering, miserable creature, or do I have rights?" No one could fault them for being afraid. Defection is dangerous. Inside and outside the country, Russians who speak out against Putin end up dead. Seemingly unimportant individuals are hunted, harassed, threatened, shot, thrown off balconies in the European Union or the United States. Journalists, activists, people few have ever heard of have been poisoned, beaten, had chemicals thrown in their faces. But the worst punishments are reserved for former members of the regime, who have died in any number of curious circumstances. The higher the profile a person has, the greater the risk. A pilot who flew his helicopter into Ukraine in a public relations coup for Kyiv was found dead in Spain. His body riddled with bullets was then run over by the assassin's car. As Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and prime minister, put it, "dogs die a dog's death." Was it the work of the regime, or its mafioso enthusiasts? Did it matter when you were dead? As a result, very few deserters from the Russian military have spoken to the media. I reported this article in eight countries across four continents and interviewed 18 deserters. Many of those who fought in Ukraine had been sent to the training exercise at the border in February 2022. As soon as they saw a war was happening, they started looking for ways out. I didn't have much of a choice, one lieutenant explained. I wasn't told, "So, look, either you go to lunch or we're going to take over Ukraine." I was told to get in the car and drive. I was trapped. If I had gotten out when we were crossing the Ukrainian border and run in the opposite direction, I would have been shot. What could I have done, killed my brigade commander? It wouldn't have made a difference. Another brigade commander would just take his place. No matter how many people I ask, what would you have done if you were in my position? They say, "Well, I would probably do what you did." In the end, the lieutenant tried to break his own hand with a rock multiple times, but couldn't manage to do it. Another man I interviewed organized a group of subordinates to shoot one another in the thigh, shin and arm. Others bided their time, returned on leave, and ran away from their base. One of them, lost his entire life savings to a Huxter and Kazakhstan, was forced to return to Russia and fled the country a second time to Armenia. His wife was against it. Everyone's going, she said, "And you're a coward." She stayed in Russia with their child and doesn't speak to him anymore. I spoke to a young gay soldier who went from his military desk job to Pushkin Square in Central Moscow to protest on the day the full-scale invasion began. On that day, a rest would have been life-destroying, even for a civilian, to say nothing of an active duty service member in a country that defines the LGBTQ movement as extremism. He tried to terminate his contract even before the invasion, but his request wasn't granted, so he fled to Kazakhstan. His boyfriend, a teacher, joined him later. Without a foreign passport, he stayed in hiding with his partner in a conservative country where violence against the queer community is normal. The couple lived in limbo for over a year without refugee status, unable to leave the CSTO, with the daily fear of being pushed back into Russia and jailed. Like Mikhail Zilin, the Federal Guard service officer and Dmitry Setrakov, a deserter who a D-Day Lesson reported was tracked down and kidnapped in Armenia to be returned to Russia. One time, when the police knocked on their door, the young man panicked so much that he started climbing out of the apartment's third-story window. His boyfriend anxiously answered the door, preparing himself to face imprisonment for abetting. The couple have since fled to safety, but many deserters remain stuck in the CSTO. One young man who worked as a Defense Ministry videographer was sent to Ukraine twice and couldn't figure out how to flee. His international passport, like Ivan's, was locked in a safe at his base's Human Resources Office. Thinking he had no other options, he decided to use the opportunity to try to collect footage of Russian crimes for history. The deserters I spoke to who don't have passports and are trapped in CSTO countries believe that their salvation is Europe or the United States, but neither place will have them. Kameel Kasimov was arrested, forcibly returned to Russia and sentenced to six years in prison for desertion. He worked for a rocket brigade that launched missiles into Ukraine. He was deployed during the training exercise, but he didn't shoot anything himself. He didn't know what they were doing, couldn't pinpoint where he had been and fled as soon as he worked up the nerve. In April 2024, the Russian and Kazakh authorities went to the 23-year-old's place of work and detained him, holding him on a Russian base in the south of Kazakhstan, where he was pressured to return to Russia to face charges. "It has become much more dangerous in Kazakhstan this year," Arthur Alkostaf, his lawyer at the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, told me recently. We received unverified information that Kameel was not the only one. There were also attempts to kidnap other deserters. Even having an international passport did not guarantee salvation. I met one man at an outdoor café in Tbilisi, where he chained smoke nervously. He had avoided deployment for a year and a half. When he was transferred to another unit, and it looked as if he was about to be ordered to Ukraine, he escaped. He left his wife and two children behind and did not know when he would be able to see them again. He tried to apply for a humanitarian visa from the European Union. He dropped his application off at embassy after embassy and received no reply. He bought a ticket to Mexico that flew through Europe, planning to claim asylum in the EU as the Germans had promised. But he was stopped from boarding the plane, despite having a valid passport. I often think about whether I should have done this, he told me over telegram months after we met. I don't know anymore. I'm stuck and scared. Had my most difficult moments, I think maybe I should have just gone to prison in Russia. At least there would have been an end date to my sentence. He wondered if he should use his remaining money to try to actually get to Mexico and cross the US border on foot. Deserters have told me recently that Russians are being taken off flights to Mexico, despite being allowed visa-free travel. After over a year of hiding in Georgia, the man recently arrived in the EU. It's impossible to know the real statistics of desertion. Media Zona, an independent investigative outlet in exile, said there had been almost 7,400 AWOL cases in military courts since the start of mobilization. But experts agree that's only a fraction of the number who have tried to escape. Adite Lesham has helped around 1,500 military men flee the country. The Russian authorities, meanwhile, have made it more and more difficult to avoid service. Last year, the authorities raised the maximum age of conscription to 30 from 27, which will increase the number in the pool to at least 700,000 by 2025. A military summons no longer has to physically reach a person. Sending it electronically is enough. People who ignore the summons for more than 20 days lose the right to drive a car, get alone, and buy or sell property. Despite this, the number of deserters continues to rise. This march, according to Media Zona, Russian military courts sentence a record 34 men per day. The growth in 2024 is unprecedented, it wrote. Soldiers most frequently receive suspended sentences so they can return to base, apologize, and be sent straight back to the front line. In May, Putin replaced Defense Minister Shoygu with Andre Bellasov, First Deputy Prime Minister and one of his most trusted economic advisors. The reshuffle showed how intertwined the military and economy had become and how committed Putin remained to waging a long-term war. Analysts saw it as an attempt to clean up military corruption once and for all, or at least a signal that the regime was trying. For two years, Putin had tolerated military bloggers criticizing the Ministry of Defense for corruption and poor management, as long as they did not implicate the Kremlin itself. Many saw this as a check on the military, a productive release foul for frustration with the war, as well as a well-honed tactic pitting parts of the regime against one another as each tries to win Putin's favor, a trademark of his 24-year reign. The Wagner founder, Evgeny Pragosian's sin, was to openly challenge Putin's rule. For this, his plane was exploded in the sky. The Kremlin continues to rely on the age-old strategy of throwing waves of infantry at the front, and the casualty toll is now astronomical. During a Russian push for territory this May, British intelligence estimated that roughly 1,250 Russian soldiers were killed or injured each day, and that up to half a million Russians have been killed or wounded since the beginning of the invasion. Still, Russia continues to recruit 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers per month, about the same number that leave the battlefield as casualties. Last year's increased recruitment drive, which included 50,000 male and female convicts, as well as people who previously would have been exempt for mental or physical impairments, allowed the Russians to continue to stabilize the force. According to the Policy Group, Rii Russia, from July 2023 to July 2024, the Russian regime has paid families of those killed and wounded approximately $34 billion, roughly 8% of the federal budget. Ukraine, meanwhile, is running out of weapons and troops. Ukrainian military casualties are a closely guarded secret. The most recent estimate of 31,000 is definitely an undercount. More than 11,500 civilians have been killed in two and a half years of war, including at least 600 children. Russian troops have been accused of rape, torture, and extrajudicial executions. A generation of Ukrainians are growing up in bomb shelters. The Russian regime has spent at least $211 billion to inflict this horror. In August, Kyiv brought the war home to Russia. The first time the country has been invaded since World War II. The Ukrainians launched a surprise attack, shocking Western officials and quickly pushing seven miles into Russia. They took prisoners, including hundreds of baby-faced conscripts who were amending the border and surrendered in droves, rekindling memories of Chechnya in Afghanistan. Ukraine would come to control at least 28 towns and villages, while the Russians would evacuate more than 132,000 people. If Ukraine's current story is being told as one of resilience, Russia's has been cast as a tale of bottomless moral passivity. Indeed, acquiescence is its own form of tacit support. For decades, the Russian had been a faceless evil in the American psyche. This time, it seems the reputation was deserved, a terrible country fighting a terrible war. I had spoken to deserters online before I met one of them in person for the first time in a park in Tbilisi. I was apprehensive, worried that I would be followed and expose someone or that I would meet an FSB plant and endanger myself. I arrived early to check the area and saw a lanky young man sitting on a bench. He was more afraid of me than I was of him. He had been a lieutenant when the invasion began. He feigned a suicide attempt, got himself locked up in a mental institution, was threatened with torture and with being chained to the commander's radiator, was told he would be killed and was then ostracized by his own family for refusing to deploy to Ukraine. The lieutenant had never been out of the country, so he plotted to leave methodically, making lists of the things he would need to pack down to a precise number of socks. Then one night he vanished from his base, from his life, into the complete unknown. Now here he was in an empty park, meeting someone who messaged him online, claiming to be a journalist. When a person says, "I'm a deserter," a coordinator of Entranza, a secretive network based in Germany that helped smuggle activists out of Russia told me, "People think they are just afraid and that's it." They don't understand the remarkable things that they've done. They're not only victims, but many of them are really heroes and they need support. I spoke to quite a few men like this, whose stories contained less moral ambiguity than Ivan's. They either left after being forced to fight in the initial invasion or tried unsuccessfully to break their contracts and then fled. I could have written an article about any one of them, but Ivan's story painted a more representative picture of the Russian servicemen. Patriotism is often not the main motivation to fight. It's money, and generally for Russians. If the war doesn't touch their family, they try to ignore it. There is a nationwide desire to eat the fish and sit on the dick. More gracefully and graciously, it could be described as "a voice." A word for the Russian attitude of ignoring the possibility of negative outcomes with the belief that luck pre-determines the result anyway. Three men in Kazakhstan, Alcastar, the human rights lawyer, and two former service members, worked together to verify stories of deserters and anticipation that this status might one day qualify them for residency in the EU. This is done to address the concern of European politicians, which in transit and a detail lesssome have encountered that such a decision would invite spies, killers, or Russian patriots into their countries. They hear deserter testimonies in video calls and review supporting paperwork to write reports to share with human rights organizations that petition Foreign Affairs Ministries. I told all three of them in a bridged version of Ivan's story. Each had a different interpretation. When he was shown the combat order, he did not refuse it, said Alexi Alshansky, the Warren Officer who used Photoshop to alter uniforms, and it was now an analyst at the conflict intelligence team. On the day he was shown the combat order, he could have left to Kazakhstan. He was not a wanted man yet. All this time, while he was telling you how he was walking around, agonizing, suffering, looking for solutions, writing reports, all this time he could calmly leave. This is a man who had every opportunity to not go to this war, not go to jail, and keep himself and his family safe. But he made the decision to go to war. How do you morally treat this? Bad. You can't demand some kind of heroism from people, Alkostof interjected. We must remember one thing. We cannot shift responsibility from the politicians who make decisions and the generals who execute them onto the soldiers. The third man, the lieutenant who had been deployed to Ukraine during the initial invasion, and had tried and failed to break his own hand with a rock, and who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, told me, "A person who was brought up and raised in a military family, then had the goal of graduating from a military school, becoming an officer, cannot see himself without military service. He will never dare to leave Russia. He will never be able to break that core," he continued with admiration. "That's a hero. This is truly a man who has transcended himself and, in my opinion, made the right choice. He was brought up with the conviction that Russia and the army are everything in life. He doesn't see himself without it, and if he dared to do it, he overstepped himself. When I met Ivan, I was struck by his earnestness. It is sincere desire to better himself and his life. His candor seemed born of genuine guilelessness. He was personable, funny, and warm, and he spoke of his self-interest openly. When we discussed attending funerals or presenting the coffins of fallen soldiers to their families, Ivan was honest. He didn't go to the services of the men who perished under his command, and he didn't want to. Whether it was his duty as the platoon commander or not. Officially, a military representative must attend a soldier's funeral, though it's not obligatory, it's considered honorable behavior for the commander to be the one present. I thought maybe we were having a miscommunication in Russian, but he assured me that he didn't feel a moral obligation. It seemed to me it was because it wasn't his war, but he never even tried to make that excuse. "That would be the right thing to do, but not everything that is right is what we want to do," he told me. If there was an option not to go, I wouldn't. This is the moral morass of a nation. Still, Ivan spent ages looking for a piece of paper that had all his platoon members' names on it so he could show it to me. He tried to reconstruct the list for months after I left. He didn't know the name of the engineer whose body they left by the crater, and this really bothered him. He wanted me to write about the soldiers he lost, to use their real call signs, to commemorate these men who behaved heroically toward their comrades in arms. He worried that it wasn't his place to publicize their names, but he also wanted their sacrifice to be known. Apricot the machine gunner. If it wasn't for him, things could have been even worse, Ivan said. This man really acted heroically. He didn't go anywhere. He didn't retreat. He started to cover us. He gave the rest of us a chance to jump into that hole. Apricot is survived by two daughters in a common-law's spouse because they were not officially married. His wife did not receive the coffin payment. Ivan protected the men he could as long as it did not risk his own safety. He never sent one of his subordinates to the SVO against his will. When he told me that, he wasn't saying it to show off or to justify himself. He was direct in matter of fact. He openly admitted that he helped send others to the front. This did not strike him as problematic. Ivan shared hundreds of pages of documents that supported his account. He showed me photographs that he had taken and that had been taken of him throughout his life. And we read his personal chat history together. All day, every day for a week, we sat in a hotel conference room and reviewed his life. Anna did not want me to go into their house. To tell your story to a journalist in such excruciating detail requires a confounding mix of blind faith, bravery, trust, and total self-disregard. The hours we spent going over details and Ivan being asked, "But why didn't you ex?" was its own kind of torture, a confessional with no absolution. Perhaps Ivan felt he was performing penance, but he said he simply wanted to save other Russian officers from repeating his fate. I also verified parts of his story with two service members from his base. Look, basically everyone involved is a murderer in one way or another, Ivan said. I realize that each of us, each Russian, is involved in this. Every one of us participated. We have allowed this old man to be in power for so many years. And there's also this anger that I had to quit. My contract was almost over. It was officially the end of the contract. I should have been a civilian by now, and all my plans, my whole life, was ruined by this old grandfather, Vladimir Vladimirovich. What right does he have to control my life? When he looked back on it, all Ivan couldn't believe that there were still people in Russia who knew full well what was going on, what their future could hold, and yet stayed. Not because they supported the war, but because they genuinely continued to believe that it wouldn't affect them. For so many years, Putin had offered them all protection, and now they just wanted to keep their heads down, a stupor of an existence, a voice. This learned indifference to the obvious, to the grinding of the bones of their own. Ivan's parents, for whom Putin remained sacred, his friends outside the services who just wanted to live their lives without being bothered by anything else, offervant patriots, criminals, and regime opponents alike perished at the front. What remains of the country's opposition is now in exile where they have been joined by those who awakened from this torpor. Over and over again for generations, Russia's greatest strength has been its habit of destroying itself, and the regime endures. Anna and Ivan grew up under the reign of Vladimir Vladimirovich. They had never participated in a real election, and were thought much about what the Kremlin did or didn't do overseas. Their parents' generation had sleepwalked into autocracy, to exhausted to protest. They focused on trying to stay alive amid the turbulence of changes no one prepared them for. Unlike them, Anna and Ivan came of age in an era of booming oil prices and optimism. They had big plans for their small life. The Russian army offered a path to socioeconomic stability. There was no shame in serving the homeland. They worked hard to buy an apartment, to improve their circumstances, to have a child, but their dreams would be destroyed by much larger geopolitical machinations. They would, like many of their compatriots, practice a kind of self-mutilating patience that cost them everything they cherished most. Now they lived in the twilight of perpetual anxiety, a paranoia that was impossible to fully shake. Small, ordinary milestones became minefields. The first time Sasha got bullied, a classmate said Russians were all evil, and Sasha came home crying. Anna tried to explain that her child, who loved kittens and made it a point to hug the principal every day, had no responsibility for this war. But Sasha brought up Ivan's military uniform. What of the last two years did their child remember? How much would they tell Sasha one day? For how many generations should guilt travel? This was never a story about heroes or bravery, a valiant victor or a helpless victim. From the beginning, Ivan wanted me to make that clear. It is a story about the dangers of an act of independence after a life of conformity. And about how defection from Putin's system is a sentence without end. The Desserter is a production of The New York Times, written by Sarah A. Topol, and narrated by Liev Schreiber. The original music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. Our audio producer was Tanya Perez, and our engineers were Paul Panias and Sophia Lambin. Additional audio production by Adrienne Hurst and Jack DeSidoro. Special thanks at The New York Times Magazine, to Gail Bickler, Renan Borrelli, Ben Grand Jeanette, Marc Geno, Snigda Quirola, Kaitlyn Roper, Kate LaRue, Jake Silverstein, and Shannon Simon. And at New York Times audio, to Tyler Cabot, Kelly Doe, Sam Dolnick, Nina Lassam, Maddie Massiello, Jeffrey Miranda, and John Wu. [ Silence ] [BLANK_AUDIO]
