Part 2. A Change of Plans On February 24, news broke that Russia invaded Ukraine. Though everyone said they couldn't believe it, almost 200,000 Russian service members had been stationed at the border with Ukraine for weeks. The troops had been told it was just an exercise, but for some reason they had been handed weapons, medical kits, and gear. Around 4 a.m. local time, they began to roll across the border. The US government estimated that Ukraine would be overrun within days. When Ivan lined up in formation for assembly, the news was everywhere, but the commander made the announcement anyway. We have launched an operation to de-notsify and de-militarize Ukraine. On base, the reaction was muted. Things continued as if nothing had changed. The same morning, afternoon, and evening formations, the same unit commander meetings at headquarters with the colonel, the same photo report minutiae paperwork BS routine. Perhaps it will all be over in three days anyway, just like Crimea, they told one another. But very quickly it was clear that things weren't going the Kremlin's way. The second strongest military in the world was failing to capture and hold territory. Russian troops were stole on highways, unable to occupy major cities and losing equipment to Ukrainian farmers on tractors. Anna joined a wave of liberal Russians expressing outrage at the invasion on social media. A few hours after she posted a story on Instagram, her supervisor called her and demanded that she take it down. Did she want to get her entire office in trouble? Did Anna not care about her own family at all? She agreed to remove it. They had been living in Putin's Russia for more than two decades now. They knew that their opinions didn't really matter, nor could they say them allowed even if they had them. Mass political gatherings of any kind had been effectively banned for almost a decade. By 2022, solo pickets were the only allowed form of political expression. In major cities, thousands of people took to the streets anyway. Many were picked up in police wagons and given 15 days of administrative arrest. In the first two weeks after the invasion, more than 13,000 protesters across the country were detained. Still, many Russians did what they do best. They tried not to pay attention. In Ivan and Anna's small town, life went on as usual. Most everyone was employed by the government in one way or another. No one was interested in losing a job to hold a piece of paper in the air. If before the war, everyone used to say, "Yeah, we have a lot of problems, at least there is no war." Now they began to say, "Well, at least the war doesn't touch us. We live as we live. We have our own problems here." Across Russian bases and mess halls and offices, during the 24-hour shifts at duty stations, bored and chatting to fill the time, everyone seemed to just assume that because this war was happening, then this war was how it should be. They should just continue to practice their patience, that moral apathy they had been honing. Their TVs told them that things were going well anyway. Those who followed the news on Telegram might talk about it with those they trusted. Did you see that the 90th Guards Tank Division had been ambushed on the outskirts of Kiev? Or that tanks were stalled on highways because they didn't have enough fuel? But no one talked explicitly about why. A person could not say that they were against what was happening. At most, they might wonder aloud, "Why do we need this war?" "Well, we have enemies in the West." But couldn't this have been handled more intelligently? Couldn't the Crimea scenario have been followed? Couldn't we have supported pro-Russian forces in Ukraine or Doneku? Maybe there's no other way. Many probably did not have a strong opinion. Collectively, Russians didn't seem to know what to think. The independent Lovada Center found that while 81% told pollsters they supported the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine, 51% felt pride for Russia, and 31% felt anxiety, fear, horror. 36% believed that the rest of the world condemned Russia for the conflict because those countries obey the United States and NATO, while 27% said it was because the world has always been against Russia. The West responded with sweeping sanctions. The ruble cratered. But if the move was intended to get the Russian people to rise up against Putin's regime, it failed. Of course, there were some radical patriots who truly supported the invasion. But there were also careerists. And even if they had a negative attitude toward the war, there were plenty who thought, "Yeah, it's bad, but it's ours." Or, "Well, since my army is fighting, I can't betray it." The thing about men in the military is that they are military men. They believed the propaganda that Kiev was overrun with neo-Nazis, or that NATO was poised to invade Russia, or they just wanted to see combat. But anyone who expressed surprise at Russia's initially dismal performance had obviously never set foot on a base. All those photo reports taken at clever angles, showing full shelves at empty warehouses. A decade of Shoigu's appearance over reality theatrics had left Russia's soldiers poorly trained and equipped. The reforms half-completed and never fully rooted in military culture. It was much easier to walk in unopposed in Crimea, send in soldiers without insignia to support separatists in Donbas, or dominate rebel militias in Syria through air superiority. Moreover, it didn't seem that Russia's armed forces actually understood what they were doing in Ukraine. Their commanding officers had not been given instructions or battle plans in advance. Rather than following traditional Russian military doctrine, the invasion looked like a botched operation based on faulty intelligence, arranged by a few civilians in the Kremlin who had never served a day in their lives. It didn't even follow the basic tactical theory that Ivan learned as a cadet. To go on the offensive, you needed to outnumber your opponent three to one. The Kremlin's reaction to failure was swift. In early March, the rubber stamp parliament fast-tracked two laws imposing a jail term of up to 15 years for spreading fake news about the armed forces or discrediting its actions. Two weeks later, it amended the laws to effectively ban criticism of all Russian government actions abroad, calling what was happening in Ukraine a war or an invasion was quickly made illegal. Instead, it would be called a special military operation, SVO, the few bastions of independent media that held out through the last two decades were banned or closed one by one. Most of the foreign press quickly fled the country. By April, the authorities had detained 15,000 protesters. Russian courts had already made a practice of charging people retroactively under other laws for extremism, for engaging with undesirable organizations like those promoting human rights and personal liberties, and for social media posts made before those organizations were recognized as undesirable. Many started deleting their social media profiles completely. Others like Anna just censored themselves. Some horrified liberals left the country. It was only a matter of time before the authorities would start sending those caught protesting to the front lines. At Ivan's morning formation, commanders began asking for volunteers to go to the SVO. The first group of roughly 30 soldiers from his base shipped out in April. At the beginning, the men stepped forward quietly on their own. No one forced them to do it. So everyone on the base was surprised when two of them returned not too long after deployment. Ivan sought them out. It's completely savage, they explained. A total bachanalia. Chaos. We are never going back there. Eluding the drinking, the utter lack of military discipline. Insanity. Their platoon leader had simply vanished. The rest of the troops seemed to disappear too. "I'm walking alone," one of them told Ivan. "I don't know what to do. I see some dry rations lying there so I took it and ate it. I thought, 'What the fuck do I need all this for?' Picked up, packed up, and left. The man left his machine gun in Ukraine and owed a large fine for losing it. 'I don't care about the fine,' he told Ivan. 'I'll pay it. Just fire me faster.' A few men became a horde. Soldiers stampededing their way back to base. Men who had been scattered along different parts of the front line ended up running into one another at the airport in Moscow. They had fled on their own dime, unauthorized. 'Oh, you're alone, too. Yeah, I'm not fucking going back there.' Soldiers were just walking off the battlefield and returning to their bases. Across Russia, entire units refused to fight. In late March, three hundred servicemen from a unit from Boonuksk, Dagestan, laid down their arms and left Ukraine. By April, five hundred national guardsmen had been dismissed for leaving Ukraine after just four days. That month, it became public that eleven members of Oman, a dreaded unit of riot police officers, had refused to deploy. In July, 150 contract soldiers from the Fifth Separate Guards Tank Brigade were dismissed after refusing to cross the border into Ukraine. At the time, a soldier could be AWOL for over a week without prompting a criminal investigation, so the early refusnics didn't face immediate imprisonment for leaving the front. But they could be fired, and for many soldiers, the threat of termination was determined enough. These men were often their family's only breadwinner. They would be giving up their entire life's accomplishments, their right to free healthcare, childcare, apartments, extra veterans' payments, to step into the abyss and poverty of civilian life with no training in anything, other than posing for photo reports ripping up dandelions. But even those who actually wanted to be fired didn't necessarily get their wish. Depending on a man's supervisor, it wasn't always easy to terminate a contract, especially as rank increased. There was a ton of paperwork and headaches for everyone, especially the higher-ups. So there were men who drank a bottle of vodka, went to the police officers, and did something stupid in front of them, so that they would be taken to the medical department where they would refuse a medical examination. According to a provision in the military regulations, this would trigger an early discharge. Refusal of a mandatory medical examination is akin to the use of banned substances in Russia. A soldier could lose his driver's license and be forced to attend a drug treatment center. But if this allowed him to get out, it was not too high a price to pay. Not everybody was ready to go to such extremes. There were those who thought, "Yes, it's bad, and I do not want to participate in it, but I've got a bit of time left until retirement, so I'll try to sit through it, and maybe no one will notice me, and I'll just stay here on my base." Those people would have loved to quit, but on their terms, with all the pay, benefits, and so on, sure the army they served in might be killing people, but they weren't the ones doing it, just cogs in the larger mechanism. The existential question repeated, "Who should be held accountable for the will of one man?" Russians had been honing their skill of tolerance, that patient waiting without truly expecting anything to change. The thing is, they weren't asking for anything more than what they had worked hard for all those years. This would describe an overwhelming majority of Russian service members, and it included Ivan, who believed he could continue to follow his plan. They wanted to stay in a military that was fighting a war, collect their paychecks, get their retirement benefits, and leave without ever stepping foot on the front line. The phrase, "To have your cake and eat it, too," in Russian slang is, "To eat the fish and sit on the dick." Evidence that this hope was misplaced was mounting. After the first few months of the invasion, volunteers began to dry up, and the authorities began an enlistment drive. Plackers went up around the provinces, heralding heroes of the S.V.O., calling men to join as private mercenaries or enlisted contracting. Recruiters offered huge sign-up bonuses and promises of coffin money. The Ministry of Defense would ultimately produce sleek television ads that exhorted taxi drivers, personal trainers and security guards, to man up, showing footage of their boring lives and asking them, "Is this the path you really want to choose?" Each man then morphed into a kitted-out soldier moving through fog. The video explained that the monthly payment started at $2,000, roughly triple the nation's average income. Another ad promised, "Land tax exemptions, compensation for household utility bills, and sanitarium vouchers." The Ministry placed ads in subway stations at bus stops and in store windows. Anna saw them so often she had memorized them. Strategically, the Kremlin could have started a mobilization right away to build up a reserve force, but it instead made the political choice to get by with the troops it had, hoping the war would not disturb too much for too many. It tried to entice more people into service. The Russian regime passed a law that allowed people over 40 to serve in the armed forces. Even though a man couldn't call it a war out loud, the authorities promised that all combatants in the special military operation would be considered veterans under Russian law, entitled to a host of lucrative long-term benefits. Recruiters promised cash bonuses for heroic deeds, like a knocked-out tank, plain, armored personnel carrier and so on, so on, so on. Conscripts who Putin had vowed would never be sent to the front lines were being cajoled by their platoon leaders to sign contracts so they could be sent out. "We're all a team," they were told. "We have to go defend the motherland. The money was good if you were lucky. If a soldier was three hundred, Russian military slang for injured, even slightly wounded, it meant three million rubles—roughly thirty-three thousand dollars." After a few months, there were fewer and fewer troops at Ivan's formation. Some entire outfits were gone. Unit leaders were asked to make their own lists of men to send out. The base needed to send fifty men, twenty men, five men, or twenty again. At HQ meetings at 5.30 p.m., even Ivan's commander was angry. "Why am I always being asked to send people to the SVO?" The chief of staff told his subordinates to prepare a document saying that each of them could not possibly send more people as it would disrupt the operation of the base. Every time anyone so much as hinted at Ivan going, he refused. Only when a name appeared on a combat order was a soldier obliged to go to the front. Ivan was able to make excuses for most of his subordinates. This one had to attend one thing or another. This one has a back problem. This one has a heart problem. This one has a family emergency. People could still go to the local medical commission to get certificates saying that they were unfit to go to the front. Some people dodged for months that way. When commanding officers were asked to make lists, they often took only the names of their men who would go voluntarily and turn those in. Other bases weren't as tolerant. There were men who were called to formation at 7 a.m. and asked to volunteer. And those who refused were forced to stand at assembly for more than fifteen hours. The military police were called and men were handcuffed, forced into buses taken to the airport and flown to Belgorod. There they were told that they were going to war with no belongings, no equipment, nothing. They stayed there for another 24 hours and then they made their own way back to base. By August, U.S. intelligence estimated that Russia had lost up to 80,000 servicemen in Ukraine. Nearly 500 casualties per day. Pressure was building. Generals asked the colonels who asked their subordinates for lists upon lists to throw at the front. Russia's military strategy was unchanged from Soviet times. The appetite from the top for bodies was insatiable. Russian military slang for killed in action is 200. Many of the two hundreds were platoon leaders, younger officers, lieutenants, senior lieutenants and captains leading ill-prepared troops on the offensive. If a platoon commander lasts even three weeks at the front, that's happiness, soldiers said. Rumors spread quickly across group chats from officer school. Brutal careerists sitting fat in the back basements sent young officers to die without a second thought, without intelligence, without provisions. They were being given incorrect information. Their commanding officers were making basic tactical mistakes for no reason. An order has come from above. You have to fulfill the order. You have to. Pagnatna. That's it. What kind of losses would result? Irrelevant. Cruelty had long been part of the Russian military experience. Since the time of the Soviet Army, there had been no professional non-commissioned officer corps to manage millions of conscripts. Others used violence to enforce discipline, including a hazing system known as Jadofsina, in which second-year conscripts, jets, or grandfathers, brutalized first years as part of the method of control. A 1994 Russian Academy of Sciences report found that a man entering the army had an 80% chance of being beaten, 30% in a particularly savage or humiliating form and a 5% chance of being raped. Though the service time had been shortened and the first and second-year distinction eliminated, this war resurrected the worst instincts of Russian military culture. The violence was cyclical. The younger officers who had been abused by their superiors in Russia's earlier wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya were now the generals. Reforms proved to mean very little to wartime command. The savagery of Jadofsina quickly returned. It soon got back to Ivan's base that commanders weren't showing much remorse over the deaths of so many of their subordinates in Ukraine. One time the men overheard their commander on the radio saying, "Now, I will send you my meat further towards your position." This guy was calling his own subordinates "meat." They threw a grenade in his hideout to kill him. It didn't work. The guy had always been a bastard, so Ivan had no reason to doubt the rumors. Another commander earned the nickname "The Butcher" because of how many men he had lost. Once the butcher was sitting in his basement playing some kind of racing game on his phone when a platoon commander, who had just been on the attack, came in and told him, "Here, comrade Colonel at the attack, there are this many three hundreds, this many two hundreds." The butcher continued playing as he listened. Then he sat straight up and shouted, "Duty guard, order me a pizza," and returned to his game. On August 1st, their base commander, Colonel S, asked Ivan and his platoon to line up in front of the podium during flag-raising. In front of the entire assembly, he informed them that they were being sent to the SVO as infantry. They had been expecting something like this. The whole platoon refused on the spot. They demanded to see a combat order that officially listed their names. "Do you want to be terminated?" S asked them. "Since you refuse, write me a report of your refusal." Ivan believed that S was bluffing, that there was no combat order with their names, but if they wrote a statement of refusal, it would be the pretext to terminate their contracts. Many of his men did it anyway. They were young. They didn't have anything to lose but their lives. But Ivan had worked too hard for too long. He had completed nearly twenty years of service more if you counted all his overtime. He was ready to start his new life. He was enrolled in retraining, taking coding classes online, trying to set up a Bitcoin mining business on the side. Everything was within his reach if he stuck to the plan. Ivan consulted with a lawyer who told him that the army could fire him only for refusing orders. So in his refusal report, he wrote that he hadn't actually refused. Instead, he had misunderstood the task his commander had set out. He was not refusing to go to the SVO outright. He would go, but in his current position, which would keep him far from the grinding front line. He cited his failing health. For years, Ivan had a herniated disk. He wanted to be medically excused. Since his experience with Pig, Ivan had been collecting documents, so he already had everything to prove that he had medical problems and was owed more than three hundred days of overtime. He took the paperwork to the Human Resources Office and submitted a statement requesting his time off. Ivan wanted to show that he was problematic. If the army wanted to fire him, fine, but he would not go down without a fight. If it was more work for the army to terminate him than it was to let him continue serving, maybe it would leave him alone. Perhaps he could draw this out for the few weeks that remained until he left for retraining. But when Ivan called the retraining center, he was told that his enrollment had been canceled. He couldn't believe it. He had the confirmation paper in hand stamped, signed by the retraining center, signed by his supervisor, and signed again by the base commander. How could the center just cancel his admission? Was that even possible? He could only guess that the colonel's office had contacted the center, called him a bastard for refusing to serve, and that was it. "Can they really deny me retraining?" he asked the head of the program. "Kind of," came the reply. Russia's legal system uses the trappings of a rules-based order as window-dressing for an authoritarian state. If you follow the complicated minutia of the law to the letter, sometimes you can stand your ground and win. That gives people hope to keep trying, but other times the regime changes the rules in the middle without warning. It was as if you were playing chess with an abusive opponent. Sometimes you could pull a queen's gambit. Sometimes your opponent just smashed you in the face with the board. Ivan decided he would fight back. He would sue Colonel S for denying him his rightful retraining if he tried to fire him. "Where is the refusal report?" S confronted Ivan at the parade grounds another morning. "I'm going to sue you, Commander, sir," Ivan replied. As walked up to him, bent down to his ear. "Fuck you," he whispered before straightening up. "That's it. Get out of here. Don't show up at the base again." Ivan was suspended. His lawyer advised him to continue attending the morning formation so no one could accuse him of being AWOL. They would fight his dismissal in court as wrongful termination. Ivan never technically refused any official order. If he were fired, he would be left with nothing. Ivan would show up to the base for roll call and go home for the rest of the day waiting for his termination. Ivan and Anna discussed it and tried to put a positive spin on things. It could be a lot worse. After he was fired, they would start their lives again, even with nothing. Across Russia, other officers were refusing to go to the front. A far more dangerous trend for the war effort than the refusal of an average contractnik. Officers who refused couldn't be discharged. They were too valuable. The state had paid for them to be trained for this. Instead, all manner of pressure was applied to ship them out. They were mocked mercilessly in front of assemblies, marched around to the base's political affairs office for conversations, sent from there to different cabinets of commanders for more conversations. Everywhere, it was as if they were reading from the same playbook. What are you? A traitor? Abandoning your own subordinates? You're not a man. Pull yourself together, coward. Then threats. We'll put you in jail. We'll find a reason to put you away. We'll turn you into the prosecutor's office. Then harm. We will take you out, handcuff you to a radiator, and shoot. The risks of refusing orders once a man arrived behind the ribbon, as the front was called, were even greater. They had all heard rumors about the pits. The basements where officers were held against their will for refusing to fight. There was also a bulletin board, which soldiers took to calling the wall of shame, at the center of Ivan's base, displaying the portraits of these men. Everyone knew that the Russian military had no squeamishness about extrajudicial reprisals. Throw a man in a ditch and shoot him, and tell his relatives he deserted. His rumors of Ivan's refusal to be sent to the front spread through their small town, people in the street butted into Anna's life. Your husband came up with the idea of not participating or something, they clucked. Soon the head of Anna's department again called her into her office. What do you mean your husband doesn't want to? We must defend our country. He's in the military. That's his job. Anna wanted to shout at them that it was Ivan's job to protect his country, to defend the homeland. If something happened on their territory, she was sure Ivan would be the first to volunteer. But forcing a man to kill for no reason, and was a big difference. She didn't dare say any of that aloud. "Yes," I understand, she would reply. "We've made that decision. That's it." She tried to speak neutrally, to stay detached without stirring up unnecessary conversations. She felt she had no other tools, only that she could deaden her bright eyes on command. Anna and Ivan were part of the state machine. If she wanted to survive, she could not start any fights, but she could not rhetorically cave either. This small shred of dignity was all that remained. On September 21, Putin appeared on their televisions and announced a partial mobilization. There had been rumors for weeks. The front was hemorrhaging men. I will repeat, we are talking specifically about partial mobilization, Putin decreed, trying to preempt the panic that followed. The priority will be those who have served in the ranks of the armed forces and have certain military specialties and relevant experience. Before being sent to the place of service, those who are drafted will undergo mandatory additional military training based on the experience of a special military operation. What Putin had not announced, but was written clearly on the Defense Ministry's website, was that the mobilization included a stop-loss measure, in which personnel remained on active duty involuntarily until the end of wartime conditions. Military strategists weren't sure what took the Kremlin so long. With very few exceptions, no man could be terminated. No contracts would be broken. Ivan had no idea if his commanding officer had submitted his termination documents in time. Would his punishment be his salvation? Anna was at a girlfriend's house when Ivan called her. "Did you hear the news?" Mobilization, she asked, though she already knew. "Yes," he replied. She understood everything. She hung up. "He's announced a mobilization," she told her friend. "I'm off." Anna got up, went outside, and realized she was floating. A kind of shock where she couldn't feel anything happening around her. A man walked toward her. "You understand that mobilization is happening," she told him. "What?" he asked. "You understand mobilization is happening," she shouted. She needed to get through to him, to someone, even this stranger. She needed him to know that he should run. Previously, there were plenty of ways to skip mandatory national military service. A man could rack up deferments until he was over 27. If he went to trade school, if he went to college, if he entered a graduate program, if he was in college, he could sign up for the military department and graduate as a lieutenant in the reserves without ever serving a day. Defense Minister Shoygu did this. He could get a health exemption, sometimes real, sometimes not so real. There had been no meaningful penalty for non-compliance with a draft notice, a fine of $50 for ignoring it. But the mobilization threw all that into disarray. If the war's toll had been confined largely to military families who were mostly from the poorer interior of the country, now the regime was coming for the sons of the middle class. On the day of the announcement, 1,300 people were arrested for protesting, risking jail terms of up to 15 years. But most showed their opposition by fleeing for their lives. Plane, train, and bus tickets out of Russia were selling out quickly at astronomical sums. Everyone worried that the borders were closing. The land crossings to Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Finland swelled with carfuls of men. They waited for days. There were rumors, arguments, stabbing, stampedes. When people died in line, ambulances couldn't make it through the crush to pick up the bodies. Telegram groups monitored the situation, advising which roads were blocked and which checkpoints had the shortest lines. The Georgian authorities closed one of the pedestrian crossings. Only people on wheels would be allowed in. Men traded belongings for bicycles and scooters and dumped them after reaching the other side, a mangled monument to their leaders' ambitions. Hotels and hostels in border towns were so full that people camped out on the floors of movie theaters, mosques, and railway stations. In the first week after the partial mobilization, an estimated 200,000 people left Russia. But the population of Russia is 146 million, as many as 25 million of whom were draftable, including retired senior officers up to age 65. There were still plenty of bodies to choose from, people without the means to flee, or those without a good understanding of their rights. The state called up 300,000 reservists at first, but the total permitted number of mobilized was classified. The opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta said it could number up to one million. The country's bureaucracy was not ready to handle such a Herculean undertaking. Officials did not have a strong reserve force. Just lists of men who had done their national service and what their specializations were, which most hadn't maintained or refreshed for years or decades. It was clear that the authorities were targeting poorer regions. Quotas were levied on districts which simplified the task. But it also incentivized the local authorities to speed up their results. Instead of serving specific people with summonses, they started rounding up men on mass. They pressured them to go to the front and demanded that they turn over their documents in order to process them as draftees. In those circumstances, the men hadn't technically been served as summons and could leave. But no one told them that. Others were served draft notices at their places of employment by secretaries, some of whom were themselves on the verge of tears. People received papers at their homes, at their parents' homes. Doctors were drafted. Sometimes the only medical provider in town was ordered to the front. Women too, surgeons, gynecologists, dentists, all sent to Ukraine. By mid-October, 2,457 protesters had been arrested. Many of the men who were detained were given military summonses. 1,747 administrative cases were opened, and 58 people faced criminal charges, 10 of whom posted their protest online. 36 military recruitment offices and other government buildings were set on fire. Penance for decades of national silence was beginning. Due to flee, the avalanche reported to local enlistment offices with their summonses. But those offices were also at a loss. Reservists needed to be served, processed, medically checked, switched to active status, sent to training, outfitted, housed, and fed. But there didn't seem to be a plan in place to do any of that. The draftees arrived with their friends, their wives, their girlfriends, their children, their mothers. Everyone was stressed and in shock. Where are they going? With whom? What should they bring? Do they really have to go? They had dependence, debts, health problems. People were arguing, shouting, demanding. Many were already drunk. It was obvious that the officials had no idea how to answer their questions. In Dagestan, protesters blocked a highway and besieged military personnel at the local draft office. In the Saka Republic, one military commissar was punched in the face. The men were corralled from enlistment offices into training facilities that were ill-prepared to receive them. There were no medical checks, or only perfunctory ones, not enough first aid equipment, zero or limited training, not even properly demarcated areas for sleeping. Families hurried to buy the men's supplies. Camping store shelves emptied out. The mobilized gathered money from friends and family to equip themselves with basic boots, jackets, and yoga mats to sleep on. From the outside, it was easy to see the assembled men as a faceless, zombified Russian mass lining up to board helicopters and transport planes to their own deaths. But of course, it was never that simple. Many of these civilians, drivers, toddlers, plumbers, security guards, computer programmers, miners, never wanted to end up in Ukraine. They barely had any opinion on politics. They did not know or even believe they had rights. Once their summons came, they did not think they had a choice. It was a command issued by their government. "I'm an honest person," an actor who was mobilized in the first days told me. "I've never once in my life had any police record. Nothing, not even any finds ever. If someone gives me a paper and an order from the government, I couldn't imagine I would just break the law." When I asked another man, an municipal office worker, why he hadn't run when he was served his summons, he was dumbfounded by my question. How would I have expected that idea to even occur to him? I worked four jobs just to survive, he told me. I had never left my town. I couldn't even afford to travel to Moscow two hours away. Where would I have gone? And how? The day after the mobilization was announced, Colonel Esch called Ivan back into the tactical room where they held command meetings. All the deputies, the commanders, and the leadership of the base were in attendance, sitting at their desks. Ivan took a seat at the first table. They handed him a piece of paper. "Familiarize yourself, comrade Captain," he was told. "Your name is on the combat order." Though he saw his name and that he was clearly ordered to leave for the area of the Special Military Operation, Ivan read every single word on that paper. Everyone had to sit and wait for him. He was in no hurry. "Do you refuse?" "No, I'm not refusing," he left to tell his wife. Anna was already there when Ivan arrived at home. "I'm going to be sent away," he told her. And that said, "No, they won't send you," she said. "Right, I don't know what, right? That you refuse, right? Anything, everything. You can't go." Anna started looking for help on telegram channels, writing to every human rights organization she could think of, searching for keywords like "defector," "refugee." She wanted to get Ivan out of Russia, but his passport, like those of other officers, was kept in a safe at the military base. Anna knew it was probably hopeless, but she needed to do something. The internet was a light with promises. Anyone who hates Putin's path and loves liberal democracy is welcome in Germany. Germany's Justice Minister Marco Bushman tweeted on the day the mobilization was announced. Nancy Phaser, the German Interior Minister, echoed his vow. "Desertors threatened with serious repression can as a rule obtain international protection in Germany," she told a German newspaper the next day. Anyone who courageously opposes Putin's regime and thereby falls into great danger can file for asylum on grounds of political persecution. American officials made similar pronouncements. Perhaps politicians had forgotten how many people actually take them at their word. Anna emailed organizations in Germany and France, Russian NGOs, bots or humans, she had no idea. No one answered. She had always been their dreamer. While Ivan was practical and goal-oriented to the point of pigheadedness, he didn't think running away was realistic. He didn't have his passport. Where could he hide? If the authorities wanted to, they would find him anywhere. An officer in war was a valuable commodity. Ivan believed he had two choices. Go to jail for refusing combat orders or go to the front. If he ended up in jail, they would send him to the front anyway. At first, they would befriend him with a mop and then send him as a zek, stormtrooper, the convicts who were being rushed to the front line. It had happened to the uncle of a friend of his. Ivan resigned himself to going to Ukraine. "Let's figure out a code to communicate," Ivan told Anna. He assumed that contact would be difficult. Everything could be intercepted so there would be no cell phones, no texting or calling or talking. He remembered some codes from his training. "If I say 103, it means it's okay," he explained. "If I say 102, that means I'm going on a combat mission so there's a chance I'll be out of touch for a long time. There's a chance I might not get in touch at all. 102 is downright serious. And 105 is I love you." Anna dutifully wrote the numbers in her notebook through tears. Ivan wasn't sure exactly when he was leaving. The military transport aircraft were notoriously unreliable. He would go to work, go to formation, go home, go back, go to formation and wait. A few days later, he got home and told Anna he had been informed that they would go the next morning. "We have one night left," he said. Anna did not want to believe it. "Please, can we stay up all night?" she begged. "Let's have tea, like always. Just be close to each other. Let's not go to sleep, please." Anna gave him a little icon and a cloth prayer to keep in his flat jacket. "When you're really scared," she told him, "Imagine you're in a dome. I'm protecting you. Just imagine my love protecting you from everything." They stayed up all night, just looking at each other. "Anna," Ivan whispered, "The hardest thing is that I don't know how I will kill people like us, who have the same Sasha. Why would I have to do that? I won't be able to. Please, I want you to live. Please," she told him. "Please, just survive." [Music] You
