For this article, Sarah Atopel spent more than a year investigating the Russian military, including interviewing the principal characters, as well as many other Russian military deserters, both online and in person. Because of the continuing security risks faced by Russian deserters, Ivan and Anna are pseudonyms. This reporting was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. [Music] The deserter, Part 1, the Ballad of Ivan and Anna. September 22, 2022, subject, I need help. Hello, my name is... My husband is a member of the Russian Army. He several times refused to participate in the Special Operation. He should have been fired, but he has not been fired so far. We are against war. We hate this mode in our country. Please help us save his life. He has a foreign passport, but he cannot take it. Please, I beg you, help. Today or tomorrow he must be sent to war. My number is plus seven. Thank you. Forgive me for writing this letter so chaotically, but I am crying and feeling absolutely hopeless. An email to a German refugee organization on the day the German Interior Minister announced that the country was ready to accept asylum requests from deserters from the armed forces of the Russian Federation. On the night Ivan met Anna, he was so drunk that he could barely remember her face the next morning, only that she had the most beautiful eyes. After that day, Ivan had been promoted to senior lieutenant. Over a dinner banquet, officers from his unit watched as Ivan washed down, a Soviet era ritual that continues to this day. They filled a glass with four shots of vodka until it was almost overflowing and threw Ivan's newly acquired six epilate stars in. Following custom, Ivan stood up and addressed the assembled. Comrade officers, warrant officers, sergeants, he began. He paused, down the vodka and flipped the cup onto the table, scattering the stars. I, senior lieutenant, present myself on the occasion of awarding me the regular military rank of senior lieutenant. Once the newly minted officer had said everything clearly, smoothly, without a hitch, the commander of Ivan's unit continued. Comrade officers, warrant officers, sergeants, do we accept? We accept, they called in unison. They put three stars on each of Ivan's shoulders, doused them with vodka and pounded on them hard so that the pins on the bottom dug into his skin. If Ivan had messed up, he would have had to drink another four shots and try again. Afterward, they headed to a club. In the crowd, under the dim, smoke-addled light, he saw Anna. She was hypnotic. Anna noticed him, too. Without exchanging words, they started dancing. The crowds parted, forming a circle around them. Ivan danced for hours like he had never danced before. Later, he would call her Andromeda, like the goddess and the galaxy. Shortly later, it eclipsed all the stars. At the end of the night, or more like early morning, Ivan gave her his phone and told her to put in her number. Anna obliged, but when she looked up, he was gone. She stood there, holding his phone for what felt like an eternity. Another guy came up and started chatting to her. Buddy, you're too late, Ivan proclaimed from behind them. She peered over and saw him covered in sweat, holding a huge bouquet of lilies. It sprinted to a 24-hour flower shop nearby. Anna was in town from St. Petersburg as the maid of honor at a wedding. At the ceremony earlier that day, she caught the bouquet. By the end of the week, Anna would be returning to her university hundreds of miles away. Ivan would leave for a month-long assignment around the islands of the Pacific, a routine expedition to observe an eavesdrop on U.S. Allied training there. Both would agree it had been fate. The Russian ship was a simple surveillance vessel with radio equipment that looked as if it was from before Ivan's grandfather was born. Ivan had just bought his first camera, and for a month he took photos of the clouds, low and heavy over the waves. He imagined all the things he would tell Anna when he next got the chance. How when you first go out on a ship you have to participate in a ceremony befriending Neptune, in which the new sailors nearly naked drink seawater out of a glass and get rubbed with ash. How they fished for squid dove right off the ship into the warm waters, a few guys standing watch with machine guns in case of sharks, while the sun sets streaked the sky with cotton candy, pink and crimson red. Ivan spent hours on the deck looking for a cell phone signal. When he found one, he ordered Anna flowers, sent her sushi rolls through friends and plotted a trip to St. Petersburg to surprise her. For her part Anna sleepwalked through her classes, rereading all his texts. She marveled at his descriptions of the Philippine sea, the color of the water. She was sure she had never seen a shade as blue as what he described. One day not far from port, Ivan's boat passed 50 meters from an American aircraft carrier that looked straight out of Hollywood. Most of the soldiers had never seen a ship so big. The carriers hatches were open, interior compartments visible with aeroplanes and all kinds of equipment inside. The Russians in flip flops and swim trunks or underwear ran out to sea. The Americans stood on the deck in blue uniforms with white helmets and gloves. Their ship glistening in the sun, everyone waved. Ivan grew up on the outskirts of nowhere in an unremarkable mid-size city near a military base. His family considered themselves patriotic, though they didn't talk much about politics Ivan was taught that he lived in a righteous country. Nearly every Soviet family had lost a man to the front in World War II in what Russians called the Great Patriotic War, and both Ivan and Anna grew up on stories of sacrifice. Ivan's father served as had his father before him. As a child of the Peristroika experiment, Ivan watched Russia sink into a decade of banditry, political tussles and get rich quick schemes. While he and his friends played with little green soldiers in the courtyard, their parents struggled with the basics, electricity, food, water, heat. Ivan's mother and father didn't make much, but they could count on housing in a small government-backed paycheck, though after the Russian Federation was established in 1991, often even that didn't come. Every month, the family drove two hours to a larger city with a wholesale market, walking through piles of plush toys, clothes, kitchen supplies and everything in between. Ivan, like everyone else, stood on a piece of cardboard while the vendor held a curtain around him as he tried on clothes. Whether it was very cold or snowing or raining, Ivan would remove his pants and stand in his underwear, too poor to try on clothes and warm-changing rooms at shops. This phrase, "dressed on cardboard," is still used to describe a generation of Russians who lived through the poverty of the '90s. Ivan was in secondary school when Vladimir Putin rose to power at the turn of the century and began to establish his system of control, promoting from his inner circle while crushing oligarchs and cracking down on newly gained freedoms. Still, in this new Russia money was everything. Though Ivan's family had stability, they had nothing on his girlfriend's parents. When he opened their refrigerator, there was so much juice, J7, a kind with pulp that his parents never bought. Her father was a businessman, and though Ivan wasn't sure what exactly that entailed, he wanted to be one too. The year before Ivan graduated from secondary school, he spent a week with a family friend's son, who spun him a tail of adventure in the special forces, where young men went on training missions for days with just their bare hands to sustain them, living in the wild with a compass and a set of instructions. In wartime, they would sneak behind enemy lines to help lead the rest of the troops to victory safely, protecting their own in defense of their homeland. Ivan had always been a sucker for romance. For a world where the villains and the heroes were clear, there were rules in the military games Ivan played as a child. Under no circumstances could anyone attack a hospital, and that's the kind of world Ivan liked, where things were black and white, and every problem had a solution. Ivan got into one of the most competitive Russian military academies. It wasn't that he dreamed of going to war, he just thought it wouldn't happen. Becoming an officer was a fine path for a kid from nowhere, a degree, free healthcare, a pension, and a guaranteed apartment upon retirement, not that Ivan was thinking that far ahead. He was spellbound by the promise of adventure. At the Academy, cadets lived in barracks with metal bunk beds in neat rows. In the corner there were mats in a punching bag. The shower was cold water from a hose connected to the tap. Ivan loved it immediately. Angles were perpendicular, beds were made and everything ended with one word, banyatna. Understood? The young men skied in the backcountry, learned terrain navigation, and hand-to-hand combat. Figured out how much TNT would blow a railway and how much would blow a bridge. They studied languages and built up their physical endurance. Upon graduation, Ivan faced the perennial problem of the Russian military. Its bloated officer corps. Ivan was a lieutenant doing reconnaissance duty, a position far from his specialization, the elite unit he trained for. His shifts were 24 hours on, 24 hours off, drafting training and duty schedules that no one looked at and heating up his food in the microwave. He tried to complain to his superiors, the state had paid for his education and then assigned him here. There was no opportunity to do what he trained for, no chance to put what he learned to the test. Worse, no one cared. Ivan couldn't just leave the service. If he were to break his contract, he would have to pay back the state for his education, lose his benefits, and have a mark on his record. It's not as if he knew how to do anything else anyway. When he looked at the civilian sector for job opportunities with his language skills, he saw ads that said military cadet graduates need not apply. Ivan decided to write it out, but the lack of good billets made life boring and difficult. He tried to distract himself, applying to different remote rotations. At least he could try to make life more interesting. After he started dating Anna, Ivan found that he began to think more critically. It wasn't just that she pressed him to be more thoughtful about their relationship. She challenged him to think about a lot of things he had taken for granted before. The contrasts didn't hit him all at once, but more slowly, an accumulation of incongruities that built up over time. Ivan told her about another work trip when he had been sent to the 2,600 mile long border with China. On top of a reconnaissance station, he could see both sides of the boundary clearly. On the Russian side, he saw a dilapidated village, not even a town, just a village, with broken roads and half-trunk passersby. On the other side, Las Vegas, high-rise buildings, neon lights, wind turbines. It looks like the difference between heaven and earth, he thought. At the time, Ivan and his comrades had asked one another, "Why couldn't their country do anything like that?" It's bad, the young men agreed, but like most Russians, they did nothing but remark on it without the expectation that it would change. Apathy is a skill that requires practice over time. Ivan had never considered himself a big talker, but Anna had a lot of things to say. She had been struck by the economic boom that followed the poverty of their childhood. The future and its possibilities had been dazzling. She had done everything she could to get out of her own childhood nowhere and to Saint Petersburg, a city of white knights, deep winters and big dreams. She cared about art, theater, music, literature, international relations, lofty college conversations in big city bars. Before she met Ivan, Anna received a scholarship to go to America on a study abroad program, and she realized that the world was much larger than anything she had been told about in school, that a person is bigger than where she was born or what language she spoke. These limits, boundaries, they don't even exist, she told Ivan when they were falling in love. You make these frames yourself. theirs was a big wedding. Both Anna and Ivan had wanted to keep it small and simple, to do something at a cafe, nothing pompous, but one thing led to another and all their relatives came. Anna carried a large bouquet accented with yellow tulips, her favorite flower. He wore his officer uniform. She wore a white trumpet dress that swayed at her ankles. Her long veil studded with glittering gemstones. Ivan was solemn during their vows, his eyes beaming. Anna cried straight through the whole thing. After they married, Anna left Saint Petersburg and joined Ivan at his base. She'd never spent much time thinking about the military before she met him. Soldiers were just people who wore green uniforms and stood at attention on parade grounds a few times a day. Ivan left in the morning, came home for lunch, left again, and was home for a late dinner. It looked like a regular civilian job, except everyone cursed all the time. Like most Russians, Anna and Ivan saw politics as something dirty, something better avoided. It was best to focus on things you could actually control. And so neither of them had paid much attention to Putin's political maneuvering or his engineering a return to power for a third term despite sweeping protests in 2012. They lived in a tiny studio apartment that they renovated themselves. They had few luxuries, but they were happy. They wrote each other poetry, danced together, sang together, and even wrote a book just for the two of them so they wouldn't forget. They started planning for a baby. When she was young, Anna kept a diary. On page after page, she begged the world to give her true love. She loved Ivan with a kind of mystical force, and she wanted to have a family. She worried that his talents were wasted in the army. He was smart, greedy for life at his core. But the man she had fallen for had chosen this road, so she took it too. Ivan's disappointment with the realities of service were bearable until he got a new commander. His subordinate's nicknamed him "Pig" for his jowls and ruddy cheeks. Pig started pocketing the rations earmarked for field training, which the guys were able to sell if they brought their own food from home. Ivan was owed three days worth after a weekend in the field, so he went to demand them. If they didn't put an end to this now, who knows what would happen? First its rations, Ivan said, "Then it's our wages." His colleagues told him not to bother. Everyone knew Pig had plenty of schemes. The confrontation went nowhere, and instead the commander started singling Ivan out, writing him up for minor infractions that everyone committed, like carrying a cell phone around the base to get him demoted. When Ivan went to the military prosecutor's office to fight his demotion, he was told he would win a case against Pig in court, but he lost. Of course, Pig had a creature, a roof. How is this happening, Ivan would ask? Everywhere I'm told I'm right, so why am I being punished? Did I steal the rations? No. Those are my rations. He stole them from me, and I'm wrong." Graft was endemic in the Russian military, permeating every level from the top brass to the grunts. The scale is astounding, said Sergei Friedinsky, one of Russia's chief military prosecutors. Sometimes it seems that people have simply lost their sense of moderation and conscience. Theft was hard to root out even if someone wanted to. It was less about criminality and more a mentality. The thinking was simple. It's one thing to serve the motherland, but you can't forget about yourself. Pig was among the many commanders who stole state-subsidized fuel from the military, and sold it on the side at the civilian market price. There were a number of methods for doing this, blatantly filling a commercial truck at a military gas station, filling a military transport, siphoning fuel from its tank to other carriers, and then adding fake kilometers to trucks to explain the difference on the accounting end. Pig was also ordering his subordinates to saw wood from the base's firing range so he could sell it. Everyone did it. Russia's turn of the century prosperity had tapered off with the 2008 financial crisis and falling oil revenue. Though the government's official statistics suggest that poverty hovers around 10 percent, an investigation by the Russian outlet The Insider shows that the reality is much worse. Roughly half of Russian families in many regions live below the poverty line. Outside the major cities, more than 10 million people do not have gas in their houses. They collect wood for heating. Many families still do not have indoor toilets. They defecate and hold in the ground. There had been plenty of idiocy that Ivan overlooked in his service. Literally hours of watching troops paint the grass green, ripping dandelions with his bare hands, plowing and re-plowing snowbanks for no discernible reason. Earning an attention for hours in the freezing cold on the parade grounds. Then there were larger frustrations, like the fact that they were promised weekends and overtime but never got them. Every repair at the base, painting the barracks, fixing broken stairs, was made using money the officers and the soldiers had to throw together, though they were making next to nothing themselves. According to the Rand Corporation in 2008, around 30 percent of officers holding the rank of major and below were earning wages at or under the poverty line. Units were asked to donate for repairs, but everyone knew there was no answer outside of "yes, comrade." As a result, men like Ivan sold military fuel or bartered parts to make base repairs. Few civilians realized that each commander in the Russian military was actually a fiscal hostage. When an officer assumed his position, he signed off on responsibility for all his units' equipment, much of which had been sold or bartered by the previous commander, and so was never actually there. This made it impossible to abdicate his job, because it would look as though he stole the equipment, and he would have to use his own money to replace it. The equipment that was there was outdated and broke frequently. Not because someone did something wrong, but because the parts were old and unserviceable, or because the repair unit didn't feel like coming out. Still, the officer would be blamed for not monitoring the equipment well and penalized. So instead of reporting the break, the officer would sell some of the military's fuel to repair the machinery. Was that really stealing, or was that simply the job? After his demotion, Ivan stalked around the base trying to foment a rebellion. He wanted to file a collective complaint against pig to the military prosecutor, but none of the other soldiers would go on the record with him. The main thing is that when they discuss something in the back rooms, everyone is like, "Yes, yes, let's do it." But when I come up and say, "Let's take action," everybody says, "Oh, come on. Why?" He would rage to Anna. Because everybody realizes that the same thing that happened to me is just going to happen to them. They're just going to be removed from their position on some flimsy excuse. Everybody's got debt. Everybody's got families and no one needs it. Anna didn't understand why it was this fight over stolen rations and his litany of complaints that broke him. He could be so categorical, so rigid. She supported his decisions, but she didn't understand why he needed this. She told him to be careful. He was in the system, and he had two choices. "You either play by the rules or get out," she told him. "If you go against your superiors, you risk everything. Was that really something he wanted to do?" At night, in their tiny apartment, they sat at the kitchen table as he tried to explain it to her. The Russian military had promised him better, a better billet, a better life, and some kind of purpose. And now, after he watched them steal so much, they were ruining his reputation. How much more could one man take? What kind of military was this? The roots of the dysfunction could be traced back to the Army of Ivan's forefathers. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union built one of the largest standing armies in the world, twice the size of the U.S. military. More than four million troops were organized to repel a large land invasion. A blundering force with a huge officer corps that relied on young men serving two years of mandatory conscription service for the bulk of its manpower. For the Soviets, national service was both political and practical. Homeland defense strategy for decades hinged on overwhelming the enemy with vast reserves of bodies on the cheap. The Russian army's development from the disarray of the Soviet Union was as impressive as it was disastrous. Fifteen countries emerged from its wreckage. The Russian Federation inherited most of the Red Army's personnel and equipment, but also its baggage. The rusted storehouses, low professionalism, and an over-reliance on conscripts and officers with no professional non-commissioned officer corps in the middle to manage things. The new country was faced with a fundamental question. Should Moscow retain a vast army, organized around fighting existential battles with the West, or should it instead create a smaller, more mobile force of professional enlisted soldiers? In the first decade of post-Soviet existence, with oil and gas prices falling to historic lows, that debate was largely theoretical. There was no money to feed or house the Russian troops, much less to professionalize them. Left to their own devices, units turned fields into farms and forage for mushrooms in the forests. Soldiers in Siberia were fed animal feed, criminality abounded, theft was rampant, commanders, officers and soldiers sold everything not nailed down at their bases, light bulbs, steel rods, electrical cables. They even sold their own weapons to their enemies. In 1993, two naval officers stole three uranium fuel rods. They were caught trying to find a buyer. That suggests that as much as 50 percent of the defense budget was stolen by individuals. As President Boris Yeltsin pursued partnership with the West, the Kremlin unveiled a new military doctrine that positioned its army as a regional force, no longer focused on global domination. The generals disagreed. They dreamed of resurrecting the army of their remembered Soviet glory and open debate permeated the establishment. Russian troops, meanwhile, fought on a series of conflicts called the Southern Wars. Most Russians, including Ivan, barely heard about these military operations in faraway places like South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnestria, Tajikstan, and Dagestan, except for the one in Chechnya, a secessionist republic where a humiliating stalemate laid bare the limitations and the brutality of the sclerotic force. These of ill-prepared conscripts and young officers were sent into urban combat with guerrilla fighters, suffering heavy casualties while perpetrating gross human rights abuses, including forced disappearances, torture, rape, and extrajudicial executions. When Putin came to power, he, too, was eager to work with the West on security issues, even flirting with one day joining NATO, but he was repeatedly rebuffed, in part because of the Russian military's poor human rights record, particularly in Chechnya, which Putin pacified by destroying its capital, Grozny. Russians often cite the hypocrisy of such claims given America's own track record in Iraq and Afghanistan. During Putin's first two terms in office, oil and gas prices started rising, so the government finally had money to spend on military reform. In 2001, Putin appointed Sergei Ivanov, a former official in the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB, to the Post of Defense Minister. Ivanov pushed for shortening mandatory national service to 12 months, and for greater reliance on enlisted soldiers, contracnicky rather than conscripts to professionalize the service. But recalcitrants among the top brass continued to thwart meaningful change. Moscow's early attempts at Rapprochement with the West were nearing their finale. In 2003, the Russian Defense Ministry issued a white paper that emphasized that the United States was again the country's main security threat. The military budget increased fourfold. Corruption continued. If earlier military fraud revolved around theft and the sale of state assets, it took on a different dimension under Putin, direct embezzlement of the budget. In August 2008, while Ivan was on summer vacation from the academy, Russia invaded Georgia, ostensibly to stop de Blisi from asserting control over the breakaway regions of Kazia and South Ossetia, but more to prevent Georgia from joining NATO. Though the operation succeeded politically, the Russian military's performance was pathetic. It was horrible coordination between branches, poorly executed flight missions, malfunctioning equipment, and deaths from friendly fire. Russia had not held a combat training exercise for about a decade. The embarrassment provided the Defense Minister, Anatoly Serjukov, an opportunity to push through new look, a major reform campaign designed to make the military a leaner, more professional force by upgrading equipment, cleaning up the corruption, and reducing the numbers of officers and conscripts. Ivan would experience the reform's unintended consequences. Hiring's froze, promotions ceased, and officer academies paused new enrollment. With no one coming up the ladder to relieve them, officers like Ivan remained stuck in lower ranks, forced to juggle multiple roles. At the same time, politicians talked while the top brass stole and all Ivan was left with was mindless paperwork, and now character assassination. One of the corruption was cleaned up. Sergei Shoygu, whom Putin appointed as Defense Minister in 2012, did nothing to change this. The military increased large-scale strategic exercises, but these functioned more like choreographed performances. Appearances outweighed reality. The most glaring example of this was the emphasis on metrics, verified by the photo report. These had to be photographed for documentation. That meant that a commanding officer was supposed to not only do his job, run an exercise say, but also produce a photo report about it to send to his commander the same day. The requirement covered everything from trainings to storehouse checks. There was no task more universally derided. The Soviet era adage "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" was reborn for the digital age. One former service member I spoke to, Alexia Oshansky, who was a warrant officer responsible for the training grounds of the 4th Guards Tank Division of the Western Military District, used Photoshop to repaint old-spotted camouflage uniforms into new, shoygu-favored Ratnik pixels so that his unit could recycle old photo reports. "I swear I'm not joking," he told me, laughing about the proliferation of the practice. I've even seen photo reports verifying the making of photo reports. As the slide shows went further and further up the district ladder, Russia appeared to have the most fearsome army on earth. But at the ground level, everyone despised the requirement. For commanders, it doubled the workload. For grunts, it meant an absurd amount of time wasted standing around posing. Many ignored the trainings themselves and just did the photo report. There was no time for both, even for those commanders who actually wanted to work. The outcome verged on cartoonish. Typically, one man was chosen and photographed. He was sweeping the barracks, doing the dusting, cleaning the bathrooms, fixing the piping and raking the lawn. Everyone knew it was bogus. What kind of one-man company were they running? What a great guy who could do everything in two hours. Some of the warehouse stores were taken from below, so it looked as if all the shells were full when only the bottom one was. Early in the pandemic, when it wasn't clear whether the photo report should show a service member wearing a mask or not wearing a mask, Ivan just photographed the same scene twice and turned in both pictures. So the duty officer could pick which one he sent up the chain of command. Ivan managed to transfer to a hardship posting, where his service counted double toward his retirement. He got a raise, but he still spent all his time making photo reports or filling out useless paperwork. The new base was even more grim than the last. It reminded him of the Western movies he watched as a kid, tumbleweeds, fields, deserts, broken swings. The town was pathetic. Zero infrastructure, two rundown bars. Ivan and Anna lived on the main street. In their second floor apartment, they could see the skate park downstairs. Next door, there was an open field. In the winter, it was a hockey rink in the summer, a soccer field. When Ivan went out with Sasha, their baby, he could sit on the bench and watch Anna inside. Sasha had been born a week late. Anna had worried about her pregnancy constantly. She joked that she was so unable to let go that she must have willed the delay herself. Ivan decided to stop drinking in advance of the baby's arrival. He wanted everything to be perfect, including himself. He put the crib together and set up the nursery while Anna was in the hospital. He held her hand through her two-day labor, barely leaving her side. At work, Ivan spent his days shifting papers. He would submit a spreadsheet about drivers, surname, first name, patronimic, license category, motorcycle, car, truck, car owner, service member or spouse. He would enter the data and send in this spreadsheet. But a week later, the columns changed places and he was told to submit it again. I submitted it last week, didn't I? Submitted again. A week later, the same thing. That was just one piece of paper from one division commander, multiplied by all the other chiefs. There were a billion pieces of paper. There were also endless loops of morning, afternoon and evening roll call assemblies on the parade grounds. 8.45 a.m. for 9 a.m. flag-raising, 1.45 p.m. for lunch, 3.45 p.m. afternoon roll call, 6.15 p.m. assembly. Then there were the officer meetings at 8 in the morning and 5.30 in the evening in the command headquarters tactical room where everyone had to leave phones outside and watch slide shows. After those meetings, Ivan would be assigned more paperwork that he needed to submit in the morning so that his commander could go to the internal formation and the base commander could say to him, "Did you do your job?" and he could say, "Yes." No one cared that they ended up sitting in their offices until 10 p.m., working on filling out useless columns. If anyone asked for the overtime they were entitled to, the commander would say, "What?" You overworked? Your shoelaces untied. Uniform violation, reprimand. For an officer, that reprimand was 6,000 to 7,000 rubles or $65 to $75. No one wanted to pay that kind of money, so no one said anything. Still, some of the new look reforms appeared to be working and the Kremlin started to actively use the military to further its foreign policy aspirations. In 2014, Ivan had watched on TV as Moscow took advantage of Ukraine's domestic unrest and internal divisions to annex Crimea. A small, elite unit of little green men in Shoygu's newly redesigned green pixel uniforms stormed the peninsula. Their discipline and professionalism were obvious. No Russian lives were lost. Though Europe and America responded with sanctions and sanctimony, the Kremlin was able to thwart Ukraine's aspirations for ascension to the European Union and force the West to acknowledge Russia's opinion on geopolitical affairs. The operation's success produced a wave of patriotism. Most everyone in Russia, including Ivan, believed that Crimea was theirs, that it had only been given to Ukraine by a drunken Khrushchev. It was a good way to get people to forget about their outhouses. Even opposition politicians, like Alexi Navalny, did not oppose the move. When unrest roiled Eastern Donbass in 2014, the state-run media told Ivan that the Ukrainian province wanted to secede, but that Kyiv wasn't letting it. Russia needs to help the ethnic Russians there at Entoned. The Kremlin sent in unmarked troops to support the separatists, but Ivan and Anna's TV showed them none of that. To them, in the distant reaches of their base, it all felt so far away. Across Russia, militarism was rising. For successes in Crimea and Donbass, Russian forces deployed to Syria in 2015 to help Moscow's embattled ally Bashar al-Assad stay in power. There, the military reforms again appeared to bear fruit, demonstrating that the Russians were capable of small, quick operations and showing off the country's new weapons. Strike fighters and ship-based cruise missiles fired for more than 900 miles away in the Caspian Sea. Russia's emboldened military intelligence agency, the GRU, experimented with international influence campaigns. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians had felt their geopolitical influence wane. As former Soviet republics elected pro-Western governments and chose to join NATO, Putin's early attempts to partner with the West ended in rebuke and shame. Now, Moscow was returning to the international stage in triumph, and President Barack Obama who had ridiculed Putin at news conferences, dismissing Russia as a regional power, had to shake his hand for photos in the United Nations General Assembly. Ivan wandered in on a Syria deployment. It was an ideology or patriotism. Word had spread that most Russian soldiers did barely anything there. Most of the actual ground combat was done by Wagner, a paramilitary group that first cropped up in Ukraine. While soldiers saw little violence, Ivan heard that the salary for an overseas assignment was double. He also heard that a combat veteran certificate entitled a man to a monthly payment and two more weeks of leave per year, like a war vacation that continues to pay. Ivan asked to be sent, but he was denied. It turned out that most people had to pay for the prestige of a rotation. If their new posting was bad for Ivan, it was even worse for Anna. She cooked their meals with the food rations they were allotted. The bases' stores of dry cereal were crawling with worms. The service fed them old fish. She didn't like the other officers' wives much and didn't have close friends or work that absorbed her. Was a far cry from her life in St. Petersburg, reading Brodsky over wine in the kitchen with her friends. Still, she remained madly in love with Ivan and Sasha. It was the small family she had always dreamed of. She took a job in the municipality. She was committed to making their situation work. Around town, everyone knew them. Anna and Ivan, Ivan and Anna. She was talkative, opinionated, and different. When they got the chance, they took a trip to St. Petersburg to see Anna's friends. Ivan noticed immediately that the couple's apartment was nice. While they settled in, the husband continued working. He was an IT developer, programming something. On his desk, there were two huge sleek monitors and virtual reality goggles. Ivan noticed that the man could get up and do something and then sit back down to work. He wasn't chained to his desk, watching the clock. It was his choice, how and when he worked. They were in St. Petersburg, but the man was talking to a colleague in America in English. The couple's went out for a beer. Ivan had thought he was making decent money as a military man, but he couldn't afford the kind of beer the husband ordered. The guy just glanced at the menu and chose the most expensive one, 400 rubles for a leader, roughly $4.50, and casually ordered some food for the table. The beer was delicious, much better than what Ivan was used to drinking. He realized that their standard of living was completely different, and of course, he wanted this too. When they got home to the base, Ivan found that he was bored with this little life they had built. He had always liked taking photos and started dabbling in Photoshop. He began teaching himself coding at night, helping Anna's cousins with marketing their small business and designing friends' websites for fun. Ivan and Anna made a plan. He would leave the military and become a web designer. He was almost done with his 20 years of service and would be eligible for retirement in 2023. He would bank the next two years of vacation and promised overtime. Enroll in the military's bullshit civilian retraining program before his contract ended. Retrain, study web design himself and make appearances at the mandatory lectures, and take all his accumulated vacation time while looking for a civilian job. Then, by the time his contract was ending that summer, he would be settled as a design specialist with a new job and a higher income. They would move to a new city and start a whole new kind of life. In February 2022, Ivan registered for a retraining course that would start in September. His commanding officer signed off. All he and Anna had to do was wait and follow the plan. But as Ivan would later say, Vladimir Vladimirovich decided this was a bad plan. He had a better one. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
