"All right. I’m a soldier. I’m ready"

Over 50,000 soldiers have deserted the Russian military since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Runaways face up to 15 years in prison—if they are not first tortured and killed by their own commanders, with their bodies dumped somewhere on the battlefield.

The Barents Observer has meet Dmitry and Solomon, two of the many defectors. Their stories from the frontline are terrifying.

"... there was a pile of bodies outside. During the second assault, twenty of us were sent forward. We were walking along and came across a corpse with its trousers pulled down. We joked that it meant we were heading in the right direction. Further on, we found five more bodies. Then they started shooting at us immediately,” Solomon said.

Dmitry said he first began seriously considering escape after an operation in which twenty-one men were sent to seize a tree line and only two returned alive.

They crossed a continent in search of refuge. Eight time zones separate Sakhalin, in Russia's Far East, from Kajaani, a small city in northern Finland surrounded by forests and lakes.

This is their story.

It is the story of two young men who went to war to kill Ukrainians. We let them speak, explain and reflect on what they saw and did on the bloodiest battlefields in Europe since the Second World War.

It is also the story of how they ran. To Finland, where we met them.

For the Nordic country, the dilemmas are many: legal, moral, political and security-related. Are defectors such as Dmitry and Solomon courageous individuals who refused to take part in an illegal war? Or should they be regarded as soldiers who bear responsibility for supporting Russia's brutal military campaign, even if they later chose to leave it behind?

Solomon and Dmitry - not their real names - are awaiting a decision on their asylum applications. They enjoy life in Europe.

“People here worry about pleasant things,” one of them says, recalling an elderly woman who complained that she could not get her bicycle repaired.

“The Officer Picked Up a Bottle and Said, ‘I’m Going to Ram This Into You’”

Dmitry and Solomon are former soldiers in the Russian Army. Solomon was among the hundreds of thousands of men mobilised and sent to the front during the autumn 2022 call-up.

“I went out to buy cigarettes, and two men followed me into the entrance of my block of flats. One was serving mobilisation notices, and the other was simply a large bloke. They handed me a notice and said I had to report to the military recruitment office. That was it. I went with them to the recruitment office, and the next day I was already at a military unit.”

Why did he not try to flee or leave the country? His answer says much about the mood and motivations of many Russian men sent to fight abroad.

“At that point in my life, I didn’t really want anything. To be honest, I didn’t have much desire to live either. They were saying the mobilisation would only last three months, and I thought: fine, I’ll go for three months. If I survive, at least I’ll have learnt something new. I didn’t watch television, and I never believed any of that nonsense about ‘denazification’ or ‘demilitarisation’. A lot of people went in the same way – with no particular goal. They just don’t talk about it.”

Dmitry’s path to the war came later and under far more dramatic circumstances. According to him, he was detained during an immigration raid, beaten, and forced to sign a military contract under the threat of rape.

The incident took place in the autumn of 2024. He had gone to an Asian restaurant when security officers suddenly arrived to conduct an inspection. As he was not carrying his passport, he was detained and driven around the city for several hours. He says officers took him to locations where car thefts had previously occurred in an attempt to pin other people’s crimes on him.

He was then taken to a police station and subjected to several days of torture.

“At first they asked me about my plans in life. Then an officer came in, put his hand on my shoulder and asked, ‘What do you know?’ I replied that I knew nothing. He said, ‘Yes, you do know everything,’ and started beating me.”

According to Dmitry, the beatings continued for several days as he was moved from office to office. Eventually, the officers began demanding that he sign a contract with the Ministry of Defence. To persuade him, they used a bottle.

“They pulled down my trousers, and the officer picked up a bottle and said, ‘I’m going to ram this into you.’ After two days of beatings, I realised perfectly well that he was capable of it. So I said: ‘All right. I’m a soldier. I’m ready.”

Dmitry later showed us a short video of himself, handcuffed, signing the contract. When military personnel arrived to collect him, he says he was actually relieved to be leaving the police station. After spending several days in an infirmary, he was sent to the trenches a month later.

“Come On, Kid, Take Care”

The deserters say that war completely changes the way you look at life, even its most ordinary aspects.

“I used to complain about my life, about what I lacked,” Dmitry says. “But once I ended up in Ukraine, I thought: when I get home, I’ll live in the woods, and all I’ll need is a river nearby. I started valuing life differently. There were days when we sat for three days without water. Everyone there gets paid a million roubles, but you can’t do anything with the money. You’ve got money, but you can’t even get a drink. I realised that, apart from water, I didn’t really need anything else.”

The men speak openly about their combat experience, which, according to them, largely consisted of trying to stay alive.

“I heard this ‘whoosh-whoosh’ sound and had no idea what it was,” Dmitry recalls emotionally, describing one occasion when he came under fire. “It was a grenade launcher. The rounds started landing all around me. I threw myself to the ground. There must have been thirty explosions, and the earth was erupting all around me. As I lay there, I suddenly remembered my first day of school with my mum. I’d never thought about that before. I could feel every hair on my body standing on end.”

Solomon immediately interjects.

“When I was under shellfire, I remembered school as well. I think it was Year Four. They were teaching us about the war and saying that thanks to our grandfathers’ sacrifice, we could live under peaceful skies. And I remember thinking: what an enormous bloody con. There will never be a peaceful sky. There will always be war, as long as there are soldiers.”

According to Dmitry, people become so accustomed to death in war that they begin speaking to the dead as though they were still alive.

“You’re walking along and there’s a body lying there. You say: ‘Come on, mate, take care.’”

They Used Bodies as Road Signs

Solomon spent thirteen months at the front. His unit was stationed in the village of Stepne in Donetsk Oblast. Russian soldiers occupied homes abandoned by Ukrainians who had fled the fighting. Documents, photographs and personal belongings still lay scattered throughout the houses, he recalls.

For a long time, they remained on the defensive. Drones flew overhead constantly, but he did not witness any deaths during that period. Then, at the end of 2023, he was sent to take part in an offensive near Novomykhailivka.

He would spend the next thirteen months there.

“They told us to take a road. We hadn’t even reached it before mortar rounds started coming in. Another company went further ahead, and only three men came back. The captain looked at that and said, ‘I’m not taking my men in there.’

“Later we found out that our mortar crews had been given the day off. They were drinking beer in Donetsk while we were being sent into the assault.”

There were casualties everywhere.

“When we entered a dugout, there was a pile of bodies outside. During the second assault, twenty of us were sent forward. We were walking along and came across a corpse with its trousers pulled down. We joked that it meant we were heading in the right direction. Further on, we found five more bodies. Then they started shooting at us immediately.”

Solomon recounts the battle in remarkable detail. He remembers every minute: ammunition detonating, shells landing around him, crawling through undergrowth, and watching comrades die from their wounds.

“I was running, and Lyokha was running beside me. I saw a flash, and he shouted: ‘I’ve been hit in the leg – wait for me, lads.’

“I threw myself down behind some metal sheeting and shouted back that we couldn’t stay there. He didn’t answer. I looked over and realised Lyokha was already dead.

“Smiley was wounded in the leg. The tourniquet was applied incorrectly. It was dark, there was blood everywhere, and he simply bled to death on the way back. We left him in the bushes.

“I spent an hour with Ilyukha. I tried to dress the wound in his chest, but I couldn’t carry him. Every time I moved him, he screamed in agony. You could hear his bones grinding together. He asked me for a dose of Promedol.

“I crawled over to where several bodies were lying to look for more water and found a stretcher. When I came back, he was already unconscious.

“I returned to the others and told them Ilyukha needed to be evacuated. Nobody came with me. They’d all seen what was happening. Out of everyone who went in there, only two men emerged uninjured.”

While Solomon speaks, Dmitry shows us footage from the war.

The video shows a drone attack. He is trying to take cover. The image shakes violently as something explodes nearby.

“It was like that every day,” he says. “Sometimes it was our own side shelling us. Look, there – that’s a kamikaze drone.”

Dmitry spent forty-six days at the front. He says he counted every single one.

Because he had been recruited after being detained, he was immediately assigned to an assault unit.

He also describes relations between soldiers and commanders. One of the most notorious features of the Russian military, repeatedly documented throughout the full-scale invasion, is extortion.

“We had two lads called ‘Sausage’ and ‘Cash Register’,” Dmitry recalls, laughing.

“One stole sausages, so everyone started calling him Sausage. The other had skimmed money from a till at work and lost it in a casino. His nickname became Cash Register.

“There wasn’t much food. One night they got up and opened a tin of condensed milk. They were caught.

“For that, each of them was fined 100,000 roubles. For a single tin of condensed milk.

“I remember thinking: these boys are eighteen years old. They’ll probably be dead tomorrow, and their own side is still shaking them down for money.”

Then he adds quietly:

“In the end, they died too. Every single one of them.”

According to Dmitry, almost everyone at the front thinks only about surviving and finding a way out.

“Some men deliberately wound themselves. If your leg gets blown off, at least you’re alive and heading home.

“I spent days sitting with a grenade and an assault rifle in my hands. I wasn’t afraid of shooting myself. I was afraid my own commanders would kill me.

“Everyone knows there are only corpses out there. The people who say, ‘I love war’, are all sitting safely behind the lines.”

“Congratulations, Your Mother Has Died”

Dmitry says he first began seriously considering escape after an operation in which twenty-one men were sent to seize a tree line and only two returned alive.

“I discovered it was possible to obtain a fake death certificate, so I contacted a lawyer. He rang me and said, ‘Congratulations, your mother has died,’ and emailed me the certificate. It looked completely genuine. I then told my commanders that my mother had passed away.”

For several days he was unable to leave his position because the entire area was under constant fire. Then, on 31 December, he emerged from the dugout and saw fog rolling across the fields.

“And I felt such joy. I ran across the open ground and somehow survived.

“I made it to the drone operators, and they gave me some juice. We’d been having problems with water. I spent the day there watching them kill Ukrainians with drones.

“They don’t even realise what they’re doing. A drone chases a soldier around, circling above him, and the others are laughing and filming it. ‘Come on! Come on!’ they shout.

“I was just waiting for the chance to get out.”

Solomon reached a similar conclusion after commanders announced yet another assault.

He and three comrades simply walked away from the front.

They took a taxi, travelled to Rostov, then onwards to Moscow, and finally returned to Sakhalin.

Not everyone managed to disappear.

One soldier, known by the call sign Kotel (“Cauldron”), was caught and imprisoned.

Another, Aru, was also detained. While in custody, he signed a new military contract, was sent back into an assault unit, and was soon killed.

“He went to war because his brother had been killed,” Solomon says. “And now he’s dead as well.”

Smoked a Cigarette and Gave Himself Up

After deserting, Solomon spent nearly eighteen months in hiding.

Sometimes he stayed with his mother, sometimes with a friend. Eventually he found work as a chef and tried to pretend he was living a normal life.

He learned he had been placed on the federal wanted list from a former classmate who now worked in law enforcement. She messaged him saying she had seen documents relating to the search for him.

At first, Solomon believed she was warning him.

Later, he came to suspect she had informed her superiors instead.

“I told my boss I was on the federal wanted list. He thought I was joking.

“I told one of my colleagues, ‘If they come looking for me, tell them I don’t work here.’ She laughed.

“When I handed in my notice and said I was leaving for Europe, she asked why. I told her: ‘Because I’m a deserter. I can’t stay in Russia.’

“She said: ‘Wait — you weren’t joking?’”

A month later, officers arrived at his mother’s flat, where a packed rucksack was already waiting by the door.

He had been preparing to leave the island.

On several occasions the security services cut off the electricity to the flat via the fuse box in the communal hallway. The final time, Solomon sat in darkness for around eight hours. Assuming the police had gone, he stepped outside.

It was a mistake.

Later, he discovered that a surveillance system had identified him.

“My mate and I went to a shopping centre. By then we’d stopped smoking, so instead of going through the smoking area, we entered through the main entrance.

“The camera picked me up immediately. The police later showed me the photograph.”

By that point, Sakhalin had become one of Russia’s most heavily monitored regions.

The facial-recognition network forms part of the state’s so-called Safe City system, officially designed to combat crime, manage traffic and improve emergency response. In practice, however, it also enables authorities to track individuals and monitor dissidents.

When someone is on a wanted list, the system automatically compares camera footage with police databases. If a match is found, officers receive an alert with the person’s likely location.

Dmitry was caught in much the same way.

A camera recorded him entering a building, and security officers quickly traced him to the flat where he was hiding.

“I tried to get away. I climbed through a window into a friend’s place and went to sleep.

“I woke up to people shouting, ‘Open up! We know you’re in there.’

“By then the cameras had identified me for the third time, and they’d surrounded the whole building.

“They started sawing through the door and pushed some sort of hose through the peephole.

“I told them I’d come out in ten minutes.

“I smoked a cigarette and surrendered.”

“I Was Definitely Looking at About Eight Years. That Was When I Decided to Run.”

Although Dmitry and Solomon had arrived at the war through different routes and escaped in different ways, they eventually found themselves in the same place: a detention facility for deserters on Sakhalin.

Dmitry spent two months there.

Solomon spent twenty-one days.

“It was basically a barracks rather than a prison,” Solomon explains. “It had been converted into a prison using the prisoners themselves.

“We even paid for the bars on the windows and installed them ourselves. We welded them, painted them — everything.

“One inmate used to laugh at us and ask when we were finally going to finish building our own prison.”

The conditions, they say, were brutal and at times amounted to torture.

The objective was simple: force the men back to the front.

“Every morning they woke us up and shouted, ‘On your feet — Dress Code Number Four.’

“That meant full combat gear: boots, trousers, jacket, everything.

“It was boiling hot.

“There were wounded men there with swollen legs, men on crutches, and they still made us march, do press-ups and jump around.

“People fainted.

“The ones who broke mentally signed papers agreeing to go back. In reality, everyone eventually signed.”

According to Solomon, officers repeatedly summoned prisoners to headquarters.

“Every day they asked us the same question: ‘Are you ready to return to the front?’

“They asked me as well.

“I said I would rather go to prison.

“One officer replied, ‘Fine. You’ll serve your sentence. Then what? No career, no future.’

“I told him: ‘I’ll find a job. Better that than dying.’

“After that the conversation changed.

“‘If you don’t sign, things will get worse. You think you’ll go to trial, but they’ll send you back to fight anyway. Only then you’ll be serving alongside convicts.’”

In the summer of 2025, both men decided to escape.

The prison-barracks was not easy to get out of, but corruption provided an opportunity.

“During those two months I was taken to see an investigator several times,” Dmitry says.

“It turned out we had a mutual acquaintance — a traffic policeman.

“Through him, I arranged for the investigator to let me leave the prison and visit home.

“Not for free, of course.

“I brought him crab, whisky and other gifts.

“Eventually they lined us up and told me: ‘You’re free. Just be back by six this evening.’

“And this was supposed to be a prison. They wouldn’t even let people go outside for a cigarette.”

Dmitry says he was granted leave several times.

The investigator’s demands were surprisingly modest.

“Once he asked for a bottle of cognac and twenty thousand roubles.”

He could have absconded earlier, but at first he believed he might receive only a short sentence.

Then reality caught up with him.

“A few days before the trial, my lawyer called and told me I was definitely looking at about eight years.

“That was when I decided to run.

“I asked for permission to go home one last time to see my family.

“And I simply never came back.”

Solomon’s escape was even more direct.

He was being escorted through the city centre to complete paperwork relating to a replacement passport.

“I told the investigator my passport had burned up during the Special Military Operation.

“So they sent me to the migration office with an escort.

“On the way, I said I needed to buy a pair of combat boots because the ones I’d been issued were rubbish.

“I went into a shop, bought some boots and came back outside.

“The escort was busy talking on the phone.

“I held up my old boots and said, ‘I’m just going to throw these away.’

“He nodded and carried on talking.

“So I threw them in the bin and ran.”

The guard chased after him, shouting for him to stop.

But Solomon escaped.

“I jumped through bushes, crossed a stream and ran through the city for about half an hour in my green uniform like a madman.

“By the time I reached the forest I was completely exhausted.

“Meanwhile the investigator was already sending me messages asking: ‘Why did you run away?’”

Escape to Finland

Sakhalin is an island, and there are only two practical ways off it: by air or by ferry. Both routes were effectively closed to fugitives wanted by the authorities.

With the help of local poachers, however, Dmitry and Solomon managed to reach the mainland roughly a month after escaping from detention.

What followed was a journey of thousands of kilometres across Russia towards Europe.

Ironically, their road to freedom began with being robbed.

“We found a driver who agreed to take us to Smolensk for 700,000 roubles because at first we planned to get out through Belarus.

“We travelled with them for two days and only got as far as Irkutsk. Then we realised they weren’t exactly trustworthy people.

“At one point the driver took me aside and suggested we leave Solomon behind and disappear with the money ourselves.

“After that they told us they were going to hand us over to the police.

“So we walked away. The money stayed with them.”

In Irkutsk, Dmitry happened to know a police officer he had met years earlier on Sakhalin. The officer took them in temporarily.

From there, the pair continued west using the ride-sharing service BlaBlaCar.

They would reach a large city, lie low for a day or two, then move on again.

Several times they came close to being caught.

“Once we were travelling with a man and woman who were going to a wedding.

“Traffic police stopped us and asked, ‘What’s this, BlaBlaCar?’

“We panicked.

“But the driver handled it brilliantly. He told them we were all heading to a friend’s wedding.

“They let us go without even checking our documents.”

Another journey was perhaps even more uncomfortable.

“We ended up sharing a car with military men.

“We asked them what things were like at the front.

“They started thumping their chests and talking about how well everything was going.

“Right, we thought.

“Then they dropped us off beside a military base.

“We quietly walked away.”

When they finally reached Smolensk, they discovered the journey had been pointless.

The organisation Idite Lesom (“Get Lost”), which assists Russian deserters and draft evaders, informed them that both men were on official wanted lists.

That meant Belarus was no longer a viable route.

Instead, they headed north to Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, whose long border with Finland runs through forests and marshland and is comparatively lightly guarded.

Through the Forest

The men gathered supplies: food, navigation equipment, waterproof clothing and other essentials.

It was already October.

Their first attempt failed.

The cold proved more severe than expected, and Dmitry became ill.

They were forced to turn back.

The second attempt was better planned.

They bought warmer clothing and carried far more food.

For four days they trekked through the forests of Karelia.

At night they built makeshift shelters.

The shelters were intended not only to protect them from the cold but also from drones equipped with thermal-imaging cameras.

“Drones are everywhere there,” Dmitry says. “Russian soldiers know that better than anyone.”

Eventually, they reached the border.

“There was a cleared strip of land and those little green border posts.

“We ran across the clearing, turned round and gave Russia the middle finger.”

Solomon remembers the moment vividly.

“It felt as though I could breathe again.

“But we knew we still needed to get farther away, so we kept walking.

“Then we came out onto a road, saw Finnish road signs and realised that we’d made it.”

The men stopped a passing car.

Unable to communicate properly with the driver, they stopped another.

A few minutes later, Finnish border guards arrived.

The Authorities Realise They Have Gone

News that two Russian citizens had crossed illegally into Finland’s North Karelia region soon appeared in local media.

At the same time, people who had helped them back in Russia began attracting the attention of the security services.

“As soon as we crossed the border, the taxi driver who had taken us into the forest contacted us.

“The FSB had identified him through camera footage.

“They took him in for questioning.

“The women who had rented flats to us, the taxi drivers who had driven us around — they were all being questioned as well.”

According to the men, it was only after they appeared in Finland that Russian authorities began seriously investigating how they had escaped.

“When we were already in Petrozavodsk, we were still speaking on the phone with officers from Sakhalin.

“They thought we were running around somewhere on the island.

“They had no idea we were together.

“When we disappeared into the forest for four days, one officer became so upset that we’d stopped answering him that he posted my wanted notice in the local news.

“Then, when we appeared in Finland, they suddenly started retracing our route.”

Dmitry still has a voice message from one officer.

“He sounded genuinely offended.

“He said: ‘How could this happen? What am I supposed to call you now? You tricked me. I promised I’d get you transferred to the artillery, and instead you’ve gone off to Europe.’”

“It Never Felt Like It Had Anything To Do With Us”

The war left its mark on both men, though in different ways.

Neither believes they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dmitry, however, admits that he changed after returning.

“I started behaving differently. Like an addict, almost.”

Neither man says he understands why Russia invaded Ukraine in the first place.

Nor do they understand what ordinary Russian soldiers are meant to be fighting for.

Solomon reflects on conversations he heard at the front.

“The village where we were stationed was filled with lads from Sakhalin. Most of the battalion came from there.

“People kept asking themselves: what am I doing here?

“You spend your entire life on an island at the far edge of the world, and then suddenly someone tells you this is your war.

“There was no feeling of connection.

“My home isn’t here.

“That official narrative — that you're defending the Motherland — doesn't really take root in the mind of someone from Sakhalin.”

Dmitry recalls one conversation during their escape across Russia.

“We were travelling with a driver who kept talking about his own experience in the war.

“He said, ‘I’m a warrior. We captured this and that.’

“People who actually spent time at the front don't talk like that.

“It’s disgusting.”

Solomon nods.

“The deeper into the rear you go, the more enthusiastic people become.

“The ones furthest from the fighting are always the most eager.

“Maybe ten or fifteen per cent genuinely want to fight.

“The rest would hand over every last rouble they own just to be declared unfit and sent home.”