By Galina Korol | 2023-12-14

KYIV -- As the war in Ukraine grinds on, more and more Russian soldiers want to desert their ranks, according to secretly recorded conversations from the battlefield in Ukraine's Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.

In conversations published by the Associated Press (AP), Russian soldiers discuss so-called 200s (dead soldiers), 300s (wounded soldiers) and 500s (men who refuse to fight).

The number of men who refuse to fight is growing, the AP reported November 26.

"There's no f------ 'dying the death of the brave' here," one soldier told his brother from the front in Kharkiv province. "You just die like a f------ earthworm."

'You can't leave...'

Another conversation between a Russian soldier named Ilya and his wife intercepted by the Ukrainian intelligence agencies demonstrates similar desperation.

"[I'm] dirty, totally worn down. The lice and bedbugs are eating [me]. And we're not allowed to wash ourselves or do our laundry," Ilya said in the recording, which was posted December 1 on the I Want to Live Telegram channel, a Ukrainian government hotline that allows Russian soldiers to surrender.

More than 3,500 Russian soldiers have called the hotline, an official said in November.

Ilya's wife says: "Sweetie, it’s better to do time, [expletive]! Really, better to do time."

Ilya: "Oh no, there's no way to [expletive] from here. You can no longer escape from here. Here it's [expletive], if they catch you, they send you back here, or they just kill their own, [expletive]."

Later in the conversation, the wife tells her husband that she has already paid a bribe and that everything has been set in motion to remove him from the war.

"I don't know how long I'll hold out," Ilya said, adding that Ukrainian forces had bombarded his unit's bunkers with grenade launchers. "Around 15 to 18 men were killed, right in front of me, [expletive]."

The bombardment left him with a concussion, he said.

Wife: "You should be hospitalized with a concussion."

Ilya: "They don't let you do anything: you can't leave, [expletive]!"

Desertion a chance to stay alive

For soldiers who have been seriously wounded and end up in hospitals in Russia, it is easier for them to desert than for those who are on the front, said Ivan Chuvilyayev, a spokesperson for Idite Lesom (Get Lost), an organization that helps Russians who want to desert or avoid being mobilized for the war in Ukraine.

Get Lost has been operating for about a year and has helped 600 men desert the army.

"And those are only the men who went through the whole procedure with us," Chuvilyayev told Kontur. "It's men who wrote to us and told us that the only option they could see was to desert."

Those who deserted did not see any other option because the typical practice in the Russian army now is that if a soldier is wounded, he will go through some rehabilitation, but after that, instead of discharge from the military, he is sent back into combat.

Even Ukrainian soldiers have told Get Lost about such incidents.

"For example, some Ukrainian soldiers wrote to us that they had picked up a wounded soldier during a battle and apparently took him prisoner," Chuvilyayev said. "But when they took him to the hospital, the doctor there told them that the wounds weren't fresh, but rather, the soldier had gotten them a month or two before."

Violating orders

The Russian army has a harsh punitive system for violating orders: execution by firing squad.

"Don't violate an order; [it's] execution by firing squad," Roman Ryabko, a prisoner of war from Voronezh province, said in a video posted on YouTube on December 2.

"If you flee without authorization, you'll get shot," he said. "I haven't seen that happen personally, but in the training camp I saw the execution of a unit commander ... he didn't follow an order -- he abandoned wounded soldiers and was shot. About 150 men saw it."

Ryabko also witnessed the punishment of a deserter.

"They ripped off his hands and feet and then his head, and then they put everything in a box, and in the morning blew it up on an antitank mine so there wouldn't be any evidence," he said. "And they warned us that the same thing would happen to anyone who tried to flee or who violated an order."

If a soldier tries to desert in occupied Donetsk or Luhansk province, he is "killed on the spot or sent to the cellars, or so-called pits," Chuvilyayev said.

"There are no laws there -- it's like the wild west, where blood and vodka flow in equal amounts."

'The Way Home'

Meanwhile, women whose husbands and sons are fighting in Ukraine are banding together across Russia, creating a movement called Put Domoi (The Way Home).

"No woman who has a child does so for him to be shot 20 years later and to rot away in a field," Maria Andreyeva, the wife of a drafted soldier, said in an interview with BELSAT posted on YouTube December 1.

The women of The Way Home are demanding that their husbands be discharged from the army because they have been fighting for a long time without rotation and with no opportunity to return home.

In exchange for the return of their husbands, the women are offering up men who want to enter the army voluntarily, according to Andreyeva.

Kontur was able to communicate with a member of The Way Home's Telegram group, a woman named Yevgeniya who declined to share her last name or where she lives.

She said her husband went to the front a year and a half ago, after a notice arrived telling him to report for data reconciliation. Two weeks later, the army sent him to boot camp; a month later, to the front.

Initially the military promised to assign him to territorial defense and in no way order him into combat, Yevgeniya said. But during his entire service he has gone home on leave only once.

Although he did not want to return to the front, "he couldn't do anything else," Yevgeniya said.

When asked why her husband is fighting in the war, Yevgeniya answered tersely: "To not be thrown in jail."

Now Yevgeniya is trying to get through to the authorities to demand her husband's discharge.

When asked if her husband was willing to desert, she said: "He'll never do something like that. He won't be able to abandon his comrades. And how will he be able to look his sons in the eye later?"

'We didn't have to come here'

This attitude captures the duality of the whole situation, said Ivan Stupak, a military analyst, member of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, and consultant to the national security and defense committee of the Ukrainian parliament.

"There's a sort of duality with them: on the one hand, men on the front line are already tired of fighting, they're sitting in filth and complaining that no one wants to come back here ever again," he told Kontur. "But on the other hand, men who are more in the rear want to fight to the end, to [victory]."

Every Russian has options for avoiding going to war and Russians need to take advantage of them "if they really want to end this brutal bloodshed," he said.

As for Ryabko, the Russian soldier from Voronezh province, it was not until Ukrainian soldiers captured him that he was able to speak out.

"This war was imposed directly by policy, by Russian policy, and we didn't have to come here; there is nothing to do here," he said.

"There are real problems in Russia, big problems we need to see and solve somehow. Here [in Ukraine] the Ukrainian people will sort through everything on their own," Ryabko said. "I always thought this but couldn't say it before."