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Warning: This article contains words about suicide and self-harm, which some may find difficult.
Oleg, 24, who grew up in the western Russian city of Ufa, thought he was signing up to work as a security guard at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine.
To get the job, with a salary of 200,000 rubles ($2,660), he took a train in December from Moscow to a military office in the city of Ryazan, 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the southeast.
He knew that the work was being organized through the military, but he did not think that he should be at the front.
He arrived at the office late at night, sleepy and with a splitting headache.
And he signed his ordinary life “quickly, without reading, without understanding, and that was it”, he told Al Jazeera.
The officer who gave him the contract at 11pm asked Oleg to sign “addendums” that became a contract to become a pilot, he said.
Oleg withheld his last name and current location for security reasons, as he left the military and fled Russia.
The Kremlin does not release information on the number of soldiers who have defected or gone elsewhere without official leave.
Last June, the independent publication Mediazona reported that nearly 21,000 Russian servicemen had been found guilty of refusing to serve, adding that many refugees had been sent back to their military units without being charged.
The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights said in September that at least 50,000 Russian soldiers, or about one in 10 fighting in Ukraine, had fled by 2022.
At least 3,000, including Oleg, did this with the help of a group called “Idite Lesom”. The word means “through the forest,” but is used figuratively to mean “lost!”
‘I’ve lost myself’
Oleg took a bus to the military unit in the western town of Kovrov, where he said, the drill sergeant called him and other future soldiers, mostly men under 35: “You are no one now, you are a soldier”.
Each of them signed up for a fee.
“Patriotism ends with money,” Oleg said with a laugh.
No drill sergeant listened to his complaints about forced conscription, even though Oleg was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was banned from using weapons.
“I was told, ‘You are in hell, no one will know (about the disease) stop screaming.'”
He also said that he was beaten by the police.
After failing the pilot test, he was told he would become a driver. But his three-month course was mostly “sitting on a stool,” he said.
Desperate and distraught at the thought of taking his own life, by March he was taken to the western Voronezh region on the border with Ukraine and served as a staging post for Russian forces.
Oleg says: “I lost my mind and started cutting my hands.
At the time of publication, Russian officials did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Caring for the sick
Idite Lesom’s spokesman, Ivan Chuvilyaev, said that Russia’s efforts “continue to change”.
In 2022, Moscow launched a campaign to mobilize “neutral” people, where many prisoners were promised amnesty and died in groups in an attempt to invade Ukrainian territory.
Volunteers were given signing bonuses of thousands of dollars – and their families received even bigger “payoffs”.
Recently, the economy do not moveuniversity students and imprisoned men awaiting trial have become new sources of soldiers.
Some new soldiers, like Oleg, are recruited under false pretenses for “safe” civilian jobs behind the front lines, or tricked into enlisting, said Chuvilyaev, a former film critic who left Russia in 2022 because of his hatred of the war.
“This meat grinder is rolling continuously,” he said.
His team works online, receiving applications and vetting potential military leavers by looking at their documents and employment information.
Sixty percent of refugees remain in Russia, living off the grid. The group advises them to stop using their bank cards and SIM cards, and rent a house.
Others, like Oleg, have decided to leave Russia.
Free in the end
In late March, he fled to Moscow, then to the western city of Belgorod, then went south to cross into Georgia, only to find himself barred from leaving Russia.
He felt that he was lucky because he was not blocked at the border.
His friends told him that the police went to the house in Ufa where he registered.
Idite Lesom advised Oleg to follow a tried and tested escape route – travel overland to Minsk, the capital of former Soviet Belarus, whose border with Russia is not protected, and fly to Armenia.
He spent the whole day at the Minsk airport thinking that he should be arrested. It was only after reaching the Armenian capital, Yerevan, that his anxiety “went away”.
Oleg moved to another country and is waiting for a humanitarian visa to be obtained in another European Union country.
The other side of the front
In Ukraine, the refugee crisis is very serious.
Defense Minister Mykhailo Fyodorov said in January that more than 200,000 soldiers, or more than 20 percent of active duty personnel, have gone AWOL or deserted, and more than two million are absconding.
“For the Ukrainian army, this is a real problem, and for the Russian army, it is not,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of the University of Bremen in Germany told Al Jazeera.
Ukrainian police are often violent Collect men of fighting age – and have been repeatedly implicated in corrupt practices.
Ukrainians will remember their President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mainly in relation to the “fraudulent recruitment process that became one of his biggest and most visible failures”, Mitrokhin said.
‘He didn’t want to be near death’
Refugees cite harassment by officers, poor conditions and slow staff turnover.
In mid-April, adults the 14th Special Mechanized Brigade was fired after publishing pictures of weak soldiers who did not leave their remote location near the eastern town of Kupiansk for a year, drank melted snow, and almost starved because food was rarely delivered by drones.
For some workers, it is a matter of escaping death.
Olena, a 29-year-old mother of two, said her 31-year-old husband Arseny fled the army in February after eight months.
He said his friend was killed after receiving an order to “kill himself” from an officer with whom he had an argument.
“He didn’t want to be the next to die in vain.”
