18/ As soon as the Red Cross pointed me out, and this man [Ukrainian journalist Vladimir Zolkin] posted a video with me on YouTube, I was exchanged ten days later. But two of us from the unit were still wanted [for desertion]. Then it was all taken down."

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When he returned to Russia, he says, "The unit immediately told me: 'Write an explanatory note—where have you been all this time?' I was a prisoner of war, bitch!"

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16/ Another man, 48-year-old Dmitry Kuznetsov from Nizhnevartovsk, was released from Ukrainian captivity in February 2023 as part of a prisoner swap. However, he found that he and a fellow former POW had been put on the AWOL list while they were in captivity.

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15/ "I will go to a unit somewhere near Vyborg to determine my fitness. And then it's back to the war. Wherever they send me, they'll send me. I'm an indentured labourer here, I don't want to go myself." He has now been taken off the AWOL list.

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13/ "My treatment is long, I don't know how it will end. My command did not inform me where I was [meant to be], and until I found the personnel office myself, the issue was not resolved. There was an investigation. I had all the papers."

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4/ As Mediazona notes, this allows the army to "send them straight back to war. Moreover, they became more dependent on their commanding officers who could report a subordinate at any moment — and his suspended sentence would turn into an actual prison term."

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6/ 43-year-old Andrei, a car electrician from Kursk, was one such. He was not physically fit to serve, having an intervertebral hernia, but his protests were ignored and he was not given a medical examination before being mobilised and sent to the army.

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2/ Mediazona reports that Russia's military courts are dealing with over 100 desertion cases a week, with 2,076 such cases in the first half of 2023 alone – twice as much as for the whole of 2022 and three times more than in 2021. The great majority involve mobiliised soldiers.

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