A strong message. Two and a half years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lieutenant Alexander, who participated in the conflict, is one of six Russian deserters recently arrived in France. After a journey fraught with obstacles, they ask their former brothers in arms to flee the army.
“I was shocked” when the war started, “I didn’t understand what was happening,” recalls this dark-skinned man with a determined look from Caen, a city in western France, where the AFP met.
After leaving with his unit to carry out “military exercises” in Crimea, a territory annexed by Russia in 2014, he says he crossed the demarcation line in a convoy and suddenly found himself “in another country”, without anything having happened to him. previously. “The bosses told us that it would be over in ten days,” he recalls.
“I didn’t want to get involved.”
The next six months passed like a nightmare for this former communications officer, who says he installed communications networks and other relay stations, sometimes on the front lines, but never fighting.
And to remember their “fears”. That of dying of course, but also “the fear of what (he was) doing.”
On leave in the summer of 2022, Alexandre asks to leave the army… and understands that this will be impossible when, a few days later, on September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin decrees the mobilization of 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine.
An announcement that sounds like a sword for all soldiers who resist the war and who know they are deprived of any resource to escape from it.
Like Sergei (not his real name), 27 years old, soldier in an infantry unit where he was in charge of IT and training soldiers. The mobilization means for him that he will be forced to go to Ukraine, “without any guarantee” that he will not fight, he recalls.
“He had knowledge of Ukraine and understood perfectly what was happening there,” explains this fragile man whom he met in Paris. “I didn’t want to get involved.”
Escape “through a window”
The partial mobilization was even more brutal for Andreï Amonov. This construction worker in Yakutia, a poor region of Siberia, is summoned by his boss, who after ten years of good and loyal service tells him that he is “fired” and must enlist in the army. Hundreds of his colleagues suffer the same blackmail, he says.
The next day, they put them on a plane, without telling them their destination, says Andreï Amonov, 32 years old. They finally landed in Buryatia, further south, and were taken to a training center, from where they managed to escape five days later, “through a window.”
Like Sergei and Alexander, Andrei Amonov fled to Kazakhstan, a multi-day trip to one of the few countries – along with Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, the latter two states closest to the Kremlin – to which Russians can Go with only your internal passport. the equivalent of an identity document.
Because Russian soldiers rarely have a passport that allows them to leave the country: to obtain one, they must have the approval of their hierarchy and the intelligence services. According to several NGOs, this document is usually confiscated.
“Exploited weaknesses”
On May 12, his birthday, Andreï Amonov was “beaten, handcuffed and taken to the police station” by Kazakh police officers. But his lawyer allows him to avoid the worst. Sergei remembers the agents who came to question his neighbors, then friends, about him.
The three defectors end up meeting through a local NGO, the International Human Rights Office of Kazakhstan. They also meet a fourth companion in misfortune, Mikhail (not his real name), who arrived in Kazakhstan seven months after them.
Mikhail, an officer in the Moscow region, told AFP that he “took advantage of the weaknesses” of the Russian military bureaucracy, did not respond to his calls and prolonged the proceedings initiated against him for his refusal to go to Ukraine. Flee at the end of May 2023, a few days before his trial.
“The day I arrived in Astana was the best day of my life. In Moscow, the level of danger was colossal,” says this athletic man with long hair.
“Farewell to arms”
France then agreed to welcome them, after months of scrupulous promotion and verification of their stories by several NGOs, including Russia-Libertés. A decision “unprecedented” in Europe, according to the president of this organization, Olga Prokopieva, who calls on Paris to “go further in welcoming Russian deserters” and other European countries to “follow the French example.”
According to the NGO Idite Lessom (Get Away), which helps them, there are currently around 500 registered Russian defectors in Kazakhstan and Armenia and thousands more are hiding in Russia.
From Caen, Paris, Metz (northeast)… the six men, finally safe, now dream of a peaceful and integrated life, but remain determined to make themselves heard. Together they have been working for months on a project, “Proshaï oruzhie” (Farewell to Arms), in which soldiers speak anonymously about the war.
Russia “cannot defeat” Ukraine with an army “that tries to plagiarize modernity, but whose methods date back to the USSR,” jokes Mijail, who wants to “transmit” his convictions to his “former colleagues” to “call them to defect.” .
“Perhaps, thanks to my example, someone will be inspired and want to leave the army,” believes Alexander, for his part, for whom “the weaker the army at the front, the fewer people there are, the more the war will end.” quickly and Ukraine will win.”
“My message to the soldier is that there is always a choice,” says Sergei. “There is always the possibility of putting down the weapon, of not killing other people (…). If it is surrender, it is surrender. If it is desertion, it is desertion.”
Source: BFM TV