Surviving Storm V – the brutal reality of life on the frontline as a Russian convict fighter
Surviving Storm V – the brutal reality of life on the frontline as a Russian convict fighter
A disturbing firsthand account of how a convicted drug dealer from Moscow went from prisoner to frontline soldier and now asylum seeker in France.
By Liza Fokht and Ilya Barabanov.
In September 2023, a 42-year old convicted Russian drug dealer called Andrei signed up to fight in Ukraine. Motivated solely by the desire to escape his seven- year jail sentence, and with no thought for the rights and wrongs of what he was doing, Andrei found himself leading a unit of fellow prisoners into battle in occupied Luhansk region. The story of his four brutal weeks on the frontline is a rare firsthand account of life and death in Russia’s notorious ‘Storm V’ units.
For safety reasons, “Andrei” is a pseudonym. The soldier’s full name and call-sign are known to the BBC. The BBC also holds copies of Andrei’s contract, criminal sentence, and additional documents confirming that his story matches his own experience, as well as photos and videos taken by Andrei on the frontline.
Content warning: this story contains very strong language and descriptions of violence
Part One. A Life of Crime
In the early hours 2nd October 2023, a column of Russian Storm V troops were making their way through a grove of trees on the outskirts of Makiivka, a village in occupied Luhansk region.
There were 35 of them. All had been released from prisons across Russia within the previous two weeks and this was their first combat mission.
They were led by a 42-year old ex-prisoner called Andrei.
At 4am they got the order to advance - 10 kilometres, towards the forward positions. Nobody explained why.
Spirits were high – some of the soldiers were laughing and cracking jokes. Andrei was furious.
By the end of the day, many of those he’d disciplined were already dead.
They marched for three or four hours. The soldiers were already exhausted, with loads of up to 40 kilos on their backs. Finally, just as dawn was breaking they reached their positions.
To everyone’s shock and surprise, the fighting began almost immediately.
Ukrainian troops opened fire with mortars, machine guns, and automatic weapons.
Most of the men in Andrei’s unit were at the front for the first time. They had no idea where the shots were coming from, or how to respond. They hadn’t been given any clear instructions by the higher command.
“We were all so cheerful, like it was a game,” Andrei remembers. “Then someone shouted – take cover in the trench, you assholes! What are you standing around for?”
Andrei’s platoon quickly fell apart. He jumped into the trench; soldiers who’d advanced the previous day were already crouched inside, looking horror struck. Two other men tried to take cover beside the trench.
While Andrei tried to force his way into the trench (one of the soldiers had frozen, blocking the way) a Ukrainian drone hit the two men left outside. Andrei, who’d just managed to climb inside, was briefly stunned.
The blast killed one man instantly, blowing his head off, The other, badly hurt, was left crawling on all fours, covered in blood, dirt and shrapnel.
It happened right in front of Andrei’s eyes, and in that moment he was suddenly hit by the stark reality of what he’d signed up for.
“I realised that they’d completely fucked us over,” he says.
Career criminal
Andrei’s background does not fit the profile of the average Russian prisoner fighting on the frontlines in Ukraine.
But in other ways his story is entirely typical of the generation of Russians who came of age during the turbulent 1990s.
He was born in the centre of Moscow in the early eighties, to a middle-class family. Both his parents were engineers.
“No-one in the family had been to prison,” he says. “Everyone had at least two degrees – your classic Moscow pseudo-intellectuals.”
The nineties passed “normally” for Andrei and his family.. His parents were pleased about the fall of the USSR and supported Yeltsin. Their views are very different now, he says. Influenced by what they see on state-controlled TV channels, both support the invasion of Ukraine, and mourn the “collapse of a great country”.
As a teenager Andrei was expelled from four schools for hooliganism. His parents pressured him to study at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering, but he dropped out in his second year. In the early two-thousands he decided to join the army, signing up with the Kantemirovskaya Tank division.
On his return to Moscow he got involved in the world of computer gaming, specialising in a game called Counter-Strike, in which ‘terrorists’ are pursued by ‘counter-terrorists’.
He played as part of a team which won national and CIS-wide championships. He jokes that so many hours of simulated armed combat, “probably set him up well to fight in Ukraine 20 years later”.
During this part of his life, Andrei became part of the violent world of football fandom. In the early noughties he was a member of the Gladiators, one of the “firms” orbiting the Moscow team Spartak.
“English-style hooliganism” was in fashion – gangs sought out the fans of other teams in bars and beat them up. By the time the gangs moved onto organised fights in the forest, Andrei had outgrown the scene – but he still supports Spartak to this day.
Andrei insists he had no interest in politics in those days, but acknowledges that like many football fans at that time he embraced right-wing, and sometimes openly neo-Nazi views. He remembers joining a protest outside the Yugoslav embassy, after the 1999 NATO airstrikes.
For a brief period he was a member of ‘Going Together’, the movement which sowed the seeds of the pro-Kremlin youth group, ‘Nashi’.
In 2005, Andrei went to Amsterdam for the first time and this is when he got involved in drug dealing. He and his gang trafficked marijuana overland from Holland to Russia. He claims it was the thrill and risk of the smuggling process that interested him, rather than end result of actually selling the drugs.
“The moral element? I can’t say it bothered me. I’m not a politician.”
“That was my sick, criminal mindset,” he tells the BBC. “You’ve either got it or you haven’t. Like a virus. Unfortunately for me – or fortunately, perhaps – I was born this way.”
He remembers coming up with a way to smuggle 50 kilos of marijuana into Russia welded inside a mechanical part for an excavator.
“You’ve got to clear customs, unload your contraband, saw open the welded metal…now that’s intelligence, that’s using your brain,” he says with disarming pride.
By the time he was 30 Andrei was a dollar millionaire, and had bought his first flat.
But the law caught up with him.
In 2010 he was arrested for bringing tens of kilos of marijuana to Moscow hidden in gas canisters in the oven of a mobile home. He was charged under Article 228, with attempted large-scale drugs smuggling. It was an offence that should have merited a 13-year prison sentence but in the end Andrei sold his flat, used the proceeds to buy off some officials and ended up with seven years instead.
Freedom, money and adventure
A further ten-thousand-dollar bribe ensured Andrei was able to serve his sentence in the relative comfort of Moscow’s Lefortovo jail, rather than in a prison colony. He got a job in the prison library, learned to paint icons, got regular food parcels from his parents and had high hopes of meeting “interesting people” while inside.
Andrei was released on parole in 2016, and incredibly he was offered a job with the Interior Ministry drugs squad. His role was to become a “problem solver” - the person who collects bribes from dealers who are caught selling drugs.
Andrei agreed. He was soon on the official payroll of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as an “undercover agent,” once even receiving a bonus. He says he also got a cut from any bribes collected - paid in bitcoin.
He had lots of cash, not much to do, and spent his time partying, often in Moscow’s Gasholder club. It was in Gasholder that he first met his future wife. They went on to have a daughter together.
At some point, Andrei graduated from middleman to businessman – seizing drugs on behalf of the Ministry, and selling them on, splitting the profits fifty-fifty. But in the summer of 2021, justice caught up with him for a second time and he was arrested.
Andrei was in pre-trial detention when he heard the news that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Even at that early stage he says, prisoners were already discussing the possibility of joining up to get out of jail.
Andrei wanted to be free, but he didn’t believe the rumours. “Who’d give weapons to criminals, they’d have to be crazy!” he remembers thinking.
As a reoffending drugs trafficker, Andrei should have received a heavy sentence, but he did a deal with investigators. In return for giving evidence against another Interior Ministry official, he got seven years and returned to Lefortovo prison.
But it wasn’t to last. In the summer of 2023, Andrei tried to send out a message about what was happening in Lefortovo. His note was intercepted. As a punishment, he was sent to a high-security prison in Vladimirsky region.
Naively, Andrei thought his status as a “professional criminal” would help him endear himself to the guards and his fellow inmates. It didn’t. On arrival he found himself subject to the same brutal ‘welcome’ afforded to all new prisoners.
“They strip you naked, stand you with your legs and arms spread, and beat the shit out of you,” he tells the BBC. This went on for four or five hours, during which time prisoners were also threatened with rape, he says.
Andrei kept shouting at his tormentors that he wanted to be sent to fight in Ukraine.
Eventually the message got through, and by September he had signed the papers and was on his way to the frontline.
“A prisoner always thinks he’s smarter than everyone else,” he says. “He imagines he can just fucking pull the wool over their eyes and go straight home to mama with money in his pocket and a ‘Hero of Russia’ medal on this chest.”
There are three main reasons why most prisoners volunteer to fight in Ukraine, Andrei says - freedom, money and adventure.
For him it was only ever about getting out of prison early. But did he actually give any thought to the fact that he was about to participate in the occupation of a neighbouring country and the killing of its people, the BBC asked him.
He hesitates for a moment.
“I didn’t focus on all that,” he says. “I thought there’d be a way to avoid killing people. I didn’t want to kill anyone. The moral element? I can’t say it bothered me. I’m not a politician. Occupation or no; I wasn’t interested in technicalities. When I see an open road, I take it. I keep my eyes on the road, not the obstacles.”
In September 2023, Andrei signed a year’s contract in the prison warden’s office. He wrote on the form that he would serve for one year, but later he would learn that the the rules had changed and there was no longer a time limit on how long prisoners were expected to serve.
On the morning of 15th September, Andrei was loaded into a prison van and taken to a camp near Vladimir.
He was issued with a gold Sberbank card, with the promise that he would be paid 200 thousand rubles (£1744) per month. An official from the Federal Penitentiary Service made a solemn speech: "Don’t let us down, sons! Let’s do this! We’re giving you a chance!"
The prisoners were flown to Moscow and then on to Voronezh. It was the first time many of them had ever been on a plane. From Voronezh they were driven across the Ukrainian border to a training camp in occupied Luhansk region.
Like most enlisted prisoners, they were assigned to what’s known as a ‘Storm V’ company. Andrei explains that ‘V’ is short for vityazi, the Russian word for ‘knights’.
The ‘V’ soldiers are known as the ‘Veh-shki’ and despite the romantic ‘knight’ moniker , their real role is to be sent into battle at the front of attack waves, usually incurring heavy casualties.
The prisoners spent 12 days training at the camp. Their instructors were either mobilised soldiers or former prisoners. Andrei says nothing they were taught was useful in battle. Having conducted himself “adequately,” Andrei found himself in charge of the group.
And so, at dawn on 2nd October they were sent into battle for the first time.
Part Two – The First Battle
Survival tactics
After one of his men was killed right in front of him, Andrei felt “uncomfortable” staying in the trench. He and another fighter broke cover and ran for the bushes, under shellfire. They met a third soldier, and the trio decided to “get he hell away from the missiles” in the absence of any orders from above.
Spotting a shell crater, they jumped inside to shelter. A Ukrainian sniper saw them and fired causing the soil around them to fly in all directions.
The soldiers were still trying to decide what to do next when they realised there was a Ukrainian drone flying overhead. They all saw the red light, the usual signal for the imminent dropping of a grenade. Andrei thought it was game over – with the sniper so close, the group couldn’t stick their heads out of the crater, let alone run. Yet staying put would mean a near-certain grenade strike.
Then something unexpected happened. The drone operator dropped the grenade on another group of Russian soldiers hiding in a nearby wooded area. It was a direct hit – they all heard the cries of pain. The sniper paused for a moment to reload; Andrei and his crew took their chance and ran.
The soldiers scrambled over fallen trees to reach the road, where wounded men were lying. Andrei remembers one soldier – call-sign Rook – with no fingers left on one hand, the bare bones poking through his glove “like a chicken’s.”
Andrei worked out that saving the wounded soldier was his only way to escape the “clusterfuck” on the battlefield. He started dragging the half-conscious man towards point-zero, where his command was based.
Carrying Rook, Andrei travelled a mile along the road before meeting a group on their way out of the forest. These were the evacuators, whose sole duty was removing wounded soldiers from the field. They demanded that Andrei give them Rook, and Andrei was forced to return towards the frontline.
He tried to make his way as slowly as possible, thinking what to do next. Then he came across another group, carrying a blood-soaked soldier. The injured man was overweight, and the soldiers were tired and fed up. Andrei took him off their hands and kept walking, aiming for the rear.
He had to hand over this one over too, but hekept on finding more wounded men to evacuate, until the order finally came for all remaining survivors to head to “point zero.”
Although Andrei didn’t know it at the time, almost all of the 35 men under his command that morning were dead.
Going through the motions
On his way to point zero, Andrei calmed down. He assumed that he and the other survivors who “fucked up and ran away” would be taken off the frontline and sent back to camp. But their commanders had other plans.
The survivors were marched back into formations without a moment’s rest. Many had lost their weapons – they were promptly reequipped and sent straight out on another mission.
Andrei – who found himself in charge again – described this next mission as “suicidal”.
The group were ordered to replace soldiers who’d been dispatched to seize two Ukrainian dugouts the previous day. Andrei’s men travelled in two armoured vehicles. The first was ambushed by Ukrainian troops, killing everyone inside. The second – carrying seven soldiers – reached the dugout. Storm V captured the dugout, but was surrounded.
A Ukrainian negotiator walked towards Andrei, white flag in hand. He asked the Russians to surrender without a fight – there was nowhere to run.
But the Russians shot him at point-blank range.
“I don’t know why they did it,” Andrei says. He suggested that the group “simply didn’t know how to act” when faced with shellfire. The BBC has been unable to independently verify this part of Andrei’s story.
When asked whether this was the only obvious war crime he was aware of during his month at the front, Andrei replied: “The whole war is one big war crime.”
Andrei and his soldiers headed towards the captured dugout in armoured vehicles, with a tank for cover. Dusk was falling – Andrei said he’d remember this “beautiful pastoral evening” forever.
The Russian vehicles reached the positions just as a Ukrainian anti-tank missile came the other way.
“That was a lovely sight too…a rogue missile heading straight towards us, and BAM! It hits our tank right on the nose. Black smoke, flames, shrapnel everywhere.”
Andrei and the others in the first vehicle were so startled that they leapt out, straight into minefield. The second vehicle sped away into the distance - it came under fire later killing everyone on board.
Andrei and the survivors ran into the woods “in total disorder,” only to meet the infantry, who sent them straight back, on foot.
That evening, Andrei found himself back at the positions where he’d been under Ukrainian fire at dawn. Andrei was meant to find a soldier with the call-sign “Fox”. He remembers: “I found him, and I was supposed to tell him how to reach the dugout surrounded by Ukrainians. He [Fox] said, you are too fucking much! We’ll never make it!”
Andrei set out yet again with the other three survivors. It was dark and they had no map. With Ukrainian guns pointing in their direction, Andrei told Fox to radio into command and say it couldn’t be done. Command ignored them, gave the order again, and kept repeating Andrei’s call-sign.
A string of curses came through the radio. Worse still, Andrei and his fighters were informed that they’d be “nullified” – ie: killed – if they refused the mission.
Andrei took the threat seriously. Feeling the need to “go through the motions” to cover their backs, he encouraged the group to move closer to the dugout.
Some live, some die
Andrei and his group split up. His “lazy” colleagues took the road, whilst he took Fox’s advice and crawled across a field, despite the mines.
Storm V fighters are given water bottles and loaves of bread; white bread that shone in the gathering gloom and could be seen “a mile away”. Andrei moved slowly, using his loaf of bread to test the ground for mines.
The three men on the road met Ukrainian troops, as Fox had predicted. The Ukrainians opened fire; one of the Russians threw a grenade.
Two of Andrei’s men were badly wounded. Hurling his loaf of bread into the middle of the field, Andrei ran over to help them. He reached the rear with the wounded soldiers. This time, they were allowed to stay put.
Andrei said this episode sums up how Russia’s former prisoners are treated in the army. “Some live, some die. But we kind of tried.”
Back at the rear that night – 3rd October – Andrei was finally able to get some sleep. But not for long. A Ukrainian drone hit the dugout, and Andrei was concussed for the second time in 24 hours.
In the morning they heard that the soldiers they’d been trying to reach on the previous day’s disastrous rescue mission had decided to make their own way back to the camp. There were seven of them – six ex-con Storm V fighters and their commander, ‘Marine’, a mobilised soldier. Andrei and the others were ordered to cover the retreat.
Soon came yet another change of plan. They heard over the radio that ‘Marine’ had reached the burnt-out armoured vehicle from yesterday. Andrei was sent to rescue Marine (nobody was sent after the other six men.)
“I said, what the fuck is wrong with you?” he says, remembering the order to re-enter the surrounded territory. “Everyone said, go on, you’ll have to crawl, we’ll cover you.”
Andrei crawled across the field. By the time he reached Marine, the mobilised commander had already been wounded in the leg. Andrei carried him out; an act for which he was nominated for a bravery award.
As for the other six men, three were killed in the dugout, and a fourth ran and was hit by a drone.
Get me out of here
Andrei spent four weeks at the front, the whole of October 2023. For him and his companions, the willingness to fight soon drained away.
“In battle you don’t have these kinds of doubts, you’re not thinking about war as a mistake,” he muses. “There’s no handwringing…you don’t really think at all. It’s a brutal, animal state. All senses are heightened. You’re at your limit.”
Yet during their breaks, the former prisoners were increasingly voicing their doubts. Almost everyone regretted coming to Ukraine.
“I’d often hear stuff like – oh, what was I thinking, trading my lovely, comfortable cell for this pile of shit?” Andrei recalls. “Say you had another chance – a fairy comes down with a wave of her wand and whoosh! You’re back in your cell, with three extra years to serve, would you take it? Yes, yes! Anything – just get me out of here!”
“I want nothing to do with those horrible events ever again in my life. It was hell. There can’t be anything worse than war,” says Andrei. Yet he admits that the Storm V men did not discuss this moral element when at the front. They did not regret their participation in the occupation, or the murder of Ukrainians.
“When you’re in the zone [prison camp], all you think about is saving your own life from those who are trying to kill you. That thought – how did I get here? It’s a long way down your list of priorities. There is no time for reflection.”
Andrei insists that he never killed anyone during his entire deployment. He was mainly tasked with rescuing injured soldiers from the battlefield, and if he shot at anything he says, it was at Ukrainian drones.
“Did I kill anyone? Definitely not,” he tells the BBC. “Thank God I didn’t have to do that.”
It’s impossible for the BBC to verify this claim, and worth noting that in addition to bringing injured soldiers out, he was also required to deliver ammunition supplies to those involved in storming Ukrainian positions.
“If you live, you’ll be a super-orc in shining armour. An orc general. And if you die, well, sorry, too bad, brother. Your orc girls will cry for you.”
Like many Russians, Andrei routinely uses a derogatory slang word to refer to Ukrainians, but he says among the soldiers there was very little hatred of the people on the other side, even after heavy fighting.
No-one talked much about politics either, he says. Some soldiers complained they didn’t know what was going on; others boasted about defeating Nazis, but after a battle, people mostly chatted about what was for dinner.
Andrei only had a few interactions with local Ukrainians. Once, in a break between battles, the fighters were sent to the store in the nearby village of Krasnorichenske. He says this was the first hint that the invading army wouldn’t be welcomed with open arms.
In the store where the soldiers bought sausages, chocolate, and energy drinks, they found themselves shortchanged: “They’d get their calculators and be like – one thousand, one thousand five hundred, two thousand….that’ll be seventy thousand.”
“After everything on TV, we were practically expecting flowers. And those angry faces!” he mimics a grimace. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
But such expeditions were rare —the Storm V fighters rarely left the frontline. Andrey hoped his first battle would be his last. He hoped in vain – he had four combat missions in a month, a few day’s break between them. Andrei was sent as part of the evacuation group into a series of assaults around Makiivka. As of April 2024, this territory remains under Ukrainian control.
“You’re an orc, go for it”
Although Andrei only spent a month at the front, it was enough for him to see the difference between those fighting on the Russian and Ukrainian sides.
He acknowledges, reluctantly, that the Ukrainians are driven by the urge to defend their native land. “They are so stubborn, they hate us,” he says. “And we’re just fighting for the sake of it…that’s the life we fucking lead.”
Andrei doesn’t think it’s true that Ukrainian commanders care more than their Russian counterparts about saving the lives of their soldiers. “Nope – it was all the same,” he says. However, he did witness one frontline zone where Ukrainian soldiers were ordered to retreat if their positions became too dangerous to hold.
“I guess their spirits were weak,” he adds, saying that it was thanks to these Ukrainian retreats, that the Russians were able to advance in the autumn of 2023, incurring huge losses along the way.
Andrei refers to his fellow soldiers as “brave warriors” or “inglorious bastards”. But sometimes he also uses the term coined by the Ukrainian side, “the orcs” – a reference to the monsters in the Lord of the Rings. And he describes the behaviour of the Russian command as “orc-ish”.
“There’s no pity. It doesn’t matter how many people end up dead,” he says, explaining the code by which Russian prisoners lived on the front. “You’re an orc – go for it like there’s no tomorrow. If you live, you’ll be a super-orc in shining armour. An orc general. And if you die, well, sorry, too bad, brother. Your orc girls will cry for you.”
“We’ve got made in China, they’ve got made in NATO”
Andrei likes to talk about military hardware.
He believes the Ukrainian army is on a higher level in terms of technology. “They have everything – they don’t need anything. “Better communications via Starlink, better walkie-talkies that Russian’s can’t listen to, and better drones.”
Andrei says the Russians didn’t use drones in the times and places he fought. Ukrainian drones regularly dropped mines and shells on their positions – FPV drones [first person view] and the heavier Vampire drones, which the soldiers nicknamed “Baba Yagas” – after the flying witch in Russian fairy tales.
“All their stuff is cooler and better quality. We’ve got made-in-China; they’ve got made by NATO.” This applied to food and uniforms too, he says. He remembers spending his final days in the war zone in the trousers taken from a Ukrainian serviceman. All the Storm V fighters had blisters from the boots they were given, he says.
Ukrainian first-aid-kits were the envy of the Russian troops. “We’d divide them up straight away,” Andrei relates, “They had good haemostatic sponges and dressings for bleeding, good pain relief.” In the camp, the Storm V fighters were given a basic, strong pain-killer as a cure-all, but whenever he got the chance, Andrei would take the drugs from abandoned Ukrainian first-aid-kits and use them instead.
Part Three. Escape
Punishment pits
Andrei was always thinking up ways to escape Storm V. By the end of October, he was toying with the idea of getting a self-inflicted injury so he could be sent to hospital. He’d even started eyeing up suitable trenches to receive “a light shrapnel wound” from a passing grenade.
Getting wounded was the only way to avoid going into battle. Nothing else was tolerated.
There have been multiple media reports about the use of so-called punishment pits by Russians on the Ukrainian front.
Andrei saw it for himself, when his group were sent to storm the Balka Zhuravka gully near Kreminna. Some soldiers refused, as the territory was under direct Ukrainian fire. They were put into a pit. The pit was also used as a drunk-tank by Andrei’s regiment. Contractors, ex-prisoners, and the mobilised could all receive this punishment.
There were separate pits for privates and officers at Andrei’s camp.
“I saw it…it was just a fucking hole in the ground,” says Andrei. “It stank of shit. There was a sentry on guard and people down below, their eyes shining in the dark. Food was thrown down to them, and they had to use the same pit as a toilet.”
But Andrei heard tales of worse punishments than the pit.
Fighters from a group nicknamed Black Mamba told Andrei they were being followed by another detachment. If someone tried to retreat, he’d run straight into the forward ranks of the next group. “They’d say – it’s that way! Oh, you’re not going? BANG!” Andrei mimes a gunshot.
Andrei never considered surrendering to the Ukrainians. He said the Russian commanders told the recruits horror stories about how the Ukrainian army treats POWs.
“They’d say, it’s your call, boys! They’ll cut you, they’ll rape you, you won’t make it out alive.” Andrei was shocked to learn from the BBC that Ukraine regularly returns prisoners of war to Russia in exchanges.
Not everyone could take the pressure. One of Andrei’s fellow soldiers shot himself.
“He just couldn’t fucking take any more. He was exhausted.” Andrei had to find a stretcher to return the suicide’s body to point zero. That was an unusual privilege – according to Andrei, the bodies of dead stormtroopers were usually left in the woods of Luhansk for months on end.
Andrei got sick during his last battle, near Svatove. Pneumonia had been detected in the camp, but Andrei’s commander sent him on the mission anyway. “I got the sense they were just going to finish us off.”
On Andrei’s birthday, he had to swim the river Zherebets by night. The bridge had been blown up by the Ukrainian army. Andrei had a fever. He spent several days afterwards coughing up blood, but he hadn’t wanted to “abandon his own guys”.
By 1st November, the soldiers realised that the Ukrainian encirclement had become a serious threat. Andrei’s pneumonia had spread; he could hardly breathe. He headed for the rear, without even the strength to wear his bulletproof vest. He left it behind, handed his gun to a friend, and he and his commander got out.
“I walked with just my helmet, and prayed. We were lucky – an evacuation group ahead of us was blown to bits. But I made it,” he says.
One miracle after another
Andrei said what happened next was “one miracle after another”.
Discharged with pneumonia, he was sent by mistake from the field hospital to the rear, across the Russian border in Belgorod. He knew he’d had enough and had to find a way not to return to the front. But he was ashamed to desert – for his parents and for the rest of his unit.
“I was trying to save face. It was just stupid pride,” he says, but admits he also didn’t want to lose his army bonus.
He tried to get transferred from the hospital to a different division, but his ex-prisoner status proved restrictive. Only then did he reach out to ‘Leave through the Forest’, and NGO which helps deserters and wanted people escape from Russia.
It wasn’t easy to escape the Belgorod hospital, where the wounded were under guard. Andrei bribed the doctors with a bottle of cognac to send him to Ivanovo, and from Ivanovo he was allowed some leave in Moscow.
Back in the capital, Andrei walked the streets in his military uniform. Again, he was surprised by the response. “It upset me. I’ve seen the films where US Marines go into a bar, everyone clapping…” Andrei felt people were giving him looks: “Who’s this asshole?” After that, he ended the “experiment” and hung up his uniform in the wardrobe, never to be touched again.
In Moscow, Andrei was reunited with his wife and daughter. He strolled through the park, he went to a restaurant. Dressed up, with squeaky clean teeth, he recalled that he’d gone 20 days without showering at the front. “I thought – sorry boys, not happening again." He made his final decision to desert in early 2024.
Back in 2019, Andrei and his family had gone on holiday to Monaco. He’d received a five-year Schengen visa, which – incredibly – was still in his passport, even after his arrest and detention. So he left Russia, travelling through two other countries before finally arriving in France, where he surrendered to the French police.
During his interrogation, he gave the police detailed information about his time at the front, and handed over a flash-drive of photos and video footage from Ukraine, and from the hospitals.
Andrei says his Storm V comrades don’t blame him for deserting, but only one of them was willing to help him escape. “That’s the kind of guys they are. Once they’re in, they’ll fight to the bitter end.”
According to Andrei, not a single one of the 105 ex-prisoner fighters with whom he began service on 1st October are still alive. It’s difficult to verify this claim. The Russian Ministry of Defence has stopped issuing information about casualties.
Andrei has filed for political asylum, and is waiting for the French authorities to make a decision on his case.
Read the full story in Russian here.
Translated by Pippa Crawford.
Edited by Jenny Norton.
