“I’d rather be in prison”. Some Russian soldiers are begging to be jailed rather than fight in Ukraine, but the system won’t let them

Since March, a 37-year-old junior lieutenant Anton Putyatov has been living in a tent on a set of wooden bunks two stories high. The tent stands in a camp on the edge of Verkhnyaya Pyshma, a small town in the Urals north of Yekaterinburg. The camp is known, unofficially, as a collection point for soldiers suspected of desertion or going AWOL.

Around 180 men are held there, Putyatov says, distributed across seven canvas tents—among them wounded soldiers. The population turns over constantly: a few new arrivals appear most days; every so often, a batch of 80 or 90 is loaded up and sent back to the front. In his first month, Putyatov counted three such dispatches.

“The chief here, a lieutenant in the military police, sent word through his subordinates that I won’t be let to live a life here—open my mouth, we’ll break you,” he says. “There’s aggression on all sides, because they know I have a temper. But I’m holding on, because I understand it will get worse. The conditions are close to null. Yes, they feed us; yes, you can wash; yes, they hand out phones for a couple of hours in the evening. But at night they won’t even let you go to the toilet—they say, piss in your pocket if you have to, we’re not letting you out. It’s because of the high rate of escapes.”

This is Putyatov’s second stint at the camp. He spent nearly half of 2025 there, from May to October. Throughout that time, and again now, he has been demanding only one thing of the Russian state: that it put him on trial.

“I have submitted a formal refusal to participate in the “special military operation; I am prepared to face trial and imprisonment, but my civic right to choose is being violated, and they keep sending me back. And so, here I am again,” he reflects.

Putyatov is far from the only Russian serviceman fighting for a seat in the dock. He is part of a strange, growing legal phenomenon that has emerged in the fifth year of the war in Ukraine: soldiers pleading with investigators to open criminal cases against them, and paying for legal counsel to defend their right to be locked up.

Putyatov’s Case

Before the war, Anton Putyatov taught English at a school in Yekaterinburg. In September 2022, he says, he could predict the inevitable and rather than wait for a mobilisation notice, he signed a contract with the 43rd separate railway brigade, where an old friend of his was already serving.

“There was a risk of ending up in combat, more than once,” he says. “But it’s one thing to go off into the unknown, and another to go with prepared people you know won’t abandon you.”

For a while, his luck held. He saw no fighting. In Lyman he guarded the heavy machinery used to dig trenches; in Svatove, he handled supply; in Luhansk, he built and protected railway lines. His commanders rated him highly, and he was granted regular leave.

It was during one of those visits home that his wife, Yevgenia, became pregnant. Doctors warned the birth would be difficult. In May 2024 Putyatov was promoted to junior lieutenant and submitted a request to be discharged. He wanted to be with his family. Instead, he was transferred to a different unit based in Chebarkul, 300 km from Yekaterinburg. When Yevgenia went into labour, no leave was granted. Putyatov went AWOL anyway. He missed the birth, but made it in time to see his wife and his newborn son.

A week later, in July 2024, he was sent to the front, to an assault unit attacking Novohrodivka, on the Pokrovsk front. The assault lasted three months. He describes the Russian losses as “colossal” and “unimaginably huge”.

In October he was hit by shrapnel in the calf. Front-line medics, after several attempts, conceded the wound needed a rear hospital. Putyatov clashed with his commanders before he was finally allowed to travel home for surgery. Once the metal was out, the medical board issued a category G-30 ruling (temporarily unfit, with 30 days leave).

He came back two days early, he says, to give himself time to prepare and to use his own money to buy kit. He was reassigned again, this time to the 1435th motor rifle regiment based at Totskoye-2 in Orenburg region. The treatment of the rank-and-file there, he says, was as bad as it gets.

“Hand over your bank card. Hand over your cash. Hand over your PIN. You’re gonna get smacked in the head. We’ll break you, we’ll zero you out. Every single day, almost every free minute. They were after me when I was on duty, everywhere. No one wanted to do anything about it.”

On January 20, 2025, Putyatov ordered a taxi and rode out to the city of Samara. He has been AWOL ever since.

The pleading

He was detained on May 2, 2025, and sent to the collection point at Verkhnyaya Pyshma.

At first, he tried to earn his way out of trouble. He used old connections to bring in “humanitarian aid”, helped with the hunt for other deserters, “kept order” in the camp. He was promised a transfer to a chemical-defence brigade in Yekaterinburg, as a drone-platoon commander. At the last moment, the transfer was refused.

So Putyatov went looking for a military investigator himself.

“I told him: while completely sober and conscious of every word and its consequences, I refuse to take part in the special military operation, and I am ready for imprisonment,” he recalls. “He said: understood, we’ll work on it.”

The investigator, by Putyatov’s account, promised to open a case under Part 5 of Article 337 of the Criminal code, “Unauthorised abandonment of unit during mobilisation”, carrying five to ten years.

Instead, in October 2025, Putyatov was sent back to the 1435th regiment. Not just the same regiment, but the same company. His comrades, he says, beat him at once and took everything he had—including a tiny sock that had belonged to his newborn son, which he was carrying as a talisman. They promised him that the moment he reached the front, they would shoot him themselves.

He did not wait. On his first combat task, he deserted again. He recorded a video appeal, and his wife circulated it; it spread quickly through Ukrainian and anti-mobilisation Telegram channels.

“I am not proud of what I did, of going AWOL,” he says in the recording. “I will be ashamed of it all my life. But I have made my choice. I am ready for imprisonment under the current law, by court verdict. If the court gives me five to ten years, I will serve them. If they give me the right to parole, I will do everything not to disgrace it, so I can return to my wife and my child. But I refuse to go back to that regiment. I renounce my rank.”

He took his protest to the same investigator he had spoken to earlier. The investigator wrote back, sympathetically: he had no power to redirect a military district, or to come and collect him personally. The Ministry of Defence and the prosecutor’s office wrote, less sympathetically, that he should return to his unit.

In March of this year, he was caught again—he had been doing odd jobs to feed his family, and visiting home sometimes—and brought back to Verkhnyaya Pyshma. He is told the new charge is the heavier offence of desertion, not merely unauthorised absence. But nobody, he says, seems in any particular hurry to investigate it.

“The lawyers everyone in this camp has hired are good specialists. None of it makes any difference: refusals, appeals, applications, citing the articles of the law.”

Not only Putyatov

Anton Putyatov is far from unique among Russian servicemen who seek prison but are barred from it. Yet, even estimating the approximate number of men in this situation is impossible—the unofficial “deserter databases” circulating online cannot be considered reliable or complete sources. In fact, names found on these lists often appear in the list of casualties maintained by Mediazona. It suggests a pattern when deserters being sent back to the front lines instead of prison.

The detention facility for deserters at Verkhnyaya Pyshma has been cited before Putyatov’s public video appeal. In August 2025, Vitaly Pyankovskiy, 45, originally from the Donetsk region of Ukraine, was detained there. He had relocated to Yekaterinburg with his family in 2023 and stated that he never received any official summons or draft notice. The military police apprehended him when he merely went to renew his passport; according to the security force officials, Pyankovskiy was charged with “evading mobilization”.

During his nearly two months at Verkhnyaya Pyshma, the investigative department overseeing the Yekaterinburg garrison refused to file charges related to unauthorized absence from unit. Although he was scheduled for transfer to the front line, just before boarding the plane he felt unwell and was rushed to a hospital where he underwent coronary bypass surgery. Pyankovskiy’s lawyer declined to speak with Mediazona because Russian authorities have designated our publication as an “foreign agent”.

Another serviceman arrived at Verkhnyaya Pyshma after spending over a year and a half on the front line, having deserted his unit following harassment and extortion by a new officer. He reached Yekaterinburg only to be promptly detained by military police, according to his mother, as told by the local Telegram channel “Podslushano Belgorod”.

Reports of other temporary military holding points for unauthorised absent soldiers are frequently popping up across various military Telegram channels. Judging by these messages, makeshift encampments for deserters may exist in nearly every region, from annexed Crimea right through to Primorye in the Pacific Far East.

Due to their unclear legal status, servicemen can remain in these temporary camps indefinitely; their fate rests solely with the whims of military police officers, investigators from the military investigative department, and the unit commander. During the war in Ukraine, operating such facilities has become routine, according to ex-deserter Vladimir Berngardt. Berngardt now lives in Yerevan and runs a project called Tverdy Znak (“Hard Sign”), which provides assistance to other Russian soldiers disillusioned with the Ukraine invasion.

In early September 2025, Berngardt was detained after fleeing the front and brought to the military commandant’s office in Krasnodar. He spent a month in a cage on the fourth floor of the building. In the same cage and in the next room, other runaways came and went. He talked to them, for want of anything else to do.

“Every day they brought someone new in, and every day someone’s unit came to collect them. On average, people were there a day to three days. I was the longest-staying resident. This is the first port of call after a deserter is caught — or after he turns himself in. The mechanism is this: they grab the person, or he walks in himself. The military police rings his unit. They ask, do you want him back? Sometimes the unit says no, don’t bother. Then he goes downstairs to the tented holding camp, and he stays there until trial, where he most often gets a suspended sentence—and goes back to his unit, or to a different one, but in any case to an assault company. The other option is that the unit does come for him. In that case nobody asks him a thing. They just take him and drive him away,”
he explains.

One young deserter, Berngardt remembers, kept trying to get to a phone—his wife was five months pregnant and he wanted to know whether they were having a boy or a girl. After he finally got through, he was told that his unit officer would come for him.

“The whole time we were there, he kept saying: I won’t go to the assault units, I’d rather do time, I’m not coming out of this cage. In the end two huge military police came in. He clung to the bars, they peeled him off, twisted his arms behind his back, put the handcuffs on and drove him to the front in that hunched-up state. There’s a lot of stories like this. Nobody asks if you want to go. Everyone who says ‘I’d rather do the time’—they don’t do the time.”

After his month in the cage, Berngardt was moved to another holding camp in Novorossiysk in southern Russia: thirty tented spaces and guards. The procedure for sending people back to the front was a little subtler there, he says.

“Officers would persuade new arrivals to write a request themselves. If you go back to the front voluntarily, your criminal case will be suspended; then, if you survive and earn a state award, it will be dropped, and you won’t have a record. As well as the local commanders, officers came in from the Southern Military District’s own holding point, and they worked on each man individually, took us into separate rooms. I said I was ready to go back, and that earned me their trust. Two days later, I escaped, the moment I had a chance.”

There is no public list of these camps, but Berngardt is confident they operate at every garrison across Russia. He has heard mention of one in Anapa, one in Gelendzhik, a large one in Krasnodar—across southern Russia. Small ones hold thirty or forty men. The big regional ones hold up to two hundred. People are taken out every day, and replacement bodies are brought in every day. The number stays roughly steady. The churn at the front is what keeps it that way.
This is no improvisation by individual commanders, he believes—the camps appear to have entered the formal structure of the Ministry of Defence. The officers in charge hold proper titles. “When I was at one of them, applying for a replacement passport, I literally wrote on the form: ‘to the commanding officer of the AWOL holding point’.”

The numbers game

There is a loose, informal association of defence lawyers who specialise in military cases. Most of its members are former military investigators or prosecutors. Its head, who requested anonymity, told Mediazona that one of the most common requests his colleagues now receive is from soldiers wanting to be charged with desertion or unauthorised absence. The work is not easy. He estimates that they manage to get a case through to verdict, and to keep the client off the front line, in roughly two cases out of ten.

“Under the Criminal code and the Code of procedure, if a man deserts and a case has been opened, or if the investigator learns of the offence, then of course he has to send the case to court,” the lawyer says. “But in practice, the command of these soldiers simply collects them, even when there’s an active investigation, and takes them to the front, and the investigator suspends the case on the grounds that the defendant is taking part in the ‘special military operation’. The proceedings stop. The soldier is calmly driven away.”

The trick, he says, is to find an investigator with an interest in the case being completed. Military investigators are judged, like civilian ones, on the number of cases they send to court. That creates an opening.

“A deserter comes to us, we sign him up and we go to a sensible investigator we know needs cases. The geography is huge: an offence is investigated where it ends, so a man could have run from the Luhansk People’s Republic to Sakhalin island, and the investigator on Sakhalin handles it. We look for investigative departments that desperately need numbers for their statistics—say, the strategic rocket forces, where nobody commits crimes. We turn up and say: here’s an absence, here’s a confession, investigate away. If they’re short on cases, they’ll take it, and they’ll push to keep the man off the front. If they have enough on their plate, they’re not interested. Then the deserter gets taken, the investigator suspends the case, waits for the man to get corpsified and quietly drops it.”

When desertion cases do reach the courtroom, the sentences are heavy. The lawyer’s outfit currently considers its best result a three-year-and-ten-month sentence in prison for one year’s absence, and four years in a lighter prison-settlement for an absence of a year and a half. He calls those “effectively acquittals”. But even mid-trial, soldiers can be removed. One of his clients, in Yekaterinburg, was driven away to the front against his will while proceedings were ongoing. The lawyers asked the court to summon him by formal notice. The court replied that this was not possible: the defendant was carrying out “special tasks”, and the case had been closed.

The pit, the assault, the pit again

Even the best legal representation can fail. Alexander Kondratunets, a 41-year-old from the town of Engels in Saratov region, signed his contract in August 2024 and was assigned to an assault unit of the 6th Guards Tank regiment. In December, he was given a single day of leave. He travelled to Donetsk, and on his way back he was picked up by military police, who decided he was drunk.

He was held for a month in a concrete pit before his commander dispatched him on a “special combat task”, which he says he carried out successfully. The commander then accused him of inciting his comrades to disobey orders. Kondratunets was beaten again and thrown back in the pit for another month. After that, another assault, during which he was concussed, took shrapnel in the leg, and froze both feet. He had to treat the injuries himself.

A few months later, drunk, he caught the eye of a commander with the call sign “Three Xs”, Major Alexei Polyakov. The major broke his nose and threw him in a pit. For months, Kondratunets was beaten while his family was shaken down for cash. Eventually he was put back on combat tasks, performed them without complaint, was rewarded with a day of leave, got drunk again, was thrown back in the pit, and so on, in a loop.

His partner, Yulia Kiseleva, contacted Boris Ushakov, a human-rights activist in Saratov. Ushakov agreed to escort the soldier to the nearest military investigative office if he decided to desert and turn himself in.

On September 6, 2025, during an assault on the village of Dachne in Dnipropetrovsk region, Kondratunets concluded he had nearly no chance of surviving, accepted the offer and ran. He travelled mostly on foot. Over 24 days he reached Donetsk and then the commandant’s office in Henichesk, where Ushakov helped him write a confession.

Instead of being sent to a pre-trial cell, he was put in a holding room at the commandant’s office. The first person to interview him, a month later, was not an investigator but a disciplinary clerk. Kondratunets gave a detailed account of the abuses in his unit. Nothing happened. It later emerged that the 121st military investigative department had, in the summer, opened a check into the same Major Polyakov and his subordinates, in response to numerous complaints. The case had been suspended at the request of the regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Asylbek Utepov.

Kondratunets’s phone was taken from him, and he was moved from pit to pit. Ushakov pressed both the investigative office and the prosecutor’s office; he posted his applications publicly in chat groups for soldiers and their families. He received only formulaic responses. On December 30, 2025, Ushakov himself was placed in pre-trial detention on a charge of insulting and threatening a local policeman.

According to his family, Kondratunets is still being held in the unit whose commanders he denounced. They say he is being deliberately denied medical treatment, despite multiple pieces of embedded shrapnel, hepatitis, head injuries and intestinal bleeding.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev