Soldier with PTSD and psychiatric issues disappeared after refusal to buy backpacks for the entire unit.
The family of Valentin Stroyev, a serviceman of military unit 71211, contacted ASTRA. They said that the man had recently disappeared, having previously asked them to send an appeal to ASTRA. However, it is not definitively clear where the video was recorded. By the time of recording, he could already be in captivity, as indicated by several secondary signs.
According to the appeal and the documents available to the editorial board, Valentin Stroev, born in 2001, was mobilized in October 2022. He joined the 331st Guards Parachute Regiment of Kostroma 98th Airborne Division. Then the young man was sent to Ivanovo, from there to Kostroma, then to the Pesochny training ground. From there, he was transported to Kremennaya, Luhansk region, where, after fighting for four months, he was wounded in the head and evacuated to Russian territory in April 2023.
As a result of the injury, Stroyev began to have mental health issues, hallucinations and panic attacks, due to which the military medical commission decided that the he “did not meet the requirements of military service,” and his service in extreme situations was “inappropriate,” as it required “constant monitoring”.
For the next year and a half, Valentin Stroev was in military unit 71211: he went to the outfits and went on business trips for “cargo 200” [killed in action]. Stroev claims that he did not want to fight.
“On January 11, 2025, I was tied up and forcibly sent to war. At the same time, they said that I would serve in the rear without weapons, since my diagnosis was psychiatric. […] At the meeting, the battalion commander told me to buy 40 military backpacks. One backpack costs five thousand rubles, and 40 backpacks is 200 thousand rubles. Of course, I refused to buy them. Because of my refusal, the battalion commander told me that he would transfer me to another unit, where all kinds of sh*t happens,” Stroyev said.
According to Stroyev’s relatives, he handed over the appeal on January 23. After that, he wrote that he was “going there”, after that contact was lost.
After a while, money began to disappear from Stroyev’s card, and messages began to arrive to his relatives in Ukrainian from his phone number. At the same time, the head of the medical unit, Alexander Meshcheryakov, answered all the questions of his relatives with excuses, argued that there were so many soldiers under his command that he could not give an answer about each of them, and then stopped answering whatsoever.
Relatives believe that Stroyev could have been captured. The editorial board of ASTRA has prepared an appeal to the “I want to find” project to find out if this is true.
