According to the relatively modest estimates, more than 70,000 people have been mobilized in the “LDPR”. In the regions mobilization began on the eve of February 24, 2022, and the residents of the occupied Donbas went to war in the first line, as they put it, as “cannon meat”.

For three years now, Andrey, who has been mobilized from the “DPR” [name changed — editor’s note], deserted from war. Before the full-scale invasion, Andrey worked as a cook, and now he is forced to live on the run and cannot even go to the doctor — because what if the doctor will call the military police on him.

ASTRA publishes Andrey’s testimony about the forced mobilization in the “DPR,” which includes information about WW2 weapons, hunger, comrades losing their minds, and the constant fear of being stabbed in the back by Ukrainian civilians and Russian soldiers.

Meat Factory, “Mosinka” and Maxim Machine Gun

I went to war in mid-March of 2022. We were dropped off about thirty kilometers from Kherson, in the village of Pridneprovskoye. The first thing I saw was stormtroopers with red armbands walking around the field, collecting something in black bags. I thought it was some kind of belongings. Then I noticed a hand.

The other conscripts had been brought to Pridneprovskoye a week before us. And that’s all that’s left of them. Bags, damn it. In short, it’s a nightmare.

My classmate and I were mobilized on February 26. On that day, we drove from Snezhnoye to the military registration office in Donetsk. We received an SMS demanding that we present ourselves, and we decided to try to sign a contract with the internal troops. However, it didn’t work out because the military had already recruited people and told us to go home and wait for a call.

On the way back, we were stopped by the traffic police. Then we went to a gathering point in the assembly hall of the house of culture named after Lenin in Khartsyzsk, a meat processing plant in Donetsk, and spent about two weeks in an abandoned school building in Ilovaisk.

There weren’t even any mattresses in Ilovaisk, so they just put us on the concrete floor. There were a lot of sick people there, some with asthma, some with heart problems, and others with various illnesses. No one was really helping them, you know, they were just passing by like they didn’t even notice. A lot of people died because they didn’t get the proper care, even though they weren’t in the middle of a war [the editors were unable to independently confirm the information about the deaths at the assembly point].

In Pridneprovsk, we were somewhere near the fighting zone. I could hear planes and helicopters flying nearby. There were a lot of us there — maybe a thousand people — spread out along the railway.

During the week we were there, we were supposedly taught how to clean, disassemble, and assemble weapons, such as the Mosin rifle. In the 21st century, we were issued the Mosin rifle for the war! This was the weapon that our grandfathers had fought with. However, the rifle was in poor condition, with rotten parts and a wobbly barrel. Additionally, there was a Maxim machine gun. When I saw it, I felt as if I were participating in World War II. Pushilin clearly has wasted the money allocated to the “DPR” for weapons and ammunition.

Then they gave us green stickers, like price tags in a store, to put on our Mosin rifles. If we were defeated, we could collect our weapons and record who had what.

They tried to teach us something, but it’s impossible to do it in a week. Many of the guys didn’t know where they were at all. They were just torn away from their mother’s tits. Naturally, they were losing their minds. I watched from the sidelines what was happening to them… They just looked like they were going crazy. They were crying, damn it. I was in shock. And that was hard to watch. How they suffered and how they died.

I tried to keep my cool, as I had already served in the People’s Militia in 2014.

How can I tell you, I was young and stupid at the time. I was 22 years old. I was in Moscow, and I saw on the news that my city was being bombed. An air raid. Well, that’s it, I flipped out and went home. Even my parents didn’t know that I had signed a contract. At the service, I looked at all this shit and broke the contract. I realized that no one was standing up for the truth. There’s no justice there either, and it’s unclear why they’re doing this in the first place.

Russian military and Ukrainian civilians

The military leadership under Kherson was Russian. For example, in fact, our battalion commander was a “curator” from Russia. And the position of battalion commander was held by a mobilized from the “DPR”, whom this Russian “curator” trained. The mobilized had long studied somewhere and received a military rank, but had no experience at all.

Once, some guys from our camp went to a village and picked up some material to get warm. The Russian commanders shot them on the spot [this episode could not be independently confirmed]. For looting. Although they were just taking some broken slate, some planks. They were just people. But at the same time, the commanders were looting themselves. And they were pretty good at transporting everything.

Before our trip to the Nikolaev region, we were briefed by a Russian “curator”. He told us that we would be leaving for the Nikolaev region tomorrow morning to guard the border. He said, “Don’t worry, this will be either the second or third line of defense.”

In Konstantinovka, we landed under fire. We were ordered to dig a trench. To give you an idea, the three of us dug it in two and a half hours. We didn’t notice that we were digging through clay, rocks, and cobblestones. We were so adrenalized, we just wanted to survive.

Our platoon leader, mobilized, constantly came to us, told us not to throw garbage, not to scatter. I reproached him that we were clearly not on the 2nd or 3rd line. He replied: “I don’t really know where we are or what we are.” So we went to find out where we were, to a nearby village, where there was supposed to be a shop. At the entrance, we met a Russian contractor. He pointed his gun at us: “Who’s coming, where, who are you? Where are you from?” We say we’re mobilized from the “DPR”.

He was surprised that we only had Mosin rifles on our backs. I told him that was all we had, and asked him where we were.

He replied: “Are you mad? After 500 meters, enemy is already sitting.” So we’re on the line zero.

Later, when we were digging machine-gun positions, I noticed that there was a Ukrainian military man in the forest opposite us. In other words, we were completely exposed. At any moment, we could be targeted by snipers. However, what surprised me was the calmness of our commanders. They continued to lie to us, claiming that we were on the third line.

We were under fire for two days. The only thing that saved us was that we had dug a deep trench. During those two days, we learned how much time passed between the volleys and the bombs. The bombs hit people, bunkers, and trenches. There were screams everywhere. It was very scary.

The Russians used us as bait. The Ukrainians fired at us, and the Russians looked to see where the fire was coming from, and so they identified where the mortar crews were. We ran around like ants under the shells.

The next morning, after the shelling, the Russians started evacuating people and equipment. But we just kept sitting there. No one told us anything. We went to our battalion commander and asked why we weren’t retreating with the Russian army.

He said we’d be on the defensive.

How? With Mosin rifles? We wouldn’t have stood there for 20 minutes! In the end, we started packing our things without a command and followed the column.

As we were leaving the village, we were again being shelled by mortars. The explosions were literally following us, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces were forcing us out.

We walked, without any equipment, for about 35 kilometers. Many people couldn’t stand it. There were sick people, the elderly, asthmatics, and heart patients. They fell like dead flies. And you couldn’t do anything because if you stopped, they would just kill you.

Some guys from Abkhazia passed by, and the commander saw that we were surrounded. They were trying to get out in KAMAZs. He promised us that he would come back for us after he had taken his guys out. Then three cars arrived, and we loaded ourselves into them. They took us to the village of Peski. There, we occupied an abandoned house.

There were still some locals in the village. I felt like they were turning us in. We had been repeatedly shelled there. We hadn’t been fed for a week in the Peski: we were hungry, wandering around the village, and the locals were giving us eggs and sour cream. Then there were rumors that the locals were putting poison in our food. Our commanders forbade us from taking it from them. However, there were still some kind-hearted elderlies who had experienced the war themselves, and they provided us with food.

There was also a group of partisans made up of local men in the Peski. There were times when our guys would go out alone, for example, to use the bathroom in the bushes, and they never came back.

When they started shelling us seriously, our battalion commander decided to move closer to the Kherson region. He lined us up outside and said, “If you don’t want to walk out of the encirclement again…” So, we found a local driver. He had a grain truck, a long, sturdy KAMAZ with a trailer, which was used for transporting grain. We were loaded into it like a tin can, packed tightly.

While we were driving, there were shelling near the KAMAZ, and the shrapnel hit the metal side of the truck. We drove for about 18 hours, maybe even longer. I don’t know, because we spent the entire journey in a closed grain truck, and we couldn’t see anything. It was scary to be in a confined space, thinking about being hit by a shell or being turned into a sieve. It was also very cold. Many people had frostbite on their legs after the trip.

At night, our KAMAZ got stuck in a landing, and the convoy continued without us. Neither we nor the driver knew where to go. It was still night, and we didn’t have any thermal imagers or anything else. We took turns sticking our heads out of the trailer hatch and observing the surroundings to avoid encountering Ukrainian troops. To give you an idea, we spent about 10 hours wandering through the field. We would drive in one direction, turn around, and drive back. This went on throughout the night. In the end, the Russian military found us using a drone. We probably drove for another day under their escort.

After that, I opened the hatch at the grain truck, I look, somewhere along the highway we are going, a man was walking. I asked him: “Man, can you tell me where we are?” He says: “You are in the Kherson region, in the village of Kostroma.” They dropped us off there. Naturally, we are all hungry and cold. Some just felt unwell, others had frostbite.

We stayed in this village, and we found an abandoned house. Then we found a place with Wi-Fi. I immediately went to call my parents, because we hadn’t spoken in four months. My parents didn’t know where I was, and they thought I might not be alive anymore. When I appeared on the screen, all dirty and unkempt, my mother started crying. I was alive and well. I talked to her for about two or three minutes, and then the connection was cut.

To give you an idea, we traveled from village to village like this. We were taken for no reason. We were constantly running away and being shelled. We stayed in this village for about four days. We didn’t have anything to eat. We started going around the locals again. Some gave us cottage cheese, others gave us sour cream, and still others gave us milk. Then we started going to our old positions with the guys and looking for any leftover rations.

In the end, I found a bag of buckwheat. Only it was all covered in diesel fuel. We started washing the buckwheat and boiled it. The taste was unpleasant, with a hint of diesel. But we still wanted to eat.

A day or two after we left, Kostromka was completely bombed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Drunken brawls and constant hunger

In the village of Bruskynskoe [in the Kherson region], we were shelled with banned cluster munitions. It was very, very scary when these munitions exploded overhead and shrapnel flew over us. You can’t hide if you’re sitting in a trench, for example. You need to go to a basement or at least a building to avoid being hit by these shrapnel. [ASTRA was unable to confirm the use of cluster munitions by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kherson region in the spring of 2022, but according to the UN Commission, Ukrainian forces did use such shells in the Kharkiv region. In most cases known to international observers, it was Russia that used cluster munitions].

In the middle of the night, five military KAMAZ trucks brought Russian soldiers to us. We were puzzled because this was happening under fire again, and the soldiers were running around looking for shelter.

As it turned out later, these were Russian contract soldiers — pilots, damn it! It was a mess. I said, “Why aren’t you in the sky?” They told me that their command had assigned them as regular infantry. In other words, they were completely untrained!

These were battalions 4 and 5. The fourth battalion was more or less adequate, normal. But the fifth battalion’s commander was a marauder: he allowed his soldiers to loot houses. They were drinking, smoking, and doing everything else.

One night, they got drunk and found that their commanders had left and taken their belongings with them. Naturally, they were under the influence of alcohol and assumed that they had been abandoned. As a result, they began to leave the village. It was a harrowing sight, as they crashed into each other in their cars [this incident has not been independently confirmed]. There was a commotion, and there were probably 200 or more people involved. There are a lot of armed people, and half of them are drunk, which is really bad.

We didn’t understand what was happening: there were bullets flying around and gunfire, and we were in a hurry. Plus, we were being fired at from the cassettes.

The next day, I found a lot of abandoned things, even phones. They left a lot of stuff behind, and I collected a whole bag of dry rations. I remember coming back and telling the guys that we had something to eat. They all rushed over and started tearing open the bag. It was a small thing, but it was nice. Even the older guys were excited like kids.

There were always problems with food. In the village of Urozhaynoye, in order to survive and not die, we went to the Russian contract soldiers and unloaded crates of ammunition for them. In return, they gave us rations and packs of cigarettes. They were decent guys. It was a service for a service.

Because I was straining myself unloading the ammunition, I got a kidney ache. I’d had problems with them before. I could feel it swollen and throbbing, and the pain was terrible, I thought I was going to die. And no one was helping me, even though everyone could see I was in pain. I was crying, I mean… Well, I wasn’t really crying, it was just the pain.

The doctor said I didn’t have any pain and that I was faking it. I said, “At least give me a shot.” But no. Some of the guys thought I wouldn’t last the night.

In the morning, a friend helped me. When we were crawling around the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, he said, we found a first-aid kit with pills. I realized that the pills were NATO-made. There was a good painkiller in the kit. And guess what? Within a few minutes, I felt like I was reborn. I felt so much relief. He was a great help to me. I started moving around, doing things, and my kidney stopped bothering me almost until the end of my service.

In the village of Bezvodnoye, the commanders’ attitude had already annoyed me and my friends. We decided that we wouldn’t live in the plantation. Sleeping outside all the time wasn’t normal. I understand that it’s a war, but we didn’t even have any tools to build our own shelter. We had to search for them ourselves.

I went to the village to look for an abandoned house. I found a very frightened woman. Her name was Lyuda. I tried to find common ground with her. I said, “Don’t worry, we won’t do anything bad to you. Just tell us where there are abandoned houses, and we’ll move in and live peacefully.” We took over Lyuda’s empty house, where she kept her hay.

Luda’s mother was an elderly woman, probably 80 years old. A deaf old lady with a device in her ears. We met on the first day in Bezvodny — I see a grandmother coming to us and pulling a portrait in her hands. He comes up to us and shows us: “Here is my father.” He says he was somewhere near Stalingrad in the Second World War, in short, delivering food to people.

I thought that granny was just afraid of us… Like, we’re soldiers, and they don’t know what to expect from us. She was a child of war, and she’d seen it all. I think she was trying to show that she didn’t have anything against us. She was a very nice person, and I became friends with her. She was always busy, always moving around. Sometimes she would bring us buns in the morning. We became really close friends. We started guarding their house to make sure no one would break in or loot it.

Of course, there were people in the village who were against us. Of course, I understand them. We came to their house and started setting our own rules. They still helped us, but they kept saying, “Guys, get out of here, our guys will come and kill you.” I understand that some of the locals had husbands and children who were fighting on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

And then, after a while, the locals naturally turned us in.

One day, I woke up at 4 a.m. to the sound of windows breaking. There was an explosion in my room, and I was still half-asleep when I saw that the roof had been blown off. My friends and I ran out, and I don’t know how we weren’t hit by shrapnel.

The elderly people, on the contrary, got hit. The shell exploded right above their house. The roof was blown off, and everything in the yard was destroyed. Their home was gone. We immediately rushed to their aid, to get them out from under the rubble.

Working in the kitchen, corruption and escape

The commanders said, “If you want a week’s leave, you have to go to the line zero and stay there for 10 days. If you return, we’ll send you on leave to Donetsk.” The guys and I realized that this was a sure way to get killed, so we refused. Some of them went, but none of them returned.

At that time, they were trying to dispose of us in any way they could. We were like expendable material. Different commanders came and tried to talk to us, saying that if we went against them, nothing good would happen. But we continued to do nothing and did not respond to their orders.

Then the guys and I decided to write a report for transfer to Donetsk. Surprisingly, we received a response within a week: they agreed. We were taken to Donetsk literally the day after the response.

In Donetsk, we were placed in a distribution center. Immediately, we managed to ask for permission to go home for at least a day. Because we hadn’t been home for several months, we were homesick and wanted to see our families. I arrived home at 2 a.m., and my parents were waiting for me. In the early morning, I had to get up and return to the camp. It hadn’t even been a day. Naturally, my mother didn’t want to let me go. There were tears and everything.

After that, we were sent to a training ground. So first they sent us to the meat grinder, and after the report, they brought us back to Donetsk and started training us. It was all a mess.

As it turned out later, we wrote reports requesting transfer to the stormtroopers.

We were taken to Makeyevka and placed in an abandoned factory. We were assigned as a reserve battalion: when the frontline ran out of men, our commanders would come and recruit us. In short, we were used to fill in the gaps on the front. Of the ten men who were sent on an assault, only two or three returned.

In civilian life, I am a cook, and now I was put to cook-instead of a cook who was admitted to the hospital with diabetes. Once, at the general construction, they called the names of all my boys — but I wasn’t there. They told me not to touch me, because I work in the kitchen. As a result, everyone was taken to the assault. Later I found out that many of the boys were dead. But I somehow stayed in the unit, the guardian angel probably saved me.

Later, at the training ground, my kidney started to hurt again. After an ultrasound, the doctor was surprised and said that only one of my kidneys was working, and I needed to have surgery immediately. I underwent surgery in Torez [ASTRA has reviewed the doctor’s report], but the first attempt did not fully remove the kidney stones. The second surgery was performed under local anesthesia, and it seems that something went wrong. Complications began to develop. I was constantly lying down, experiencing nausea, and my skin was pale, and I had lost a significant amount of weight.

I asked the doctor for rehabilitation, but “you’ll be undergoing rehabilitation at the unit,” and I already knew that they wouldn’t provide me with any assistance.

In the end, I decided to go home and come back when I felt better. I shouldn’t have done that, because they started calling me, saying, “We’ll declare you a deserter.” They started pressuring and threatening me, saying, “We’ll put you in jail, we’ll wipe you out.” It went on and on. I was in such a state that I just wanted to die. I didn’t pay attention to it anymore.

After a while, my conscience got the better of me, and I returned to the unit, wrote an explanatory note, and submitted a report. I was reinstated as a cook. Later, I developed a boil, and I asked to be allowed to go home to get dental treatment. While I was at the doctor’s office, I received a call from my company commander, whose call sign was “Vovan”. “Get ready, go to the training ground to collect your belongings, and then head to Lidiivka in Donetsk.”

And when he said “to Lidiivka”, I immediately turned pale, because I understood: our battalion is being sent to the assault. This is a one-way ticket.

That day, I developed a fever, so I went home and then to the hospital. No one would admit a military man to the hospital without a medical order. I made a deal through a friend. They made it look like I was brought to the hospital by an ambulance. Naturally, it wasn’t free.

They kept me for two weeks, then sent me for a second examination in Torez, and finally they said that everything was fine and that I could go serve. After the operation, I had acute pyelonephritis and my kidneys were in pain [ASTRA has read the doctor’s report]. That’s when I decided to leave. I stayed at home for a while, then with my relatives, and eventually I bought tickets to Crimea and disappeared there.

During my service, I didn’t feel like I was a Russian soldier. I was a soldier of the “DPR” — and in comparison with the Russian army, we considered ourselves homeless. I repeat, we had nothing at all. We were like cannon fodder, bait, just second-rate.

Two years have passed, and I’m still on the run [Andrey is indeed on the run in the Russian Federation, but the Ministry of Internal Affairs website does not specify which criminal article he is on].

I don’t know what to do in this situation. If I’m arrested without a trial, I’ll be sent to the stormtroopers. That’s a 100% guarantee.

I understand that I’m not the only one, and there are a lot of guys like me. When I think about it, I don’t want to go back. I’m in a panic. I’ve become mentally unstable, and I get angry easily. I need to get treatment, but since I’m wanted by the police, I’m afraid to go anywhere. Even going to the hospital is a challenge. I’m just sitting here.

I didn’t sign a contract at all. I didn’t even receive a summons. I just don’t understand how they’re doing this. I don’t even have any marks in my military record indicating that I’ve been there. The only document they gave me in Kherson was a temporary ID card. They took a photo of it on their phone, printed it out, and that’s it. It’s the only document that proves I’ve been there.

Whoever had connections, they went there. Whoever didn’t, they stayed there…. But my classmate, the one who got us into trouble, he’s still serving, and he’s doing well, really well… His father is the one who makes all the decisions. My classmate works as a driver for the headquarters, driving the battalion commander.

Of the 80 people I was with in Donetsk, maybe 6 are still alive, including me.