A 50-year-old resident of St. Petersburg was tricked into visiting a foreign city and forced to sign a contract with the Russian Armed Forces. His daughter went to “LDPR” in search of her father and searched for him in military units and hospitals for about 10 days — the man was found: however, during this time he was forcibly sent into battle, wounded, and now a new assault awaits him, ASTRA found out.
Anatoly Petrosyan is 50 years old and has three children. Until September 29, 2025, the man worked in private security in St. Petersburg. He had previously suffered clinical death three times, his daughter Diana and relative Victoria tell ASTRA. A father with many children has a cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) installed due to severe hypertension, structural heart disease and persistent rhythm disturbance, according to medical documents available to ASTRA.
On September 29, Anatoly informed his family that he was going on a business trip for a week. However, upon arrival, he reported that he had been to Ryazan, “passed a medical examination, failed it, and was declared unfit for military service.” According to Diana, it later turned out that previously unknown people had constantly called her father, introduced themselves as employees of the military enlistment office in Ryazan and demanded to come to them to “check in”, threatening otherwise to put him on the wanted list. After returning from Ryazan, the calls were repeated and the man was lured by threats to Nizhny Novgorod. Daughters still don’t know for sure what happened to their relative. Then, from what they found out for sure, the man was forced to sign a contract and forcibly sent to war.
“He signed a contract in Nizhny Novgorod and was immediately redirected to the Voronezh Region to study. And so they supposedly went through all sorts of training, but there was no training as such,” says Diana ASTRA
In the Voronezh Region, a man was locked up on the territory of the Pogonovo training ground. The Pogonovo training ground began to be used to hide the military from their relatives and lawyers in October 2023. In cases known to ASTRA, military “refuseniks” were then sent along the “route” Rassypnoye – Kursk – Voronezh – Rostov – “DPR” with the destination in the assault brigade.
Diana, having learned from her father that he was being held in Pogonovo, went there. There, the girl tried to meet her father for several hours, but she was informed that he “refused” to come out to his daughter. Anatoly has been missing ever since. Later, a lawyer hired by the family was able to find out that the man had signed a contract with military unit 95368, was in regiment 1428 and had already been sent into battle. His daughter went to look for him in Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
“I urge you to return my father to the family. We are a large family, I will take him in any condition and will not budge from the place [combat] until he is handed over to us,” Diana said in a video message recorded on October 26.
According to her, she searched for her father in local hospitals and military units, but to no avail.
On October 27, Anatoly contacted his wife Yulia and wrote that he had been “deceived and forced to sign a contract.” The day before, on October 29, Anatoly called his relatives and said that he had already managed to get a leg injury, which he had operated on just a year ago, but he was being forcibly sent to fight again.
“We began to write to the prosecutor’s office and ask, how could a person with a pacemaker be allowed to go to war and he was even allegedly able to pass the commission?! And everyone, of course, is in shock: “We don’t know,” Diana tells ASTRA.
She continues to search for her father and demands that he be returned home.
