When Vitaly Vasilyev, a 23-year-old from a rural village in the republic of Chuvashia, was drafted into the Russian army in 2021, he had no intention of becoming a contract soldier, much less going to war. But like thousands of other Russian conscripts, he found himself on the front lines of Ukraine. “I never signed a contract, despite the command encouraging us to do so from the very beginning,” Vasilyev told The Moscow Times in an interview from Yerevan, Armenia, where he now lives in hiding. “I cried. I wrote reports saying I didn’t want to serve. But it was all for nothing.” At least 50,000 Russian soldiers have fled the military since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to leaked data published in May by the exiled outlet IStories. Among them is a growing number of conscripts: young men, often poor and from remote regions, who say they were forced into contracts they never agreed to sign, and then sent to fight. Despite denials by President Vladimir Putin and other top officials, conscripts have participated in combat from the earli
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