“They talk about the debt to the Motherland, but I’ve already paid it”. Over 2,000 soldiers from the self‑proclaimed Donbas republics are wanted for desertion

When a criminal case for unauthorised abandonment of a unit was opened against 37-year-old Donetsk native Yevgeny Kutuev in the summer of 2024, he immediately decided that he would not plead guilty.

Kutuev went to the military enlistment office on October 6, 2022—the day after Russia formalised the annexation of the self-proclaimed DPR. The unit he was sent to serve in at that time belonged to the Donetsk “people’s militia”. Yevgeny did not receive any summons from the Russian Ministry of Defence, he did not sign a contract, and therefore, the man reasoned, he had not committed any crime against military service in Russia.

In December 2024, Kutuev’s trial began, and already at the first hearing in the Solnechnogorsk garrison military court, it became clear that the prosecutor thought otherwise.

“The legislation is more flexible in this regard. It doesn’t all come down to signing a contract. Now there are a fucktillion of servicemen, pardon my French, from convicts, various Akhmat [Chechen militia unit] members, etc.,” the state prosecutor explained to Kutuev’s lawyer in the court hallway.

The defendant continued to call himself a “volunteer”; he did not recognise himself as a Russian serviceman.

“What was understood by ‘volunteer’? You just turn up, they give you a gun and that’s it?” the judge clarified.

“That’s how it is in Donetsk,” Kutuev replied with a broad smile.

A Donetsk volunteer

In Donetsk, Yevgeny lived with a DPR citizen’s passport and until 2024 bore the surname Sirorez. He supported pro-Russian separatists, was a member of the “militia”, fought near Avdiivka and Mariupol, received a medal for fighting near the Donetsk airport, and graduated from the Donetsk Higher Combined Arms Command School, established in 2015. In 2021, Sirorez resigned from the “people’s militia” and became a fitness coach.

In the summer of 2022, a difficult period began in the man’s life—“life circumstances piled up”, his “girlfriend left” him. In October, he decided to go to the military registration and enlistment office and enlist as a volunteer. Mobilisation was continuing in the DPR, with people being “grabbed off the streets”, so he would have ended up in a trench sooner or later anyway, the man reasoned.

According to Yevgeny, the Novoazovsk military enlistment office dispensed with formalities—he received neither a mobilisation order, nor a military ID, nor a personal number, and did not sign any contract. He was sent to serve as a mortarman and received two concussions. The effects are still noticeable: in court, he found it difficult to concentrate on the questions, and he began to tremble.

About once a month, Yevgeny continues, the soldiers were taken to the finance department, their passports were collected, and they were given envelopes with cash—from 50,000 to 70,000 roubles (roughly $500–$700).

“They photographed us, checked us against our passports, we signed some registers and received money. There were no payslips, nothing. That’s how it all worked in Donetsk in 2022,” he says.

Sometimes the mortarman was given leave, at which point a girlfriend from Klin near Moscow, whom Yevgeny had once met through VK, would come to visit him in Donetsk.

In the spring of 2024, the woman had a stroke. On April 17, Yevgeny packed his things and went to Klin. The couple soon got married, and Sirorez took his wife’s surname—Kutuev. He has not returned to Donetsk since.

On September 5, 2024, Kutuev went to the Klin passport office to get a passport in his new surname. The employee first asked him to wait, then officers appeared who escorted the man to the police station.

“There they checked me out—you’re on the federal wanted list, Article 337! What kind of article is that? I say: guys, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he recalls.

The officers transferred Kutuev to the military police, who placed him under supervised release at a military unit in Solnechnogorsk. As his wife was ill, he was permitted to return home on weekends to care for her. Once the investigation concluded, he was allowed to return home permanently while awaiting the court’s verdict.

A Russian contract soldier

The indictment’s first page listed Kutuev’s passport details and described him as a “serviceman performing military service under contract with the rank of private.” Kutuev had hoped the court would need to verify the existence of this supposed contract. However, the investigators took the position that no actual signed contract was necessary to classify Kutuev as a contract soldier.

According to the indictment, on October 6, 2022, the man went to the military enlistment office of Novoazovsk, and on October 10, with the rank of private, he was enrolled in a unit.

A few days before, Russia and the DPR had signed an agreement on “acceptance”, and the fighters of the self-proclaimed republic’s forces by default received the “status of servicemen performing service under contract” in the Russian army.

Therefore, the investigation insisted, de jure Kutuev is a Russian serviceman. And therefore, having left Donetsk for his beloved, he, according to Russian law, “committed unauthorised abandonment of his place of service”.

“I do not recognise the contract, I do not recognise myself as a serviceman, I have no relation to the Ministry of Defence. In 2022, these units did not even exist—there were, so to speak, volunteer formations,” Yevgeny disagreed with the accusation.

According to the case files, in January 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defence issued an order for his enrolment in the personnel lists. Kutuev himself claims that he did not know about this and suggests that the order could have been issued retroactively.

Yevgeny says that he first learned his personal military service number when he and his lawyer were studying the case in anticipation of the trial.

At the same time, it can be concluded from the indictment that the investigation considers Kutuev to have been conscripted through mobilisation—despite the fact that he himself appeared at the military enlistment office and calls himself a volunteer. In the very first lines of the document, it is noted that a “general mobilisation” was announced in the DPR. Elsewhere, the investigator refers to Putin’s decree of September 21, 2022, according to which mobilised persons “have the status of servicemen performing military service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation under contract.”

“So like, am I a contract soldier or a mobilised one? But here’s the thing—there’s no contract, no orders, I didn’t even get a personal number. I don’t think it was by chance that the prosecutor called me when the case went to court. He asks me: ‘Do you consider yourself military personnel?’ I tell him no. ‘Did you get paid?’ I tell him no! So how the heck am I supposed to be military personnel?" Yevgeny puzzled before his trial began.

“Am I a contract soldier or a mobilised soldier—but at the same time there is no contract and no order, there was not even a personal number. I think it’s no coincidence that when my case was transferred to the court, the prosecutor called me. He asked: do you consider yourself a serviceman? I said: no. And did you receive money? I said: no! Well, what kind of serviceman am I then?” Yevgeny wondered before the start of the trial.

Leaked database

There are thousands of men from the DPR and LPR in the same situation as Yevgeny Kutuev.

Before the formal annexation to Russia, the armed formations of the self-proclaimed republics were in a legal grey area, explains an expert from the Mobilisation DPR Live project, who wished to remain anonymous.

“Let’s start with the fact that mobilisation in the occupied territories is generally prohibited by international conventions, so it is hidden, retouched, carried out semi-officially. We decided to provide human rights consultations in order to somehow bring these persecuted people into a ‘brighter’ area,” he says.

“Few of those mobilised received summons. In addition, until August 2022, there were no conscription commissions in the DPR, that is, this cannot be called mobilisation at all. And after August 2022, when conscription commissions existed, captured residents of the DPR were forced to sign contracts,” the lawyer continues.

According to estimates by Ukrainian human rights activist Pavel Lisyansky, by the summer of 2022, at least 120,000 local residents had been mobilised in the self-proclaimed republics.

Only about 20% of them, adds the lawyer from Mobilisation DPR Live, went to the conscription point voluntarily—mostly, like Kutuev, these were people with experience of service in the “militia” and “people’s militia”. The rest were conscripted by threats or force.

“That is, they were simply caught at work, herded into groups, processed very crookedly or without any processing at all—and now, because they ended up in this grey area against their will, criminal cases are being opened against them under articles on unauthorised abandonment of a military unit,” the lawyer says.

People who served in the formations of the self-proclaimed DPR under contract are not in a better position, he adds.

“A typical situation: a person concluded a contract with the ‘people’s militia’ in 2019 or 2020, it expired, and the person simply remained in service, but without a contract, because no one bothered with documents there. And with the start of the ‘special military operation’, it turned out that he had been turned into a Russian serviceman, and he is charged with the same duties as if he had a contract—although it was a completely different state. Now the goal is to send as many people to the front as possible, therefore, to put it simply, they are persecuting everyone they can reach,” he says.

Leaked documents have appeared online showing criminal cases filed for unauthorised abandonment of a unit against natives of the DPR and LPR.

Mediazona studied a spreadsheet labeled as “Southern Military District Unauthorized Abandonment Cases 2024.” In this document, 8,756 names are marked with “1 AC” and 2,533 names with “2 AC”. These likely refer to the 1st and 2nd Army Corps—the designation used since 2014 for “people’s militia” units of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR respectively.

The expert of the Mobilisation DPR Live project also believes that in the first case we are talking about servicemen from the DPR, and in the second—from the LPR. Mediazona compared the names from these lists with the official database of the federal wanted list of the Russian interior ministry. Excluding repeating names, about 2,150 surnames marked as “1 AC” matched, and 700 surnames— “2 AC”.

In total, interior ministry departments in the occupied territories want to arrest 3,741 men in the DPR and 1,851 men in the LPR.

Many subscribers of Mobilisation DPR Live were able to find themselves in these lists, the project representative told Mediazona. But some noticed errors—for example, incorrect time and place of detention or date of birth. The question of the reliability, completeness and origin of these databases remains open. In addition, there are typos in all databases, so the figures given above are approximate.

However, it can be said with a high degree of certainty that in 2024 the interior ministry was searching for at least 2,850 soldiers from the DPR and LPR for unauthorised abandonment of a unit.

Contract or prison

Analyzing court practices for unauthorised abandonment cases involving soldiers from the former DPR and LPR is challenging. While Kutuev’s case was heard near Moscow in Klin because that’s where he went, most similar cases are handled by courts in Donetsk and Luhansk, which don’t publish their proceedings. Information about verdicts only becomes public through defense attorneys or family members of those convicted.

For example, on February 21 last year, a military court in Donetsk sentenced three servicemen to real prison terms, and four to suspended sentences.

“All eyewitnesses and defendants reported that the court’s decision boils down to answering the question: ‘Contract or prison?’ Suspended sentences were given only to those who agreed to sign a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence,” says the expert of Mobilisation DPR Live.

The matter of contracts is typically settled informally through verbal agreements, the human rights activist explains. However, evidence of such arrangements often surfaces in court verdicts through phrases like “willingness to participate in the special military operation” or “desire to perform combat missions.”

While Mediazona was unable to locate any verdicts under Article 337 of the Criminal Code from Donetsk or Luhansk courts, we did examine one such ruling from the Rostov garrison military court.

In October 2023, a resident of Donetsk, mobilised immediately after the start of the war, received a two-year suspended sentence for the fact that, after serving for about a year, he stopped appearing at the unit.

“The defendant in the court session pleaded guilty to the incriminated act and provided testimony, therein explaining that his absence from service was due to health reasons, and upon his return to service he continued to perform his military service duties and presently indicates readiness to participate in the special military operation. [...] In imposing punishment, the court takes into consideration his admission of guilt, expressed remorse for the committed act, and willingness to fulfill his military duty in defense of the Fatherland during the special military operation,” the verdict states.

The court further noted that the Donetsk man “shall be required to demonstrate his rehabilitation through proper execution of military service duties, which shall serve to deter similar offences within the military collective and shall effect appropriate preventive measures.”

In summer 2023, another Donetsk volunteer, who had served in the Kherson region since the war’s beginning, sought medical attention for heart problems. He was transferred from the medical unit to a Donetsk hospital, where after examination he was released for outpatient treatment and instructed to “await further contact.”

He lived as a regular civilian, taking gig work, until military police arrested him in October. The court remanded him to pre-trial detention for unauthorised unit abandonment. Though he was offered and signed a contract on April 4, 2024, the Donetsk court nevertheless sentenced him to five years in prison on May 14.

Another Donetsk resident faced trial in summer 2024. Before the verdict, he voluntarily signed a contract, and his unit commander appeared at the hearing to provide a positive character testimony. Consequently, the 25-year-old received a three-year suspended sentence and was deployed to the front. One month after his trial, his wife was notified that he was missing in action. His remains have not been recovered.

Both convicts’ passport information appears in the leaked Article 337 defendant lists examined by Mediazona.

Currently, many DPR and LPR natives are serving in Russian military units under “command supervision”—a preventive measure for service members prescribed under Article 104 of the Criminal Procedure Code. According to the Mobilisation DPR Live expert, such cases have been documented across Russia, from Moscow to Primorsky krai in the Far East.

“All these people left because they were persecuted lawlessly in the DPR and LPR, the consequences upon detention there would be much harsher—most likely, they would be sent to storm assault units. Therefore, many who could rushed to Russia so that they would be returned to the unit here and dealt with in Russian units. At the same time, such people can be in units for a very long time, because the investigator calls the unit commander from the DPR and LPR, and the commander does not come because it is far away. This is how one guy went all the way to Primorsky krai and is still there, because the commander will not come for him, because it is simply far away,” the human rights activist says.

Verdict

At the last court hearing, Yevgeny Kutuev finally pleaded guilty and said that he repented.

“They would have jailed me immediately. They proceed from what they have written in the indictment. I did not start arguing with them, because they explained to me that it was useless. I would have been convicted according to the documents that are in the case. I did not start arguing, and the judge said that there was no point—there are enough case materials for a guilty verdict,” he explains.

On January 15, 2025, the Solnechnogorsk military court delivered its verdict—five years suspended. The prosecutor had requested six years of actual imprisonment. At the same time, according to Putin’s decree of September 21, 2022, during the period of mobilisation, only actual imprisonment serves as a basis for dismissal from military service—therefore, those who receive a suspended sentence are usually sent back to the front.

The judge also told Yevgeny that within two weeks he was obliged to return to his unit in Donetsk. The verdict contains a reference to the law according to which all servicemen of the former unrecognised republics “continue to perform military service in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation in the armed forces of the Russian Federation.” The obligation to return to the unit is not explicitly stated in the verdict—it only says that a lenient punishment was chosen, among other things, because of “Kutuev’s desire to subsequently perform combat missions in the special military operation.”

The former fitness coach says that he is not against returning to the front, but only not to his unit, where the commanders will consider him a deserter.

“I served in my unit for two years and I saw how they treated people who left and who were returned. It’s a demonstrably bad attitude. It would be easier for me to go to the forest now and hang myself than to go there. It’s equivalent to that,” he complains. “They talk about repaying my debt to the Motherland, but I already have! How many years have I been involved in this war, how much is enough? And they still want to imprison me for this. Why do I deserve these five years, if they are changed to an actual term? Did I steal from someone, kill someone and so on? In essence, they leave me no choice—either back to the war, or run and hide.”

Kutuev recalls that, having learned about the initiation of the case, he contacted his fellow soldiers from Donetsk—it turned out that at least two of them had been in a similar situation.

“I have a friend, he’s been in this mess since 2015, left the unit after being wounded and went to his home region in Russia. He says, well, I’d rather go to jail. Because the choice is either feet first, or sit. They don’t give any options. If I had known that I would end up in such a situation, I would never have taken up arms,” the man says.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev