Michail was born in a central Asia Republic that he has not wanted to realize. He arrived in Ukraine when the Wagner group had already begun to retire from Bajmut. After the riot that led Yevgueni Prigozhin, his unit crossed the border to Belarus. There he signed a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry in exchange for obtaining citizenship. The army transferred him shortly after and placed him in a regular unit deployed in the Kursk region, with the commission of curbing the Ukrainian advance. In that area he began to open his eyes and ended up deserting.
In an interview published in Michail explained that he did not participate in any fight and that, from the beginning, he noticed how the moral of the group came down. “Everyone knew that this war was shit and everyone touched their balls,” he summarized. He said that the image that Russians see on television has nothing to do with what happens in the front. “Once we saw on TV that our unit had thrown the Ukrainians of the town, but we continued in the same trench and the town was still under their control. We did not understand anything.”
He denounced mass corruption within the army. In his environment he found “drugs, alcohol and trapicheos to beast.” He affirmed that everything is trafficked, from fuel to military material. “We had a BVP that did not move, I was burst. But in the papers they put it as an operation. Every day the officer in command pointed 60 liters of diesel that later sold on his own. Thus with everything. Where does that money end? It is not necessary to be the smartest of the class to realize.”
Michail saw how his teammates accumulated months and months without returning home. Some carried in the front since 2022 and had only been able to visit their families once. “They were exhausted, demotivated. Every day someone was detention or did not return to permission. In the end, the command decided not to give more permits to prevent people from escaping.”
He defected in November 2024, after spending three months in Kursk. “I realized that everything politicians and television say is a lie. I understood what this war was really.
He didn’t think about it anymore. A tooth was left, bribed the dentist to sign four days off and looked for a taxi driver willing to collaborate. The driver took him to Volgograd, where he bought a ticket from Moscow. In the capital, he used his old passport – not Russian – to buy another flight and left the country. Armyweb has not revealed its current location for security reasons.
After exhausting the fighters of Russian ethnicities, it is not Eslavas, such as the muriators, the Kremlin focused on recruiting soldiers in countries of Central Asia such as Kyrgyzistan, Tayikistan or Kazakhstan. The language does not suppose a barrier, because many speak Russian, and the command sends them directly to the front. When they die, their families have it very difficult to claim compensation or demand justice.
