“I didn’t go into the attack, they tied me up and pulled out my teeth with pliers.” Testimony of a Russian deserter

Anton told his story for Radio Liberty’s project “Sever. Realii”.

Before being drafted into the war, Anton worked as a personal driver for the director of a construction company. He says he had two weekends a week and a salary of about 80,000 rubles (about $1,000 at the time). He managed to save for a small house and lived separately from his mother.

 

“I thought they would reject me right away”

 

The Russian got involved in the war in Ukraine because of a car accident. In September 2023, Anton was returning home in the evening in his Lada Granta and, losing control of the car, crashed into a parked car. In shock, he fled the scene of the accident and parked the car near his house. The police found him a week and a half later. Leaving the scene of an accident without casualties is an administrative penalty, but the police told him that they would open criminal proceedings against him. After that, they offered an alternative:

“They said you could go to prison and from there go to war or go to war as a volunteer,” says Anton. “They gave him time to think. A few days later, they called and asked what I had decided? They said they would either send me to a detention center or to the “SVO” (this is how the Russian authorities and the media call the war in Ukraine – ed.). The bailiffs also got involved: I had debts for fines of about 200,000 rubles. I consulted with my sister and mother and decided to go to war as a volunteer. The police told me to send them a photo of my contract.” Anton says that he did not serve in the army in Russia and that before being drafted he had been registered with a psychiatrist for 10 years with a diagnosis of “personality disorder.” His military record book stated that he was “unfit” for service: he had made several suicide attempts. When he went to Moscow, to the military registration and enlistment office, he took all his discharge papers with him and thought he would be immediately rejected during the medical examination. But when they saw the papers, they just asked him: “How are you feeling now? Are you walking?” Enough!”.

After a medical examination, Anton signed the contract and never returned home. He spent the night at an assembly point in Moscow, and in the morning, together with other contract soldiers, he was sent by bus to Rostov. There he spent a week in a "training camp", during which Anton, who had never held a weapon in his hands before, was given the opportunity to fire a machine

 

"They brought us, and the soldier led us all along a path to a forest, that is, to what was left of it after the shelling," Anton recalls. "He told us to settle here, and tomorrow morning he would settle us somewhere. Of course, nobody slept that night."

"There were fighters from 'Ahmat' among us, they said that the worst would be if a drone spots us. Then the drone will come and that's it," says Anton. "But it worked, thank God. And in the morning they looked at my file in the military record book and said it would be better if they didn't give me a weapon. And they assigned me to evacuation.

 

Drink Moonshine and Forget

 

The "evacuators" were engaged in removing the wounded and dead from the front line. This is what Anton did for the next six months. He says that they were divided into two brigades of six people each and on the very first night they went to collect the bodies.

According to Anton, from the dugouts where the evacuation teams spent the night to the "front line" it was about five to six kilometers in one direction. Each group had one stretcher, and during the night they had to make two walks (i.e. walk 20 to 24 kilometers) and bring two "two hundred" (killed) or "three hundred" (wounded).

At the end of the route, a car was waiting for the wounded, which took them to the hospital; the killed were identified by their badges. Often along the way, "three hundred" turned into "two hundred", says Anton.

"If a drone would fly or mortar fire would start, we would just run in different directions, throwing stretchers. And when it was all over, the person we were carrying would disappear," recalls Anton. "Either a shell dropped by a drone would kill him or he would be killed by mortar fire. Then we would just take a stretcher and leave, saying on the radio that we were going empty. The stretchers had to be brought, no one gave them to us anymore. The elder in the group said that before there were no stretchers, and the corpses were simply carried on their shoulders or dragged."

Corpses had one big advantage over the living, says the tow truck driver. Only one machine gun could be pushed under the wounded, somehow from the side, while two could be safely placed under the corpse, because "it doesn't hurt anyway".

Anton says they took machine guns from the dead and hid them, then traded them for moonshine from Bars squad fighters. One machine gun is a liter and a half of moonshine.

"We drank it to fall asleep and simply so that what we see does not damage us mentally," says Anton.

According to him, after returning from a night out, the tow truck workers would "overturn" a glass and have a snack, and then sleep in the basement all day. When it got dark, they would return for the wounded or the dead.

Anton says that his team often had to carry the corpses of their people, those who participated in the evacuation.

During the month and a half that he was a "tow truck", the composition of his team changed almost three times.

"About 30 people changed. On the second night, we brought back a person from our team, forty minutes after we left," he recalls. - Next to him, "Baba Yaga" (a large Ukrainian drone capable of carrying several grenades - op.ed.) dropped a grenade and completely cut him with shrapnel. We waited for the drone to take off, put it on a stretcher and returned. In serious condition, but we got it back. They loaded him into the UAZ and I never heard anything about him again".

"In the first week, the commander and I, two of the six, returned, and four of them died," emphasizes Anton. "And a couple of weeks later, the same thing happened again. By the end of the month, we had already stopped remembering each other's call signs. What's the point if in a couple of weeks at most you leave a wounded person or a corpse?"

 

I injected myself with painkillers and deliberately stepped on the ‘petal’”

 

Anton says that when he was five years old, his father, drunk, set fire to the hair on his head. After what happened, the boy did not speak for several years. He started first grade at almost nine years old, but after a year of studying at a regular school, he was transferred to a reformatory.

 

When he got drunk, Anton’s father would often beat the children, and as punishment, he would impale his older sister. Then Anton, together with his mother and sister, would leave the house to visit his grandmother or neighbors.

 

The beatings stopped when Anton turned 16, and he realized that he could fight back. Since then, according to him, his father, as before, brought home a bottle, drank, but after that he did not go wild, but simply went to bed. However, in the last years of his life he changed:

“I drank a little and wanted to fix everything,” Anton recalls.

He admits that his psyche never fully recovered from the childhood trauma. Already in adulthood, he had several suicide attempts. And when he came to the war, he decided to mutilate himself, hoping that then he would be “written off”.

“We thought about what was better: to step on the “petal” (the Soviet anti-personnel mine PFM-1 – ed.) or to unscrew the fuse from the grenade and detonate it, squeezing it in his hand? The main thing is that the fingers were torn off and that there were no traces of gunpowder left,” says Anton. “One did it. His fingers were torn off, but the military command took him away, because a ring (from the grenade) was found nearby.”

“I tried to stand on the ‘petal’ myself. I noticed it once when we were coming back, not far from our basement, but I didn’t tell anyone. And when everyone was lying down, I injected myself with painkillers in my shoulder, went and stood on it, but nothing happened. At that moment I thought ‘unfortunately’, but now I think it was fortunately,” says Anton. “I jumped on it for another five minutes and went to bed.”

“I had no emotions at that moment. I just wanted to get out of there, at all costs. We also carried wounded from the ‘front’, mostly either with ‘crossbows’, or those who also deliberately stood on the ‘petal’,” emphasizes Anton.

Anton says that the ampoules with promedol, which he injected himself before standing on the ‘petal’ (promedrol is an analgesic used in the Russian army as a painkiller – ed.). were a very valuable thing in the war.

According to him, in the Russian army, a soldier was given only one ampoule. It was believed that this should be enough from the moment of injury to the hospital. If you return from the hospital to the front line, you get a new one, but if you suddenly lose your ampoule, no one will give you yours.

Anton says that the “evacuators” sometimes found promedol with the dead and hid it for safety. He used such an ampoule before stepping on a mine.

After a month and a half, according to the soldier, there was no one in their unit to send him on an assault. And then the command sent soldiers from the evacuation group on an assault.

“The ensign lined us up. I and another guy from our group went out and said that we would not go on an assault. The ensign replied: ‘Then we will ‘annihilate’ (kill) you, and I said that at least let him annihilate you here - it’s better than there, under mortars,’” says Anton.

 

“They took us to the ‘front line’ and put us in a dugout, which was often under fire. They said they would come in the morning to ‘annihilate’ us, but in the morning the military police came to get us,” says Anton. “They took us to Zaitseve (a village in the so-called ‘DNR’ where conscientious objectors are taken – ed.), we stayed there for about a week.”

“They brought me to an officer, and he said that if I didn’t go to fight, I would face five to 15 years in prison. I replied that they could give me the maximum sentence,” Anton emphasizes. “They took me to the basement, and after a few hours they started torturing me.”

The term “annihilation,” meaning killing by one’s own kind, became a common expression among Russian soldiers during the war.

“They put me in a chair, tied my hands, wrapped my head in tape, and started pulling out my teeth.”

Anton says that the room where those who refused to return to the war were taken one by one was directly above the basement. In Zaitsevo it was called the “party room”.

The “refusals” (“otkazniki” in Russian), and there were about 20 of them, heard screams from that room, but no one resisted when they were taken there. Except for one soldier, but he was first beaten to the point that he could not stand on his feet, and then he was dragged to that room anyway.

“They put me in a chair, tied my hands with handcuffs and belts, and wrapped a tape around my head”, recalls Anton. “Then they beat me, put some kind of iron in my mouth so that I could not close my mouth and started pulling out my teeth with pliers. When they pulled out the third one, I screamed that I agreed to sign everything, the pain was unbearable”.

“My hand was moving, and they pushed a piece of paper at me. I signed, and they said: ‘Don’t refuse anymore, we’ll get you out again.’ And they started pulling out more of my teeth. They shook them, broke them in half,” the soldier says. “I don’t know how long it took, it seemed like an eternity. And they were laughing and joking all the time.”

After this torture, Anton had only three teeth left. They dragged him into the basement and threw him to the rest of the “refusals,” who gave him painkillers. Seeing what they had done to him, another refuser from the evacuation group immediately signed a consent to return to the front. That same night, they “bought” both of them to another unit and, putting them in a KamAZ, drove them away.

Anton’s mother says that after the fight, while he was still in his “civilian” uniform, he didn’t have any teeth. But he did return from the front with only three teeth: he also told her that his teeth were extracted "in the basement".

"When he left, he didn't have all of them, of course, but he had some. And when he came back, he told me that they had them extracted there. He didn't really want to tell me, and I didn't ask him. I can see that the man is having a hard time," says his mother.

 

In the German clinic where Š. prosthesis was made in 2025, he also said: "That he was tortured by the Russian army." "Extremely high tooth loss with three healthy teeth left at such a young age can be explained, from a dental point of view, only by senseless premature extraction of teeth that could have been saved," says the certificate from the clinic, which is available to Sever.Realiya.

In 2023, Yevgeny Chudnetsov, a fighter of the Azov battalion, who was captured by the Russians and returned home as a result of the exchange, said that teeth were extracted during torture.

"At first they just kicked him, and then they pulled out his teeth with pliers. They also said: 'Come on, get a drill.' It's a good thing that there wasn't a cocoon working there. And then some Russian came and said: 'What are you doing? They told you not to touch it, they told you to bring it whole!'" "They wanted me to be whole for the interview, but I don't have any teeth anymore, my face is broken," Chudnetsov recalled.

 

Ukrainian media also reported on the testimonies of prisoners whose teeth were filed with a Russian file in the Kharkiv region.

 

Temperature 41, arrived at the medical unit

 

Then Anton was brought to the unit's location near the town of Krinki. He says he could barely stand and could barely speak.

"The battalion commander was there, he looked at me and said: 'What kind of meat have you brought me?' He asked what they were doing to me. I replied that they were pulling out my teeth, he ordered me to be taken to the medical unit. He acted humanely. There they took my temperature, it was 41. They immediately started stabbing me," says Anton.

Anton says that the field medical unit near Krinki was essentially a concrete room without windows, in which the wounded lay on wooden pallets. Those who could move went to the store to buy noodles, took food and lay down.

“I stayed there for a month, and then they took us to Rostov, and two days later they sent us by plane to a hospital in Sevastopol. There we had to go through a commission. But one doctor said that he would let us rest, but then he would still recognize everyone as fit. And a message came from an officer in a general conversation that our company was gone and that we would go to the next assault to replace the dead. Then, without thinking, I decided to escape,” the soldier says. Anton says that he took a train ticket to Sochi, but did not get there: on the way he got out of the car, ordered a taxi and for 70,000 rubles drove to Ufa in two days. His mother and girlfriend were already waiting for him at home, whom he had told about his plans in advance. A week later, Anton’s nerves could not stand it, and he went to surrender to the military commander’s office. There he told how he was forced to SZCh (unauthorized leaving of the unit -

ed.), because he was not treated. But the command simply dismissed him, saying that they had no information about him, and if they had, they would find him themselves.

Anton was finally declared a deserter only in August 2024, six months after his escape.

Anton, too, was not given treatment at home. The psychiatrist he went to for an examination refused to admit him to a hospital because he was a military man. Then Anton decided to flee the country. He settled with the girl's parents far from the city - in case they suddenly got information about him and started looking for him. He applied for a foreign passport and sold his car.  

 

„The passport was ready in two weeks. I specially applied for a five-year one to make it go faster,” says Anton. “I went to Belarus, and from there I flew to Armenia and lived there for three months. As soon as I got there, I went to the German embassy and asked for asylum, but they turned me down, saying that Armenia was a safe country. And there’s a Russian military base in Gyumri!” “Eventually, with the help of anti-war activists, I made it to Germany via Bosnia and Croatia. The Croats simply let in those who said ‘asylum.’” I reached Germany, spent a month and a half in a refugee camp, and now I live in Nellingen,” says Anton.

Between the refugee camp and the hostel in Nellingen, Anton spent four months in the psychiatric ward of a German clinic.

“When they placed me in a clinic in Germany, I started taking antidepressants, and they still prescribe them to me. In principle, it helps. But still, at night I dream that there are murders. Or that they have come to bring me back from here, from Germany,” Anton admits.

 

According to him, the medical staff at the German clinic was very attentive. It turned out that Anton’s doctor was Ukrainian: she treated the Russian deserter well and sympathized with him, listening to his stories.

Leaving Russia, Anton hoped that his girlfriend would come to him soon. But this did not happen.

"On the day I was supposed to leave the clinic, she sent me a message that she won't come to see me. Because she needs a soldier, not a traitor to the motherland. And now she has another, who is also a soldier," says Anton. "Her stepfather, "Wagner" (he fought in the private mercenary unit Wagner - op.ed.), must have brainwashed her."

"She admitted that she was pregnant with me and sent me an ultrasound image. I wanted to jump from the bridge onto the highway, the police and firefighters knocked me down and I returned to the clinic," says Anton. "Since I was in the clinic for a long time, Germany accepted my asylum request for consideration. So, they would deport me back to Croatia, because I entered the European Union through it."

At the last meeting with officials from the German migration agency, Anton was told that his asylum application could take a year or a year and a half to be processed. The man, who had never been abroad before his desertion, is now trying to settle down in Germany: he is waiting for his prosthesis to be finished, attending integration courses and riding a bicycle.

"Of course, I miss home, but I understand that if I end up there, I will immediately be sent to war. Or first to prison, and from there to war," Anton is sure. "My mother will soon turn 70. They have already come to her with a paper saying that they are looking for me, asking where I am. Of course, she will come to visit me, a call can be made. But she said that she will stay in Russia for the rest of her life."