Torture, bribes, and an escape. What one mobilised Russian soldier went through to evade the war

Moscow—Nizhny Novgorod—Svatove: How a Pacifist Electrician Became a Military Anaesthetist

Sergei Savchenko is the first to admit he had a turbulent youth. He married early, became a father, divorced after a quarrel, and then reunited with his ex-wife, but this time without officially registering the marriage. In recent years, Sergei worked repairing household appliances and visited Moscow on business trips.

On October 22, 2022—a month after mobilisation was announced in Russia—he was stopped by Moscow police. After checking his passport, they told him that a summons was already waiting for him in Nizhny Novgorod. Sergei had lived there once but had not shown up at the enlistment office since returning from conscription service in 2011 and had long ago lost his military ID.

In response to the offer to go to the Nizhny Novgorod enlistment office, Savchenko told the police to “fuck off”. The security forces then dragged him into the “guard room”, stuffed a bundle into his pocket, called in witnesses, and drew up an inspection report. The bundle contained 10 grams of mephedrone, a widely available synthetic drug. After that, Sergei was released and threatened that if he did not show up at the enlistment office, the case would proceed.

Savchenko was in Nizhny Novgorod the very next day. The duty officer took him to the military commissar who, upon learning that the man had not been registered in the city for a long time, called someone.

A few hours later, a plainclothes man arrived to pick up Savchenko and took him to the passport office, where Sergei was immediately given temporary registration at someone else’s address. The military commissar also indicated this address on the summons.

Two days passed, and Savchenko was issued a military ID with the rank of corporal. He says he immediately warned that he was not going to shoot at people.

“I said that I had a real taboo on killing—this is a horrifying thing for me, one I would have to live with later. I don’t need that. Not even specifically Ukrainians, but in general. They asked me what I did in civilian life. Well, I repaired household appliances; my military specialty also says ‘electrician’. They all told me: ‘Oh, well, you’ll go as an electrician! We need electricians!’ ” Sergei recalls.

He was sent to the 347th Motorised rifle regiment, which was formed from mobilised men at a base near Kostroma in the autumn of 2022. There, to his surprise, Savchenko learned that he would serve not as an electrician, but as a regular infantryman. Two weeks were allotted for training.

During this time, Sergei found out that the medical company lacked specialists. He began to seek meetings with military doctors and eventually managed to speak with the commander of the medical company.

“It helped that I have a gift for gab and personal experience. I have medics among my relatives, so I don’t watch TV; I read books, and medicine is one of the topics that interests me. I was a little bit knowledgeable on the subject, I understood how the body works,” Savchenko explains. “There were simple, general questions: what, roughly speaking, can be the causes of death in war? And it’s always shock—either haemorrhagic, pain-induced, or anaphylactic. I named such basic things, and they took me into the medical company as an anaesthetist instead of the infantry.”

Already on November 12, Savchenko was at positions near the village of Nyzhnia Duvanka in the Svatove district of the Luhansk region. The line of contact was 20 kilometres away. The medical company equipped a resuscitation room in a barn next to a private house, and Savchenko got the position of nurse anaesthetist. He had to learn on the job in the operating room; the flow of wounded was huge, Sergei recalls. Some were resuscitated, while others were simply stabilised to a condition where they could be transported to the rear hospital.

He was only given leave in May 2023. Then Savchenko went home and officially married his wife.

Upon returning to the front, he received two medals: “For Merit in Military Medicine” and “For Saving the Perishing”.

However, the award played a cruel joke on Sergei: “those who are not idiots” in the 347th Regiment were sent to officer courses. As a holder of awards and the status of a combat participant, Savchenko more than met this requirement. The problem was that after the courses, it was almost impossible to avoid participating in combat, and it was also impossible to refuse training.

As Sergei says, the commander of the medical company with the call sign Znakhar warned that in case of refusal, he would be sent to the assault detachment.

“He just passed on the order from the command, apparently from the group command. He said that they would ‘zero me out’—not directly, but ’You know how it can be,’” Savchenko recalls.

Zaitsevo: Torture in Three Shifts

Officer training took place in the summer in the Naro-Fominsk district near Moscow. After three months, Savchenko was given the rank of junior lieutenant.

On the night of October 14, units of the 347th regiment were thrown into an assault that resulted in heavy losses. Relatives of the mobilised men began recording video appeals, and the surviving soldiers began giving interviews, outraged that inexperienced recruits were being sent to the front line. Because of this, the commander, his deputy, and the commander of the 2nd Battalion were replaced in the regiment, Sergei says, but the attitude towards the soldiers did not change.

Upon returning to the front, Savchenko, as an officer, was appointed a platoon commander, and a few days later, the new regimental command ordered the soldiers to be issued ammunition and to storm the strongholds of the AFU in the area of the village of Yahidne—according to Sergei, without artillery preparation or reconnaissance.

He refused to carry out the order.

“I was ready to go to the front, but only for the wounded, nothing more. From the very beginning, I said that I would not shoot myself, nor give orders to shoot at anyone,” says Savchenko.

The battalion commander wrote up a report, and a few days later, the military police detained Savchenko.

According to the man, he was first brought to the regimental location in Nyzhnia Duvanka and put in a cellar. As soon as the police left, fellow soldiers who remembered Sergei from the medical company released him and allowed him to move freely around the territory. He spent five days like this, waiting for the commanders to decide his fate.

Then Savchenko was taken from Nyzhnia Duvanka to Zaitsevo—an illegal prison for military personnel who refused to follow orders.

He clarifies that the Zaitsevo prison is no longer located in the village of the same name, but 15 kilometres from it—in Rassypnoye near the Russian border. That’s where Sergei was brought.

The facility is located in the basement of the former Ukrainian customs building. Savchenko read its full name on a piece of paper hanging on the door: “Centre for the Detention of Military Personnel Who Have Temporarily Lost Their Combat Resilience, Western Group of Forces (Forces) ‘Zaitsevo’.”

Mediazona saw the abbreviation TsVVUBU (ЦСВВУБУ) in the responses of the Ministry of Defence to complaints from the wives of military personnel. Similar wording—“centre for restoring combat capability,” “centre for restoring mental health”—were also mentioned by former prisoners of the camp for objectors in Zaitsevo itself.

Sergei Savchenko recognised the room in a video published by Astra. According to him, about 400 people were kept in the basement at the same time. Among the detainees, the junior lieutenant claims, were also the former commanders of the 347th Regiment, who lost their positions while he was in training.

At the same time, people in the basement were constantly changing—in one day, 15 new prisoners could be brought in; in another, 20 could be taken away, Sergei says. He noticed that privates were kept in Zaitsevo for an average of 5–10 days, while officers were kept much longer.

According to Savchenko, he spent 72 days in the basement.

During this time, he was allowed to call his wife twice, who was inundating the prosecutor’s office, the Ministry of Defence, and even the human rights commissioner with complaints—to inform her that he was alive.

At the same time, he was tortured every day, Sergei says.

“They interrogated me only upon arrival and took all my documents. Then every day they took me out of the basement to a separate room, where I was subjected to torture. It happened in a variety of ways: time and again, they beat me with electric shocks, poured cold water over me for an hour and a half or two, straight from a hose, just beat me. Sometimes they took me outside, sometimes they did it in the office,” he recalls. “The task of this facility is simply to break a person so that he agrees to everything. This is not for the sake of some kind of testimony; it’s just daily special effects so that you really want to get out of there, anywhere. It could take five or six hours, or it could take half an hour. But daily, daily.”

According to Savchenko, the prisoners were tortured by the same people—a platoon of 30 who were divided into three shifts. It seemed to Sergei that they were the same objectors as he was.

Every day, the prisoners were taken out of the basement for a formation: the deputy commander of the 25th Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade would come to Rassypnoye and announce the names of those he was taking with him.

Savchenko heard his name on December 26th. About 40 other people were taken from Zaitsevo with him. They were dropped off near an abandoned house and ordered to wait.

From local residents, they learned that they were in the village of Mechnikove, Kharkiv region. One of the objectors tried to escape in order not to get into the assault group but got lost and suffered frostbite on his legs, which, according to Savchenko, later had to be amputated.

Two days later, they were transferred to the Kupyansk direction.

Synkivka. Ill-gotten Gains

On the eve of the New Year 2024, the Russian army, with the forces of the 25th Separate Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade, tried to take the village of Synkivka in the Kupyansk district. Everyone was thrown into the assault—contract soldiers, mobilised men, prisoners, and the disabled. Thanks to interviews with soldiers’ wives and videos from the battlefield, the 25th brigade earned a reputation as a unit in which, if you end up there, you become cannon fodder.

Sergei Savchenko knew this too.

“I wasn’t supposed to get out of there; I was sent there to be ‘zeroed out,’ ” he says.

The objectors released from Zaitsevo were brought to the location of the 25th brigade late at night on December 29. Savchenko claims that even then he continued to repeat that he would not take up arms, and on the way, he told the deputy commander about his stance.

“After the torture in Zaitsevo, I was in such a depressed state—I really didn’t give a fuck. I just said, ‘Do what you want, but I won’t shoot.’ I already thought they would fucking kill me. I was ready for not getting out of there alive,” he recalls.

For this, Sergei was tied to a tree for the night, but in the morning, he was released and taken to the head of the medical service of one of the assault detachments, an obese sergeant with deeply set eyes. A native of Crimea, he once served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a conscript, and after the annexation of the peninsula, he received a Russian passport. Before the war, the sergeant worked as a paramedic in one of the Moscow hospitals.

In the 25th brigade, as Savchenko guessed, this person was one of those who unofficially helped the commanders keep the rank-and-file stormtroopers in subordination.

“Having realised where he ended up, he became something like ‘activists’ in [Russian] prisons who break fellow prisoners. Who, so to speak, observe order on the part of the administration, but at the same time is not the administration. Tying to a tree, while buying something for the needs of the brigade—in general, such ambiguous organisational and educational activities,” Sergei explains.

Savchenko told the sergeant that before his arrest he had been an anaesthetist and had awards. After studying Sergei’s military ID, the sergeant offered him to engage in the evacuation of the wounded from the line of contact. For this, it was necessary to pay 100,000 rubles (about $1,000). Savchenko agreed.

The sergeant gave him a phone (Sergei claims that the phone was connected to Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service that is not supposed to be in use of Russian military), and he called his wife and asked her to urgently transfer the required amount. The head of the medical service didn’t bother with secrecy: the money was sent to a Sberbank card linked to his phone number. Mediazona has confirmation of this transfer.

Savchenko explains that the amount wasn’t particularly large because bribery at the front is routine.

“Everyone’s throwing money around there all the time. Basically, if you want to be a driver, you buy a UAZ minibus—the so-called ‘bukhanka’, a ‘loaf’—and then you can drive. If you want to postpone going on a mission to live a bit longer, you pay up. It’s a common practice—ten bribes of 100,000 each, and you’re talking a million. Plus, new people arrive daily, so it’s steady business,” he says.

After paying for a spot in the evacuation brigade, Sergei found himself on the front line, still wearing the rubber boots he’d been issued in Zaitsevo. He scavenged proper boots from a corpse, acquiring a phone in much the same way, which he later managed to unlock. Evacuations were carried out twice daily—at dawn and dusk. According to Savchenko, each trip rescued seven to twelve people. Transport was typically a standard UAZ minibus, driven at speeds of 80–90 km/h to avoid being an easy target.

“You’re racing across rough terrain at a mad speed under constant fire, finding the wounded, cramming them in like sardines, and speeding back. If the vehicle burns out, you hide the wounded somewhere relatively safe, request another one, and hope it arrives in time. I went through five minibuses and two armoured carriers. Four drivers were killed—200s—and countless others were injured. Somehow, I was spared. We were shelled every single time. Each trip, you knew you’d come under fire—it was just a matter of luck. Apparently, I’m very lucky,” Sergei recalls.

He estimates that out of 40 people taken with him from Zaitsevo, only 13 survived. All were wounded and had to be evacuated.

This continued for more than two months. During that time, according to Savchenko, the sergeant he had paid to secure his evacuation role was enjoying an unofficial leave in Moscow. Meanwhile, Sergei suffered five concussions and a shrapnel wound to his left forearm from a drone strike. When he sought hospitalisation, his commander refused, telling him that as a medic, he could treat himself.

When the head of the medical service returned, he offered to help process compensation for Sergei’s injuries—but only if Sergei agreed to let him keep one million roubles out of the three million he was entitled to.

Not expecting much, Savchenko agreed. He was issued Form 100, the necessary paperwork for injury compensation, but at the last moment, the sergeant abruptly cancelled the arrangement without explanation.

From Velikiye Vyselki to Luhansk: Forced Labour for Investigators

On 13 March 2024, Sergei Savchenko was ordered to deploy to the frontline again—this time as an assault soldier, not an evacuator. Determined to escape the front at any cost, he persuaded the driver of an evacuation vehicle to take him to the headquarters of the 25th Brigade in Novoyegoryevka. There, he approached an FSB counterintelligence officer attached to the unit and offered himself for interrogation.

“I gave a full statement: my injury, which could only be recognised officially with a bribe; the payment I had to make for an evacuation role; everything. Plus, while I was in Zaitsevo, my wife was filing complaints non-stop with the prosecutor’s office, the Investigative Committee, and the Ministry of Defence. By then, rumours about this guy with all the paperwork had probably started spreading. They didn’t know what to do with me,” Sergei explains.

After the interrogation, he was locked in a cage outside the headquarters—“like a zoo enclosure, about the size of a small dog kennel, where you could only stand hunched over.”

The soldiers guarding his cage initially mistook him for a Ukrainian prisoner of war. When they realised he was Russian, they began bringing him bread and blankets at night.

After three nights, Sergei was transferred to the artillery division of the 25th Brigade, stationed ten kilometres from headquarters in a wooded area near Velikiye Vyselki.

A conversation with the divisional commander revealed that Sergei had been moved “closer to headquarters” to appease his wife, who continued filing complaints about torture and corruption.

In May, following yet another complaint from his wife, the prosecutor’s office summoned Sergei to the 25th Brigade’s headquarters and presented him with an ultimatum: “Basically, we either kill you now, or you sign a statement saying everything is fine and request no investigation into your case.”

Sergei signed the statement. Later, in their responses to his wife’s inquiries, the oversight officials cited this statement as the reason for their inaction.

“It has been established that Junior Lieutenant Savchenko has no complaints against Ministry of Defence officials, does not confirm the allegations made in your appeal, and requests that investigative measures regarding him be terminated,” stated the letters reviewed by Mediazona.

Within the howitzer division, Sergei found himself in an unusual position of privilege—“wandering around like a free officer, keeping an eye on things to make sure no one was drinking.”

“I’d been in the service for a long time, and my wife had been submitting complaints for just as long. I reckon they were scared to zero me out and instead hid me somewhere quieter. If they’d arrested me, the whole bribery scandal would’ve come to light if I ended up in prison. That would’ve created a mess for everyone involved, and no one wanted that. So, a person they were supposed to get rid of stayed around and learned a lot instead. They just tried to sweep everything under the rug,” Sergei explains.

However, despite his commander’s promises, Sergei was never paid. He had to ask colleagues returning to Russia for cigarettes and basic supplies. During this time, he constantly thought about how to escape the front line.

In late June, a team of UAV operators was assigned temporarily to the howitzer division, sharing a bunker with Sergei. One of the operators was often on the phone, and Sergei recalls hearing the words “Investigative Committee” during those conversations. Curious, he asked if the operator had contacts in the agency. The operator provided him with the number of a deputy head of the military investigative department in Luhansk.

According to Savchenko, the investigator promised to take him out of the division compound for one million roubles.

“He didn’t explain how it would happen, he just said: I can do it and it costs a mil,” Savchenko recalls. “I believed him, because everyone’s afraid of people from the Investigative Committee. They have something on every commanding officer. Each one of them is dirty one way or the other.” The soldier had to borrow money from friends.

In mid-June Savchenko’s wife transferred 400,000 roubles to the investigator’s Sberbank account. Judging by their correspondence, he promised the woman that “guys from the Luhansk Investigative Committee” will come for her husband the next day after this first transfer, but this didn’t happen.

Nevertheless, the 25th division soon received an inquiry from the Investigative Committee about the location of Savchenko. And even though the officer, in his own words, “slouching around,” his unit’s response was that he is “in direct contact with the enemy in the zone of the special military operation.”

In June, according to the correspondence, the investigator finally had good news for Sergei’s wife: “We finally breached the brigade’s defence, they tried real hard to hide him. They were probably afraid he would tell us an awful lot about them. We never had such a difficult case)))”

In September, people from the Investigative Committee eventually came for Savchenko and took him to Luhansk, presenting a paper that the junior lieutenant was assigned to the department in connection with investigative activities.

Sergei spent the next month in a five-story building of the IC in Lugansk. Upon arrival, he was assigned to one of the department deputy heads. In fact, he performed the duties of an interrogator: he kept documentation, interrogated witnesses, and wrote requests to various government bodies, from drug dispensaries to local authorities.

According to Savchenko, he worked 12 hours a day for free, with no days off, and lived in a room on the fifth floor, where there was a shower. Food was brought to him by other employees of the  Investigative Committee. He had a few selfies of himself in a T-shirt with the logo of the organisation as a keepsake.

From Luhansk to Rostov: the last work trip

Whilst working in the Investigative Committee, Sergei Savchenko says, he made a request to the Unified Settlement Center of the Ministry of Defence and learned that he had been marked as a missing person since December 29, 2023. That’s the day he arrived at the 25th Motorised Rifle Brigade.

Sergei could not confirm his words with any document, but the mass recognition of soldiers of the 25th brigade as missing in action was widely discussed in the media. According to Savchenko, this is the know-how of the brigade commander, Colonel Alexei Ksenofontov (call sign “Tiger”).

Savchenko says that when he learned Ksenofontov had been awarded the Hero of Russia title, “the puzzle came together.”

“He received the Hero of Russia for assault operations without losses, and assaults without losses are the result of the boys being brought there, immediately declared missing and sent to become fodder,” Sergei says. “This scum will then get the rank of major-general, retire and become an awesome member of parliament. Meanwhile, because of him, 5,000 boys are lying there, bushes are already growing over some of them, and the corpses were not pulled out, because corpses must be paid for, and corpses must be recognized as corpses. These are losses, and no one is interested in them.”

In the meantime, a month passed, and the chief returned from vacation to the investigative department where he worked. Savchenko realized that he did not know about the bribe.

“So that investigator took money from me, waited until the chief went on vacation, and quietly, without letting the commander know, just pulled me out,” Savchenko says. “Like I work there. It was impossible to reach an agreement with the commander: he said that the 25th Brigade would be coming for me soon and that there was nothing to be done.”

That’s when the junior lieutenant decided to simply run away. His experience working at the Investigative Committee gave him confidence: he had learned from correspondence with other agencies that “there are no common databases for various security services,” and if a person is not on the wanted list, it is virtually impossible to find them in Russia.

Just in case, Savchenko came up with a legend: he is the head of a construction firm from Rostov-on-Don, who went to Luhansk to look at buildings for reconstruction.

“I changed into civilian clothes, deleted everything from my phone, traveled around Luhansk construction sites, and took photos. I called a firm in Rostov which I found on Avito and made sure it was working in Luhansk, so that if anything happened I could refer to it,” Sergei recalls. “I went to Sberbank, found a random guy, and my wife transferred the money to him, which he gave to me in cash. Then I called a cab and went straight to Rostov. It was so fucking scary. They stopped us at the checkpoint, checked our passports. They asked who I was, how I had entered the Luhansk region: I said that I had come through another checkpoint, on corporate transport. And that was it, no more problems. I knew that this story would work.” https://t.me/iditelesom_help

In Rostov-on-Don, he took a train and got off at a random station, “made an appearance in front of the cameras,” and from there hitchhiked, not fully believing his luck.

For the first two weeks, Sergei drank heavily, although he says he quit alcohol about ten years ago. Then he managed to meet his family. After a month on the run, in the fall of 2024, he was able to leave Russia with the help of the Get Lost project. At the time this article was published, his name wasn’t on the public wanted list of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

While serving in the medical company, Savchenko had been paid 195,000 roubles a month. He claims that nearly 60% of this money went to medicines, bandages, IVs, and other supplies. In 2024, he did not receive a single penny from the Ministry of Defence, but spent half a million on bribes. The recipients of the money are known, but an inspection in the 25th Brigade found “no confirmation of the fact of bribery.”

Savchenko now finds short-term occasional jobs. The shrapnel is still in his arm: in Russia, doctors would call the police when dealing with such a wound, and the fugitive has no money for treatment abroad. Every time he flexes his arm, he feels pain.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev