Political prisoner in Belarus, deserter in Russia. He tried to make some money, was captured by the KGB in Minsk, then found himself in the trenches in Ukraine

Car target

26-year-old Anton Lysov from Cheboksary, the capital of Chuvashia on the Volga River, barely remembers his father, who left the family when the boy was seven. When Anton turned 16, his mother passed away. His only remaining relatives were his younger sister and elderly grandmother.

He lived in his grandmother’s apartment on the outskirts of the city. Constantly short of money and without a steady job, he was into motorcycles, weightlifting, and guns, loved shooting at the range, and, by all accounts, was no stranger to the romance of crime. While it was still a “relatively cheap hobby,” he bought a Makarov pistol “to sleep more peacefully,” but never used it, and the gun “just lay around for several years and did no harm to anyone.” 

In 2021, the young man was looking for a side job on the darknet and saw an ad: the customer promised two thousand dollars for setting a car on fire in Minsk. At that time, Lysov was traveling and had just arrived in St. Petersburg. When the deal was agreed upon, he traveled to Belarus by train via Moscow.

Lysov knew about the mass protests against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus in 2020, but he didn’t even think that the job could be related to politics in any way. 

“I was too young, my head was full of nonsense. At that moment, I just wanted to make money, and they told me, ‘There’s this job, you need to burn a car in Belarus.’ I said, ‘All right, okay.’ Today, I would never agree to anything like that. I was just young,” he recalls.

Upon arrival in Minsk, it turned out that the Toyota Land Cruiser he was supposed to burn was being guarded by some people. Lysov waited until the guards left, and on the night of October 1, he doused the car with gasoline and set it on fire. It burned almost completely.

After the arson, Lysov returned to his rented apartment. He was arrested 11 hours later. That same night, Belarusian security forces arrested 18-year-old Zakhar Tarazevich, who was supposed to photograph the burned car but was detained on his way to the scene of the fire. Lysov and Tarazevich did not know each other, but became co-defendants in the same criminal case.

The owner of the SUV turned out to be Major General Alexei Volkov, chairman of the Belarusian Committee of Forensic Experts, who previously served as first deputy chairman of the Investigative Committee and participated in cases against Sergei Tikhanvsky and other opposition figures. 

By that time, the protests in Belarus had been brutally suppressed, their participants had emigrated en masse, and those who remained were given long prison sentences. The arson of a high-ranking official’s car became big news.

At first, the young people were charged with terrorism, which carried a sentence of 15 to 25 years in prison. Lysov recalls that he was taken to the police station with a bag over his head. On the way he was beaten, his fingers were twisted, and the officers practiced chokeholds on him.

“They tortured and tortured me: who are you, what are you? I said I didn’t know anything, denied everything to the end, said I didn’t set the fire. I thought it would work, but in Belarus it doesn’t work. There is no justice there at all, and I also got caught up in a political mess. If I were Belarusian, they would probably just hang me in the forest—that’s what they told me when they detained me, that they would just take me to the forest and that would be it. I replied, ‘Well, we’ll all die eventually.’ It all sounds funny now, but it wasn’t funny at all then,” he says. 

According to Lysov, the head of the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ivan Kubrakov, visited him at the police station. First, he asked if the detainee knew whose car he had set on fire and if he recognised his interlocutor. The Russian answered no to both questions. 

Then Kubrakov approached Lysov, who was sitting on a chair with his hands tied behind his back, and, according to him, “began to press on the pain points” on his face and behind his ears. 

“I started making noises, growling. He said, ‘Are you growling, you little bitch? That’s right!’ After that, he hit my head against the wall and said that if I didn’t confess in 20 minutes, they would beat me up. I didn’t say anything, and they took me to the detention centre on Okrestina,” Lysov says. 

From there, he was transferred to Minsk Detention Centre No. 1 (SIZO-1), where he was placed on a special register as prone to extremism. For the first few months he was not even allowed to inform his grandmother about his detention. The young man spent a year and a half awaiting trial.

Operatives from Chuvashia flew to Minsk to meet with Lysov. During a search of his grandmother’s apartment, they found a pistol and the banned books “The Anarchist Cookbook” and its Russian variation, “The ABCs of Domestic Terrorism,” on his computer. In addition, witnesses testified that Lysov had been shooting combat weapons at a shooting range, so Russian law enforcement agencies managed to open a case under the article on “training for terrorism.” However, they did not pursue it, probably because intergovernmental cooperation proved too complicated.

Since it was not possible to prove a political motive in the case of Lysov and Tarazevich, the charges were reclassified under the article on destruction of property. On November 2, 2022, Lysov was sentenced to 10 years in a maximum-security prison, and Tarazevich to 7.5 years.

The Belarusian Viasna Human Rights Centre recognised both as political prisoners, considering the terms and conditions of their detention to be “disproportionate” to their actions. 

Tarazevich is still serving his sentence and is now 23 years old.

Extradition

After the verdict, Lysov wrote a request for extradition to Russia, reasoning that it would be easier for him to serve the sentence in his homeland. Such requests are reviewed jointly by two agencies—the Belarusian Prosecutor General’s Office and the Russian Ministry of Justice, which oversees the penitentiary system. 

However, it turned out that before being transferred from Belarus to Russia, the convicted person must undergo a psychiatric examination in a hospital at his own expense. This cost Lysov 2,000 Belarusian rubles, or about $700. In the psychiatric hospital, he found himself in the same ward as Belarusian artist Ales Pushkin, and the acquaintance made a strong impression on Lysov. 

“He drew my portrait and promised to transfer it to canvas when he was released. He remained idealistic to the end, spoke only Belarusian, shouted ‘Long live Belarus!’ at the police, and was beaten for it, but he still did not break. I respect this man very much; he has a very strong core,” says the young man. A few months later, Pushkin died in a prison hospital. 

After a psychiatric examination, it turned out that a commission had been deducted from the payment, and Lysov owed the Belarusian state 30 rubles ($10). This delayed the extradition process for several months. 

Finally, in December 2023, the young man was transported to Russia: first to Smolensk, and from there, with stops in various cities and prisons, to IK-1 in Cheboksary. It was then that he saw his grandmother for the first time in two years.

At first, things were quiet in the Cheboksary colony. But soon, Lysov recalls, operatives began to visit him frequently: taking him away for investigative activities related to other crimes, threatening to frame him in some of their old cold cases, locking him up in solitary confinement. In addition, because of a pistol found during a search, a case was brought against him for illegal possession of weapons.

Lysov himself believes that the security forces terrorized him out of solidarity with Volkov—the victim in the arson case was a man in uniform. According to the prisoner’s calculations, in 2024 he traveled about 7,000 kilometers — mainly from Cheboksary to the Novgorod region and back. 

As a result, Lysov wrote a confession and admitted to ordering the arson of two more cars, one of which was quickly extinguished. Now the young man claims that he incriminated himself. During the investigation of the new case, he was transferred to a denetntion centre in Novgorod. 

“I said, ‘Fine, I’ll sign, just leave me alone. I’m so tired of all this, I’m exhausted.’ They drove me back and forth thousands of kilometers on this train and just broke me mentally,” Lysov explains. 

On February 20, 2025, the Borovichsky District Court of the Novgorod Region found him guilty of arson and an unsuccessful attempt at arson. 

Shortly after the verdict, Lysov signed a contract with the Ministry of Defence to go and fight in the war against Ukraine.

“I didn’t really have a choice. The first option was to die there and finally find peace, or to try to escape,” he explains.

Vovchansk

Lysov left the detention centre for the war on May 6, 2025. First, the recruit was sent to Voronezh, then to a training unit in the occupied part of the Luhansk region. He thought of an escape, but it was impossible: it turned out that the training unit was well guarded by military police. 

In early June, a company of former prisoners assigned to the 82nd Motorized Rifle Regiment was sent to a position near Vovchansk, in the Kharkiv region. The coordinates provided by Lysov match the data from the OSINT project DeepState for early June 2025, which indicated that this area was occupied by the Russians. 

During the first attack, the prisoners were fired upon with a grenade launcher. Lysov suffered a shrapnel wound to his leg and retreated with his comrades. The next day, the commander ordered him to secure a position closer to the line of contact on his own. 

The position indicated by the commander turned out to be the basement of a private house on Metallist Street in Vovchansk, which had been almost completely destroyed during the fighting. 

“Three-by-three-meter room, brick walls, concrete ceiling. In other words, it was a typical basement of a private house. Of course, the house itself was gone. You go down the stairs and that’s it, the height is about two and a half meters,” Lysov says.

As soon as Lysov jumped into the basement, the first drone appeared above the stairs, followed by more and more. The soldier requested retreat via radio, but was refused. One of the drones dropped a grenade into the basement. Shrapnel hit him in the face, piercing his cheek, breaking his nose, and knocking out three teeth.

“There wasn’t much water there anyway. But with this cheek, when I drank—like in a cartoon, half of the water spilled out. It was even funny in that moment of hopelessness,” Lysov recalls.

Since the Ukrainians had spotted him, drones appeared one after another above the basement entrance. Lysov lost consciousness twice from concussions, but came to. While he was lying unconscious, shrapnel that had hit his face caused an infection. He tried to persuade the commanders again that he must retreat, but to no avail. 

“I said, ‘I’m rotting alive here, let me leave.’ They said, ‘No, that’s a war crime.’ Well, it was clear what would happen next; these same people would simply shoot me. So I just sat there and rotted, stinking of death, because the wound was right under my nose. I could really smell the stench of a corpse coming from me. When I came to, my first thought was to slit my throat and end the suffering, but thank God there was no knife nearby. I’m glad it turned out that way. I’m a Christian and I don’t want to go to hell,” says the young man.

Two days later, a fiber optic drone flew into the basement.

“When these drones land, their self-destruct system is activated. I dug a hole in this cellar to hide somehow, and it landed very close to me; I could feel the wind from its propellers. It flew in, exploded, and it was as if my screen had gone blank. Just a black screen, everything black, I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t feel myself breathing. I thought I was dead,” Lysov recounts.

When he came to, the soldier couldn’t move: “I was in a foxhole in the far corner of the cellar. It even hurt to breathe.” The concrete ceiling split in half from the explosion, sagged, and “formed two half-arches, dividing the cellar into two parts.”

He managed to dig out the radio that had been buried by the explosion, but no one was responding on the command frequency anymore. According to Lysov, he spent a total of 21 days in the basement on Metallist Street.

The young man recalls that for the first two days after the concussion, he had severe hallucinations: it seemed that he was bringing water to his mouth, but it disappeared. Someone treated him to condensed milk, then teased and laughed at him, pointing their finger. On the third day, Lysov dug a hole to collect water. When enough water seeped from the soil, he scooped it up, filtered it through a cloth, and drank it. He ate toothpaste.

The soldier claims to have lost about 40 kilograms. The radio was silent. Lysov thought he would die of exhaustion, but still tried to switch the radio frequencies at random. And then a communications officer stumbled upon his frequency.

“He said, ‘Who is this?’ They already thought I was dead and reported me missing. Everyone thought I was dead, both the Russians and the Ukrainians. But I showed up and said I was alive. Then they sent me a drone, which rescued me. I don’t know how I got there, I hadn’t walked for three weeks, I hadn’t eaten anything. I just walked like a zombie, losing consciousness, moving forward on inertia. I walked and fell, but at that moment there was no shooting or explosions. I was just lucky, and I came back,” Lysov says.

Escape

He was taken to a field hospital and then to Belgorod, a city close to the Russia-Ukraine border. Lysov claims that his legs gave way due to exhaustion, so he used a wheelchair during the first few days. The fragments of his broken teeth were removed. 

Hoping that this would make it easier to desert, Lysov persuaded the chief physician to give him a referral to Moscow for facial surgery. But for some reason, this infuriated the doctor, and after two or three days, he discharged the troublesome soldier, sending him back to his unit near the border town of Shebekino. 

In July, Lysov recalls, an investigation began at the unit into the suicide of one of the officers. A month later, he was sent back to the front, but this time to dig trenches. 

Lysov tried to injure himself with a hand grenade fuse, but failed. A few weeks later he decided to escape. Every day, he and other former prisoners were taken out to dig. Having memorised the approximate route, he took a chance and headed towards Russia, but was caught by a military policeman passing by. 

According to the young man, he did not even deny that he was trying to desert. He only asked to be punished according to the law, rather than be “zeroed out” (simply killed, a common practice in units on the front lines). Lysov thought that the policeman took pity on him when he saw his physical condition. The fugitive was held in a military police warehouse for several days, then his commander came and brought him back to his unit in Shebekino. Soon Lysov was told that he was going on a combat mission.

The mission was scheduled for 4 a.m. According to Lysov, he simply refused to sign for the weapons and said he would not carry out the order. The commanders took him to the forest and beat him, then tied him to a tree and left there for the whole day. 

“They beat me up. They deliberately not on hit me in the face, but all over the body, even though I hadn’t actually done anything. They were just sadists. I don’t understand where their unjustified cruelty comes from. There were drones flying around, but I was lucky that none of them hit me,” Lysov says. 

In the evening, they untied him. Not knowing what to do with the deserter, the commander ordered him to deliver provisions to the position.

Lysov took advantage of this and decided to run away. This happened on August 29, 2025. According to him, he first hitched a ride with the military, introduced himself as a drone operator, and asked to be taken to the nearest village. There he found a taxi driver who agreed to take the him to Shebekino. Finally, Lysov made it to Belgorod, and from there he traveled by train to his native Cheboksary—the former prisoner did not have a passport. 

A few weeks later, his grandmother received a notice that her grandson had gone missing on September 3 “while performing the special military operation in the town of Vovchansk.” 

Lysov hid for about six months, but after consulting with Get Lost, a project that helps Russian soldiers desert, he realised that he could take a risk and restore his passport by reporting it lost.

When issuing the passport, an employee of the migration department said that the military registration office would be notified about the new document. Lysov realised that it was time to leave Russia, and the very next day, February 26, he was in Yerevan.

As he tells his story, he repeatedly points out that since his concussion, he often gets confused and forgets what he has said. His face is covered with numerous scars. But now Anton Lysov now feels relatively safe for the first time since 2021. 

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev