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Among them is a young IT worker in southern Russia who now lives in a tent in the forest.
Like others eligible for military service, the IT worker quickly began planning to apply after Putin issued his mobilization order on Sept. 21 — frantically checking outbound flights, whose prices jumped every time he hit the refresh button.
Then he had an epiphany: if he couldn’t afford to flee Russia or abandon his family and friends, he could at least escape civilization and the state military system. So he took a week off from work and went to hide in the woods.
“I was afraid that I would be called if I went to the store, or that someone would come to my house,” the IT worker, who shares his experience on a Telegram blog under the pseudonym Adam Kalinin, said in a phone interview. He requested anonymity because he is on the run from authorities.
The Washington Post interviewed five other men who have spent the past weeks hiding out in rented apartments, country houses and even a music studio. Some were interviewed by phone, others agreed to be visited by a photographer in their hiding places. Despite coming from different backgrounds, professions and family circumstances, they expressed an identical goal: to avoid killing or being killed in Ukraine.
In interviews, most said they still did not feel safe from Putin’s war machine, and each spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being identified by authorities.
“I’m in no rush to get back to a normal lifestyle,” said a 38-year-old lab technician who was attacked by a group of police and service officials who served him a summons at his home in late September.
He did not sign it and decided not to report to the assembly point the next day as requested. Instead, he holed up in a villa outside Moscow while notes piled up on his apartment door.
He eventually had to return to the city for work, but swapped his car for a bicycle to avoid traffic police and wore a mask, wary of Moscow’s vast CCTV network with a built-in facial recognition system.
“I had nowhere to run, no way to work remotely,” he said when asked if he was considering going abroad. Having served in the Russian military before, the lab technician said he wanted to avoid it again, but said he did not feel “unequivocal support for either side” in the war.
The IT worker and his wife had always been keen campers, so he had most of what he needed to evade the conscription officers: a sleeping bag, a saw, a gas burner. He also bought solar panels, a winter fishing tent and a satellite dish to continue working online.
Shoigu’s public statements that the mobilization was over did not bring much peace to the IT worker or other Russian men in hiding. No legal decree has been issued officially ending conscription.
So the IT worker, who calls himself a pacifist, is already living his second month as an anti-war recluse.
For the IT worker, his daily commute is now a three-minute walk from his ‘home’ to his ‘office’ – a separate tent set higher up in a clearing, the only place nearby with a reasonably stable internet connection.
He cooks over an open fire and said he misses hot showers and fresh fruit, but his living conditions are still far better than those of conscripted men sent to Ukraine. According to Russian media, hundreds of recruits in Russia, many of them poorly equipped and poorly trained, have already been killed – reinforcing the IT worker’s decision to remain in hiding.
“The first news that came out of the mobilization was how people were missing basic equipment or the conditions they were in,” he said, referring to reports of senior officers forcing new soldiers to buy their own body armor or sleep in dilapidated, unheated barracks.
“They’re suffering even before they get to the front line and they could easily get, say, pneumonia and nobody would care, which puts it into perspective for me,” he said. “Either they mobilize me and put me in something like a prison, where you have no rights, only duties, or I stay here, where I still have a lot of problems and problems, but I’m free.”
As Russian losses continue to mount and troops inevitably need rotation, there is no doubt that additional reinforcements will be needed.
“For how long the hundreds of thousands of mobilized servicemen have been sent to the armed forces is unknown,” Pavel Chikov, a lawyer from the human rights group Agora, wrote on Telegram. “Sooner or later…either through death, injury, or other causes, their places will have to be filled with recruits.”
A 24-year-old financial consultant from Moscow was a key target for recruitment officers because of his previous service as a special operations soldier, and they were persistent in trying to track him down, he told The Post.
First, the door of the apartment at his declared address — all Russians must register with the authorities — was plastered with drafts. The financial advisor, who lives elsewhere, never took them.
The local commissioner then sent a notice to his office. Under Russian law, employers are required to provide them to staff or risk hefty fines. Instead, his company fired him on paper but allowed him to telecommute unofficially.
Days before the mobilization ended, conscripts went to the apartment with a police escort and questioned the tenants living there about the whereabouts of the former soldier.
From the start of the mobilization, the financial consultant, who graduated from naval school, said he knew he would be called up. “I wore the uniform for six years,” he said. “So I’ve already prepared for it.”
When Putin issued the diploma, his family wanted him to flee to Kazakhstan, but he refused to leave, fearing he would be stopped at the border or worse, labeled a deserter. His former military colleagues are also bombarded with advertisements.
But the consultant said he was unwilling to fight and die in a senseless conflict.
“I think it’s absolutely not my war and there’s nothing for me to do there,” he said. “Knowing the mechanics of the military, it’s horrible to realize how many civilians are dying.” He added: “On a political level, I don’t even get involved there and I don’t even want to know what they’re fighting for there. But on a personal, moral level, I don’t want that to happen.”
He hides in a dacha or a country house, then rotates through the apartments of several friends in the Moscow region. “I avoided all public transport,” he said. “I refused to go to the office under any circumstances and you will not see me in public.” After Putin declared the mobilization complete, the consultant returned to his rented apartment, but still kept a low profile.
A 40-year-old music producer in Moscow who had military training at the university also had officers banging repeatedly on the door of an apartment he owns but rents out.
“I’m against war, I’ve never hit anybody in my life,” said the producer, sitting in a dimly lit room of his music studio decorated with Soviet paraphernalia. “When problems are solved by violence, it is the most primitive way, a return to the animal state.”
The producer moved away from his wife and children and spent nights on the sofa in the studio, shaken after hearing that his friend, who was also on the run, had been served a note by police officers who stopped his car.
Most of the producer’s friends left Russia, and his wife begged him to follow suit, even threatening him with divorce. But he refused, saying he would not allow Putin to “evaporate” the life he had built in Moscow.
“I never cared about Russia, I always considered myself a person of the world,” said the producer. “But when the war started, it kind of turned my thought process around. … I decided I wasn’t going to run. I am a full resident of this country and just because someone has gone off the rails doesn’t mean I have to give up my house, my beliefs and my job.
He continues to live “off the grid” – avoiding the subway, crossing the street if he sees someone in uniform, and most of all, keeping his phone off to avoid being tracked. “I think you should choose a maximum security strategy if you decided to stay here,” he said. “The situation could get worse. Rumor has it that there will be a second wave of sets, and then maybe a third.
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