In February 2025, after a court ruling in Russia’s Altai region, it became public that conscripts were being urged to sign military contracts under direct orders from the Defense Ministry. According to 22-year-old Timur Prozorov from Vorkuta, that pressure often turns into coercion, and draftees end up at war against their will.
Prozorov graduated from the Vorkuta Polytechnic College as a systems administrator, worked there, and later moved into game development. He says he had opposed the war in Ukraine since 2014, viewed the violation of the 1991 borders as unacceptable, and wanted to leave Russia, but had neither the money to emigrate nor the means to fight the draft.
On December 9, 2024, he was sent to the 126th Guards unit in Crimea. There, he says, conscripts were first persuaded to sign contracts with promises of money, and later worn down by duty shifts, sleep deprivation, and beatings.
“The only ideological people are officers, majors and colonels sitting comfortably in their offices,”Prozorov said.
After eight days under that regime, he signed a contract and chose the 36th Engineer-Sapper Regiment, hoping to find a way to escape later. After brief training near Kalanchak, he was sent to the left bank of the Dnipro in Kherson region. He served in drone crews near Pishchanivka, Pidstepne, Oleshky, and Krynky, setting up antennas and launching drones.
According to Prozorov, commanders demanded seven sorties a day and threatened soldiers with being sent “onto the boat” or transferred to assault units. “The boat” was the soldiers’ term for attempts to cross the Dnipro in rowing craft, which he described as effectively a death sentence. He says that from January to September 2025 he did not witness a single successful operation of that kind.
In the fall of 2025, Prozorov finally secured leave. On September 26, he returned to his unit, received his leave papers the next day, traveled through occupied territories to Taganrog, then went via Moscow back to Vorkuta and left Russia. In January 2026, after requesting a criminal record certificate, he discovered he was wanted on a charge of unauthorized abandonment of his unit. He now lives abroad, survives on freelance work, and says he is making a satirical game about Vladimir Putin.