Anton Lysov, officially listed as a missing Russian serviceman, is in fact in Yerevan. According to his account, the path there began in 2021, when, as a 22-year-old from Cheboksary, he accepted a darknet offer of 2,000 dollars to burn the car of Alyaksey Volkau, head of Belarus’s State Forensic Committee.
Lysov says he was simply looking for money and attached no political meaning to the job at the time. After one failed attempt, on the night of October 1, 2021, he entered a property in the village of Zatsen near Minsk, set the car on fire and fled, but was detained 11 hours later. Zakhar Tarazevich was also convicted in the case after, according to investigators, the same anonymous заказчик sent him to photograph the burned vehicle.
Lysov was initially accused of terrorism, but the case was later reclassified as intentional destruction of property. He received 10 years, while Tarazevich was sentenced to 7.5 years. Belarusian human rights groups recognized Lysov as a political prisoner on November 12, 2022. He says he was abused after arrest at GUBOPiK and was labeled an “extremist” in prison.
In March 2023, Lysov asked to be extradited to Russia, and on December 7, 2023, he was transferred there. A Russian court reduced his sentence to 7.5 years. Later, after repeated transfers and pressure in another case, he signed a request to be sent to the war. On May 6, 2025, he was taken from a detention center in Novgorod, placed in a unit of former prisoners, and then sent near Vovchansk in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.
According to Lysov, convicts in the unit were treated as expendable. He was wounded, refused to return to the front, and says he was threatened and tied to a tree under drones. On September 3, 2025, he and two other soldiers left their position, reached Belgorod, then Cheboksary, and later Armenia.
Meanwhile, his sister received official notice that he had gone missing in action near Vovchansk. That status, he found, left a legal gap: he obtained a new passport and flew to Yerevan without obstruction.
“If I had known in advance the price of freedom, I would have preferred to serve out my sentence,”
Lysov says.