The Associated Press spoke with five officers and one soldier who deserted the Russian military. All have criminal cases against them in Russia, where they face 10 years or more in prison. Each is waiting for a welcome from the West that has never arrived. Instead, all but one live in hiding.
You need to give these people a way out. If you create a way for people to escape military service a lot of people would take it.
Surrender is a legitimate way out.
There’s a difference between surrender and defection.
Soldiers who surrender are afforded protections and retain ties to their countries. After hostilities resolve or if a prisoner transfer is arranged, they return to their country and generally do not face punishment. At least according to Geneva conventions on lawful war. It’s rarely this simple and clean.
Soldiers who defect have few, if any, protections and are in a weird place with nationality. They are typically considered fugitives by their home countries and may or may not be able to travel internationally as they may also be stateless.
Yeah, that’s true.
You’ve got some complications there, though.
You probably need to find a country that has sufficient Russian-speakers to get by, unless they can also speak something else. But that country is going to be basically harboring people that Russia considers criminals. That’s going to piss off Russia. So, maybe Armenia or the -stans. They’ve got a Russophone population. I’d guess that one can probably get by fine there speaking Russian. But they’ve also got some good reasons not to piss off Russia; it’s a rough neighborhood and Russia is a major player. Then you’ve got, say, the Baltic states. They’ve got Russian-speakers. But they’re – probably partly as a result of this war, which Putin justified by “protecting Russian-speakers” – adverse to the Russian language and it being used as a route for Kremlin influence, and they were pushing EU policy opposed to Russian immigration; I think that they’ve got national security concerns. There’s Belarus, but I’m pretty sure that Belarus is just gonna extradite anyone Russia wants to Russia. And there’s Ukraine, but they’re already there, and if Ukraine isn’t willing, that’s not really an answer. I’d assume that Ukraine takes forcibly conscripted DPR/LNR soldiers who want to stay, though they probably are going to want to handle them on a case-by-case basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_diaspora
Or maybe more-usefully:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_Russian_speakers
That’s basically Germany, Israel, the US, and Canada. Everyone else above 100k Russophones falls into one of the above camps: -stans, Baltic-style states, Belarus, or Ukraine. My guess is that we could probably do it, but you also gotta remember that Trump already rode a wave of upset at immigration to office. I would assume that there is going to be some political price there with nativists.
The only skillset that they’re definitely going to have in common is some – maybe minimal – military training, and odds are pretty good that they were poorer-than-the-average in Russia, folks for whom the money meant more. They may have psychological or physical scars from the war.
Some of them – because, remember the Kremlin got a lot of “low political cost” manpower by offering amnesties to people who were in prison prior to the war – were prisoners, so for some people, you’re not talking about people who are not merely criminal in Russia’s eyes for surrendering, but may have been aiming to exit a hefty prison sentence. That’s going to be a difficult sell for countries accepting immigrants. If you think of the Mariel boatlift, where Castro intentionally sought to mix Cuban prisoners in, send them to the US:
The Mariel boatlift (Spanish: éxodo del Mariel) was a mass emigration of Cubans who traveled from Cuba’s Mariel Harbor to the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. The term “Marielito” (plural “Marielitos”) is used to refer to these refugees in both Spanish and English. While the exodus was triggered by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy, it followed on the heels of generations of Cubans who had immigrated to the United States in the preceding decades.
After 10,000 Cubans tried to gain asylum by taking refuge on the grounds of the Peruvian embassy, the Cuban government announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so. The ensuing mass migration was organized by Cuban Americans, with the agreement of Cuban President Fidel Castro. The arrival of the refugees in the United States created political problems for U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The Carter administration struggled to develop a consistent response to the immigrants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0144818822000503
For one, the link between immigration and crime was salient to Miami residents in the 1980s. The arrival of Cuban refugees coincided with a spike in crime rates, which local politicians and journalists quickly pointed out.3 Additionally, records reveal Fidel Castro exploited the flotilla as a means of ridding Cuba of its mentally ill and criminal populations.4 While individuals with such backgrounds would generally be barred from entry, political tensions between the US and Cuba virtually eliminated the option to deport undesirable newcomers. To exacerbate matters, federal authorities were both unaware of Castro’s actions and unprepared to interview Mariel Cubans.
Our analyses indicate Marielitos’ arrival led to a temporary surge in violent crime and a long-term increase in property crime relative to similar MSAs. Murder rates, however, remain significant as other violent crime effects disappear; our preferred estimates indicate murders per 100,000 comparatively rose by 41.2% in the seven years after the arrival of the flotilla. While less persuasive, we observe a relative increase in aggregate violent crime rates of 43%–53% on average following April 1980, though this effect dissipates after five quarters. Our property crime and robbery estimates are more sustained; we find that these comparative measures grew nearly 25%–32% and 70%, respectively, and persist until 1990.
I’d also guess that probably Israel’s Russophone population is driven by Jewish migration; Israel has immigration policy that favors Jewish immigration. For some soldiers, that may be applicable, but not for others.
I’d guess that the most-realistic options are probably Germany, us in the US, or Canada.
And my guess is that in those cases, surrendered soldiers are probably going to have lower priority than conscientious objectors, people who left with the aim of avoiding the conflict entirely.
I hope they get help. But just to clarify: wouldn’t you be tried for deserting any army?
By your home country sure. They’d have to extradite you for that to happen. Russia doesn’t have that many friends, so defectors may be able to get away with it as long as they never enter a Russian-friendly state ever again
That russian pilot got murdered in Spain.
Countries aren’t too fond of assassinations on their own turf. Russia seems to do these things more than any other country (at least as reported in the news), but it’s still pretty rare.
