Escaping Russian News Today

Russian authorities in occupied parts of Luhansk Oblast had ordered the creation of propaganda centers posing as "museums of the special military operation (a Russian term for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine)," Governor Artem Lysohor said on Jan. 6.

The move is part of Russia’s preparations for a mass mobilization campaign in the occupied territories of Ukraine, according to the center run by the Ukrainian military. The Kyiv Independent could not immediately verify this information.

Only 7% of personnel serving in Russian "Sudoplatov" and "Margelov" pseudo-volunteer battalions in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts are locals, the Ukrainian military's National Resistance Center reported on Nov. 5, citing Russia's estimates.

The "Bohdan Khmelnytsky" battalion formed from Ukrainian prisoners of war has joined a Russian military unit and will be deployed to Ukraine's front lines after taking the oath, Russian state-controlled news outlet RIA Novosti reported on Oct. 27.

When Yevhen Kalashnikov found an opening to surrender to Ukrainian troops in April, he made a run for it. As he ran, mortars landed and exploded all around him, he told a press conference in Kyiv in August. Weeks before surrendering, Russia’s Security Service (FSB) conscripted Kalashnikov, a Ukrainian student, into the Russian army for publishing photos of a bridge used for Russian military logistics in his hometown of Novoazovsk in Donetsk Oblast, a town under Moscow’s control s...

Private Alexey Girkin massages his knee as he sits on a bed in the infirmary at a prisoner of war camp in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the front line. The former Russian inmate, who was an assault infantryman of Russia’s 61st Naval Infantry Brigade before being captured, spends his time at the camp reading pulp fiction and hoping to be swapped in a prisoner exchange. Girkin had six years left to serve in a Russian prison in Perm Krai northeast of Moscow for drug dealing ...

Voting is underway in sham "regional elections" in occupied Ukrainian territories as Russia seeks to consolidate its control over these regions. The illegal so-called elections in the occupied territories come nearly a year after Russia held sham annexation referendums in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk oblasts, which Moscow only partially controls, and nine years after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. The sham elections have been widely condem...