A mother of a Russian soldier speaking to RFE/RL has told the broadcaster the last time she heard from her son, a Russian soldier deployed to the front line, was when he was dispatched on a combat mission on 20 July 2025 – more than a year ago.
He had transmitted a photo to her that same day and had also messaged her that he had been wounded but not seriously when a drone exploded near his position.
Putin Back in 2018 Creative Commons Image
Putin in 2021 Creative Commons Photo
It was the last message of any kind she ever received from him.
The woman, whose first name is Marina, then recounted that an officer in her son’s unit contacted her ten days later, saying that her son was OK and would contact her as soon as he had the opportunity.
Marina did not provide her last name out of concern for what happens to many Russians who speak ill of the manner in which the conflict is being conducted by Moscow’s higher-ups.
Marina contacted the Russian Defense Ministry in August through a hotline to inquire about her son’s condition after his injuries and his location.
She was then informed that he had been declared Absent Without Official Leave (AWOL) as of 23 July – three days after his last message to her.
Over a year later, Marina is increasingly afraid that her son was killed in action, but that she has not been and will never be officially informed of such.
What she now says is that her son has vanished into the same chasm that has swallowed up so many other Russians whose sons, husbands, or fathers are being declared AWOL.
The Biggest Scam in Russia: The Military’s Dodge to Keep from Paying Death Benefits
Marina and many others are assuming that their loved ones were either confirmed as killed in action or had gone missing in combat with no body or other evidence being recovered, but declared AWOL nonetheless.
The number of these cases is so numerous that the conclusion of those whose loved ones are missing is that the Defense Ministry is deliberately falsifying their status.
Such practice has also since been confirmed by Russian military officials themselves.
Sergei Lyapin, a senior military official at the Russian military’s Investigative Committee for the Central Military District, spoke to media outlets in Moscow on the subject.
He has stated that the practice of assigning AWOL status without any adequate verification has become much more widespread over the last 12 months.
Speaking at a conference in November 2025, he revealed that “Sixty per cent of those declared AWOL are given this status without justification.
We’ve seriously encountered this problem this year; it was not happening in 2024,” he had added.
The Russian military’s primary motivation for this level of immorality is money.
Beginning last year, reports came out more frequently that Russia was running out of the funds needed to pay soldiers’ enlistment bonuses and monthly paycheques.
But there is a greater deficit in the lack of funds to pay the death benefit that is owed to a soldier’s family when they are officially listed as killed in action, or the monthly pay that must continue to be paid to relatives if the serviceman is declared to be lost in action.
The trick that the Russian state employs to avoid that expense is to declare the honored dead to have instead deserted.
A soldier’s pay to his family is suspended if he is declared AWOL, and the same family members receive none of the other payments promised to relatives of dead or missing soldiers.
These go beyond the actual death benefit paid out by a life insurance policy.
They also include perks such as preferential treatment for children in placement at educational institutions, from kindergarten to university.
Legal Action
Marina and many others like her also suffer from the disadvantage of being many time zones away from the central bureaucracy in Moscow.
In her case, she lives more than 2000 miles away in the Kemerovo region of Siberia.
As of last summer, she had taken legal action to have her son’s status changed to missing or killed in action.
She also said that the same officer she had contacted previously, who had reassured her in July 2025 that her son was still alive and well, had only recently begun responding to her queries.
But he inexplicably informed her there had been no word from her son because the Russian military had found it impossible to evacuate soldiers from the battlefield where he had been sent on last summer’s combat mission.
If evacuation by the Russian military was impossible, “how could he have left the area of his own accord [and be declared AWOL],” she asked. “There’s intense fighting there [at this position on the front] to this day,” she told RFE/RL.
During this time, Marina has had the common (even in the US) experience of hiring and firing one lawyer and then retaining a second, and has spent some 200,000 roubles (about US $2,500) on her case, which has finally gone to court.
Marina also said that when she began the effort to have her son’s status changed, she was fully aware that “it might take years.
It’s now the summer of 2026,” she said. “For the second year, I am not hearing my son say, ‘Mama, I’m alive,’ and he is still listed as AWOL.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
