I escaped from a paramilitary convoy that was delivering me to a military unit preparing cannon fodder for the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region. The Ukrainian army invaded the area in August 2024 but Kursk has become a snare, a meat-grinder in which there is no escape. We, in Ukraine, call it a "one-way ticket."
As you may know, Zelensky is now withdrawing troops from the region as of today, March 13, 2025. The whole military operation has proven to be a complete disaster. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men have been killed or wounded, all for nothing. Most sent there will never return home to their wives and children. They were snatched from off the streets, given pitiful military training: chopping wood, sprinkling sand on potholes over a dirt road during winter or digging a 20-by-20-foot pit, 10 feet deep, all to bury a cigarette butt - that's what they call "training" nowadays.
And I knew what to expect. My friends had warned me personally, having endured it themselves. Truly I had only one last chance for escape - and I knew it intimately.
During a certain stop, I ran from the convoy like mad, never looking back, deeper and deeper into a forest. Branches whipped my face, but I pushed forward. The ground was blanketed with snow — it was 9°F. I feared they’d track my footprints so I kept running, farther and farther, without looking back even once. I lost my hat and gloves; they’re probably still there, unless animals tore them apart.
After about half an hour, I tripped over a fallen tree, rolled down a small bank and stopped to rest, finally I checked to see if anyone was following me. I was breathless. My lungs felt like they’d burst from gulping the freezing air as I fled those man-snatchers.
They’d grabbed me right off the street a few days before my escape. Two military officers seized my arms from behind. One whispered to me, “Run, and I’ll shoot you!” I felt a hard object—likely a gun—pressed against my kidney. They shoved me into an old Volkswagen van, which sped off to the nearest TRC, Territorial Recruitment Center (known as TCK in Ukrainian).
Here in Ukraine, this “safari game” or manhunt, carried out by paramilitary crews and police teams, is nicknamed “busification”—from the Ukrainian word bus, meaning van. They snatch military-age men off the streets and stuff them into vans with tinted windows as shown in the videos below.
The van stopped in front of a massive iron gate topped with fresh coils of razor wire. The entire building, surrounded by a tall wall, was encircled with the same menacing wire. I knew they had built their own makeshift prison within these walls—a place where they torture men, forcing them to sign documents claiming they had "volunteered" to serve in the Ukrainian army.
One of the man-snatchers escorted me inside the building to face a lineup of their so-called doctors. Without hesitation or any medical records of my health, these doctors declared me perfectly fit to serve. The entire process took less than 20 minutes.
Afterward, they shoved me back into the same van and drove me to an old half-ruined building. Inside was a room crammed with several filthy beds, each bearing the grime of hundreds of men who had slept there before me. The place was revolting—bedsheets and pillows greasy with gray and dark yellow stains. The doors and windows were reinforced with an extra layer of metal rebars, welded haphazardly over the existing ones to shrink the gaps between them.
So, this was one of their jails I’d been warned about. That night, sleep eluded me.
The next day, they fabricated a stack of documents, including a military ticket—a sort of passport or ID for soldiers.
Everything they do is inhumane and cruel. I had received a guaranteed death sentence which would be delivered either by my own Ukrainian soldiers or at the hands of the Russian-invaders. My friends had told me how they torture men, strapping them to stretchers and flipping them upside down, heads dangling toward the ground, to break their will and force compliance.
If you refuse to "volunteer," a horde of military officers descends on you, beating you mercilessly through the night. Someone who witnessed this told me about the screams and cries that echo into the darkness before fading away. The next morning, a military ambulance arrives, and that person is never seen again. Yet their name remains on the list. During the morning roll call, it’s the first one read—and no one answers. Then the entire unit shouts, "Died as a hero!" But we all knew the truth, we saw it with your own eyes: these men had never reached the front lines but instead were murdered by their own Ukrainian officers!?
They want us to fight for them. Professional soldiers, police, and government officials — people who should be the first to defend the country are instead hunting civilians around the clock, knowingly delivering them up to their deaths. In their defense, if you can call it that, they’ve been told that if they fail to meet a daily quota of captured men, they’ll be sent to the front lines themselves. That’s why they’re so relentless in this twisted game of safari.
Imagine this: without ever committing a crime in your life, you suddenly become a wanted fugitive. The government, police, military, judges, and prosecutors—all of them—are out to find you and destroy you. It doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you’re not one of them. You can’t step outside or stay in your own home because they’ll come, arrest you, and ship you off to the trenches. They want to live, to rake in money like never before, to cling to their power, etc. To them, we're just "meat," and they told me directly, right to my face.
I managed to escape, but I’m still in grave danger. If they catch me again, it’ll be the end of me for certain.
If you can reach anyone in the U.S. government about my life-threatening situation, please contact the editor of American Revival. You could save my life.
For now, I’m hiding inside what most people call the country of Ukraine, but it’s really a concentration camp.
The guards and snatchers are still hunting.
Every day could be my last.
I greatly covet your prayers,
Thank you! Ivan.
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