whitefish here our liveblog from the war in Ukraine
Nikita Chibrin was drafted into the Russian army in the summer of 2021. It was not a sense of patriotism or a desire to defend the country that prompted him to join the Russian forces, but financial difficulties. He was far from thinking that war would break out in less than a year.
On February 24, 27-year-old Chibrin crossed the Ukrainian border from Belarus, not suspecting that he was being sent to fight on Ukrainian territory. “We’ve all been deceived”he recalls a few months later in an interview The keeperfrom the immigration center at Madrid Airport, where he applied for political asylum.
The young man, who was part of the 64th brigade of the Russian army, spent the first few months in the village of Lipivka near Kyiv. your division personally awarded by President Vladimir Putinaccused of committing war crimes in Bucha and Andreevka, two nearby towns.
From the first days of the war, Chibrin expressed his displeasure directly to his commanders, who demoted him to the position of an army mechanic. “They threatened to arrest me, but in the end the authorities decided to use me for cleaning and loading work. I was placed away from the battlefield,” he explains. He was not the only one who was unhappy with the situation. The Guardian reported that military morale was “extremely low” and many were looking for an escape route, but the risk was high: “Our commanders threatened to shoot us if we deserted”.
He spent four months in Ukraine but denies witnessing or complicity in war crimes committed by his brigade. He even guarantees that he never took up arms, admitting, however, that there were “rumors” about soldiers involved in civilian deaths and sexual violence. He defected in June – hiding in a van that was supposed to receive supplies from Russia – and now wants to testify in an international court about what he saw in Ukraine: “I have nothing to hide,” he says.
This is a criminal war that Russia started. I want to do my best to reach the end.”
Chibrin became the second Russian serviceman to publicly declare his experience of service in Ukraine. In August, paratrooper Pavel Filatiev published a detailed 141-page diary in which he reported on his time in the army, suggesting that he saw neither “justice” nor “truth” in the war in Ukraine.
Like Filatiev, Chibrin managed to get out of Russia with the help of the human rights organization Gulagu.net. Now he hopes to obtain political asylum in Spain, where he will temporarily settle in a refugee center.
