How to escape from the Russian army

But as he lay in a Russian military hospital, wounded in battle and surrounded by people speaking an alien language, Krishna Bahadur Shahi, an out-of-work engineer from Nepal who had committed the mistake of joining Moscow’s army, made a vow.

Former Nepali soldiers in his village introduced him to human traffickers, he said, who quickly arranged for him to fly to Moscow. The deal looked solid. He’d pay the traffickers $US5600. In Russia he’d make $US2200 a month as a contract soldier, working as a guard at a base, he was told, not on the front line. Soon, he would get Russian citizenship as a reward for his service.

Shahi arrived at a Russian army base a few hours’ drive east of Moscow in late October, he said. He provided photos of himself dressed in crisp camouflage and a hat with earflaps. In one picture, he’s holding a snowball. After an artillery barrage in December wiped out three of his friends, he decided to make a break for it. His wife, Alisha, back in Kathmandu, spoke to a Nepali living in Moscow who connected Shahi to traffickers working inside Russia. They put together a plan: He’d pay €4000 , in instalments, and the traffickers would arrange for a car to take him from Donetsk to Mariupol, and then to Moscow.

In a haze of pain, he met some other Nepali soldiers and gave them his ATM card and his mobile phone and told them to call his family back home and tell them he was no more. Khakendra Khatri, an agricultural student who said that in October he flew to Moscow with a planeload of 50 other Nepali recruits for the Russian military.They began to panic. In Russia, deserters are punished by military courts and can spend years in prison. But then they saw a taxi coming down a road and waved it down. Khatri said he frantically tapped open Google Translate on his phone and used it to tell the driver they were lost tourists and needed to get to Moscow.

They drove all day to the one place that could help with the final stage of the escape: the Nepali embassy in Moscow.For months, the families of missing Nepali soldiers have held protests and hunger strikes in front of the Russian Embassy in Kathmandu. The Nepali government says at least 32 Nepali men have died fighting for Russia; the families of the missing believe there are many more.

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