Russia is going to extreme lengths to track down soldiers who fled the war. When it finds them, the question is whether they should be prosecuted or redeployed.

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Last fall, an army recruit from rural Russia named Anatoly Shchetinin was told he would soon be sent to the front lines in Ukraine. Shchetinin didn’t like the sound of that and devised a different plan. He fled his base in southern Russia for Armenia, thinking he would be safe there.

Russian authorities weren’t done with him, however. Police threatened his family and called his sister Anna in for questioning. “Whatever happens, we’ll find him,” they told her.

They made good on their promise. Today, the 26-year-old is back in Russia after being detained by Russian military officials in Armenia, preparing to either stand trial for desertion or be sent to fight in the war—an example of the lengths Russia is going to in order to meet its voracious need for manpower in Ukraine.

Russia’s vast professional army has been hollowed out after 2½ years sending waves of men to break down Ukraine’s defenses with a warfare attrition strategy. Infantry are thrown into risky assaults with little apparent care for their survival, and advances are often counted in yards instead of miles.

Russia’s inability to push out Ukrainian forces that have now been occupying parts of its southwest for two weeks has exposed the severity of this manpower shortage. U.S. officials say it will need at least 20,000 properly trained personnel to retake the Ukrainian-held land, which exceeds 400 square miles. It has failed to do so even after shifting part of its invasion force from Ukraine to aid the effort.

The war has been deadly for both sides. At least half a million Russians have been killed or wounded in the conflict, according to a senior Western intelligence official, who declined to reveal numbers for Ukraine. Kyiv has also struggled to raise enough troops to hold back the Russians, despite lowering the mobilization age and raising pay. 

Throughout the war, Russia has deployed aggressive measures to keep its own numbers strong in the face of so many deaths. It emptied prisons with the promise of early release to convicts, and froze criminal trials for defendants willing to serve. It dangled rich incentives to lure Russians into signing up, tripling recruitment bonuses in some regions and offering soldiers’ families subsidized housing and spots in the best schools. It fast-tracked foreigners’ citizenship applications as a reward for military service.

With a population three times that of Ukraine, Russia has used such measures to keep around half a million soldiers in and around Ukraine, according to Ukrainian estimates. British and Ukrainian intelligence says Russia is now recruiting at least 25,000 men a month, though few have combat experience.

Hundreds on trial

But the Russian replenishment push isn’t only about incentives. It has also amped up a campaign to punish draft dodgers and hunt down those unwilling to fight, in an effort that now spans borders. When deserters are tracked down, the Russians calculate whether to imprison or redeploy them.

The punitive approach begins even before military service begins. Army summonses issued online automatically bar recipients from going abroad. Conscripts are often coerced into signing contracts by officers who are sent enlistment quotas from their superiors in Moscow, according to lawyers who defend Russian soldiers in court.

With no end date for their military service, recruits are stuck indefinitely on the front lines. Desperate for a reprieve, some 50,000 have deserted or refused orders to fight, say rights activists and groups that help soldiers flee. Lawyers who defend them say the numbers are much higher, since many are quietly persuaded to return through promises of lenient treatment or threats against their families back in Russia.

In 2022, Russia passed new laws toughening the punishment for desertion and insubordination, including prison sentences of up to 15 years and the confiscation of the property of fleeing soldiers. Authorities have launched more than 10,000 criminal cases on such charges, according to court statistics viewed by the Journal and compiled by MediaZona, a news outlet run by Russian exiles and focused on the country’s criminal justice system. 

Court press releases show that hundreds are on trial, while many more are in Russian jails pending proceedings. In May, a court sentenced one soldier to 10 years in prison for repeated absences without leave.

Some suffer far worse fates. 

A soldier recruited by Russia’s Wagner paramilitary force was executed on camera by blows from a sledgehammer after publicly backing Ukraine then being handed back to Russia in a prisoner exchange in 2022.

In February, a Russian pilot who had defected to Ukraine was gunned down in Spain. Spanish authorities haven’t arrested anyone in connection with his murder. Just after his death, Russian spy chief Sergei Naryshkin said that the pilot, Maksim Kuzminov, “became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime.”

Despite this, many still take their chances.

“Among conscripts and soldiers alike, there’s a view that if you come back to base after vacation, you’re an idiot,” said Artem Mugunyants, a lawyer who represents Russian soldiers. “The possibility of criminal charges is seen as a much lesser evil than the likelihood of death.”

‘He never wanted to serve’

Raised in Kamchatka in Russia’s remote Far East, Shchetinin was shunted between abusive relatives and state institutions after his single mother drowned in a hot spring following a bout of late-night drinking when Shchetinin was three, according to his sister Anna Shchetinina.

He joined the military in November 2022 when his boss at Kamchatka’s forestry service—responding to pressure from local officials—said Shchetinin would otherwise lose his job. He signed a three-year contract soon after. He was pressured into it, said Anna: “He never wanted to serve.”

Last October, when another unit was sent to Mariupol in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine in preparation for front line combat, Shchetinin learned he would be among the next to go. He responded by asking for a leave of absence and heading to one of the few countries Russians can enter without a passport: Armenia. 

As a country seeking to weaken its reliance on Russia, Armenia seemed like a haven for Russian draft-dodgers and deserters, many of whom have recently settled there. A bilateral treaty obliges Armenia to detain Russian soldiers placed on Moscow’s wanted list, and report back to Russia on their status. But because there is no automatic extradition for deserters, most are released after questioning.

The sense of security Shchetinin and other Russian exiles felt in Armenia was shattered last December, when Russian deserter Dmitry Setrakov was detained at the capital’s main airport and, contrary to protocol, handed over to officials from Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, which has helped Armenia patrol its borders since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Setrakov was taken to a Russian military base in Armenia’s north, opened in 1995 on the former grounds of a Russian imperial outpost. At the base’s entrance hangs a photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a quote: “Russia’s growing military might is a steadfast guarantee of global peace.” Within weeks, Setrakov was returned to Russia to face trial on charges of desertion.

Blindsided, the Armenians pushed back. “We cannot tolerate illegal actions on our territory,” Armenian President Nikol Pashinian said in February, warning of consequences for Russia. His government later demanded Moscow remove FSB personnel from the airport. Their withdrawal was finally completed last month.

Meanwhile, Armenian rights activists began reporting that Russian military officers were harassing local Russian men. One man who fled Russia for Armenia during the 2022 mobilization said two men approached him in April identifying themselves as officials from the prosecutor’s office. They demanded he accompany them to the police station on suspicion of drug possession. With the help of a local, he evaded the men, who he believes were FSB officers. “I don’t feel completely safe here any more,” he said.

Russia’s defense ministry did not answer a request for comment about the detentions of deserters sheltering abroad.

‘We’ll find him’

After his escape to Armenia, Shchetinin struggled to make ends meet with odd jobs, relying for money on his sister Anna in Kazan, a city 500 miles east of Moscow. Then, in March, Russian police summoned Anna and threatened their family with unspecified consequences if Shchetinin didn’t give himself up.

That rattled Shchetinin. He began thinking of surrendering. In a message to his commander on March 5, he asked: What happens if I give myself up? Will I also be sent to Mariupol?

His commander said he would be put on trial and likely evade jail by agreeing to fight in an assault unit, according to screenshots of the exchange Shchetinin shared with Anna. Another military official told him he might get away with a fine.

In social-media posts throughout March, Shchetinin expressed suicidal thoughts. He shared dark memes and song lyrics about loneliness and regret over his actions, and wrote in one post: “After all the mistakes I’ve made, at a certain point I simply stopped understanding myself.”

Anna worried that he also didn’t understand the consequences of surrendering.

On March 29, he handed himself in to the Russian consulate, which immediately put him under guard at the Russian base.

“I know it’s risky to go back, but I want to go home,” Shchetinin said in a phone interview in May, when he was on the Russian base and said he was away from military officials. “This life on the run is no life at all.”

Soon, news that another Russian had been detained in Armenia prompted an uproar in the country. This time, the Armenian government blocked Shchetinin’s transfer to Russia.

Others who were hiding abroad were also being rounded up. In May, Kamil Kasimov, a 23-year-old Russian deserter who had fled to Kazakhstan last year, was arrested in the capital Astana by Russian military officials. In December 2023, the commander of Kasimov’s base wrote to the soldier’s relatives urging them to reveal his whereabouts. The letter called Kasimov a traitor who had “chosen the path of disgrace and cowardice.”

The Russians detained him on a Russian base in the southern part of Kazakhstan and later flew him to Omsk in Siberia, where he is now standing trial for desertion. Rashit Kasimov, his brother, said Kasimov plans to request a plea bargain that will allow him to avoid a potential 15-year prison term in exchange for service on the front line.

Mariana Katzarova, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Russia, said Russian authorities have been “implicated in virtually kidnapping” deserters abroad.

Those who are captured are often pressured to return to combat. One serviceman facing 10 years in prison for abandoning his base told Go By The Forest, a group helping Russian soldiers desert, that state investigators promised him a suspended sentence if he agreed to “atone for his guilt” by fighting in Ukraine, according to a phone conversation the group recorded and shared with the Journal. The man fled to Armenia.

Shchetinin, the Russian held in Armenia, spent his days on the Russian base playing games on his phone while Armenia and Russia jostled over his fate. He was accompanied by Russian military police wherever he went. When rights activists visited him at the base and tried to convince him to accept legal assistance to resist being transferred, he refused, saying he wants to face justice in Russia.

“I don’t need defense,” the serviceman wrote in a message to the Journal. “I’m not a criminal.”

Russia’s defense ministry did not answer a request for comment about the detentions of deserters sheltering abroad.

In April, he appeared in a video broadcast by a Kremlin-controlled news outlet. Standing in a black jacket and hoodie at the base beside a Soviet-era propaganda display, he expressed remorse for his escape and pledged to redeem himself by fighting in Ukraine.

“I’m a Russian soldier,” he said. “Given the chance, I will atone for my guilt before the motherland.”

Armenia ultimately lifted Shchetinin’s exit ban at his request, after Russia removed his name from its wanted list. In June, he flew in a Russian military plane to Rostov-on-Don in south Russia, where he is now in a special detention center for insubordinate soldiers, awaiting trial on desertion charges.

In a letter to the investigator dealing with his case in July, Shchetinin wrote that he was willing to redeem himself by fighting in Ukraine, and asked to be transferred from detention to a Russian military base for training.

The investigator told him he will stand trial like the others.

“I’m desperate. I want to live,” Shchetinin wrote in a message from Rostov in late June. “And this is not my war.”

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com

— Top Photo Illustration Photos: Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press, Maxim Shemetov/Reuters, Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press.

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