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The former tank soldier from Moscow said he would not have gone to Ukraine voluntarily. "No, what for? That's not our war. If our troops were officially there it would be a different story."
He said he had been sent to fight in Ukraine last summer and returned to Russia in September when the first peace talks took place. His crew operated a modernized Russian T-72B3 tank, he said.
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Another soldier who said he quit the army over the Ukraine conflict is a 21-year-old who was a member of a Grad missile unit. The soldier, who asked that he and his unit not be identified, told Reuters that in the summer of 2014 his team took up position about 2 km (one mile) from the Ukrainian border in the Rostov region of southwest Russia. The operation appeared to be an exercise, though the men were ordered to prepare as if for real combat.
"We drove there without insignia. We took off all the buttonholes and stripes. We were told that we did not need them in field conditions."
In early September the men were ordered to fire their rockets at a target "about 17 km" away, "maybe less." It was possible the target was in Ukraine, he said. "I was hoping I did not aim at any people. Or at least that I missed the target."
He said his fellow soldiers told him another battery from his unit had crossed the border and spent 10 days in Ukraine. "I did not understand who was fighting and what for, and the point of it," he said.
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Dorjo Dugarov, a politician from Buryatiya, a region in southeast Siberia, said a Siberian soldier who had returned from Ukraine had told him that "people from the western part (of Russia) didn't want to go. Their morale has fallen."