“Let’s stand up for the truth.” A military recruiting billboard photographed earlier this summer in Kaluga, promising five million rubles (approx. 56,000 euros) for one year of “contract” (voluntary) military service, a one-time signing bonus of two and a half million rubles, and a monthly salary of 210,000 rubles for service in the “Special Military Operation zone.” Photo: Alexander Gronsky (Facebook). Thanks to Sergei Medvedev for the heads-up.
An American father who moved to Russia to avoid LGBTQ+ “indoctrination” for his kids is being sent to the front line in Ukraine, despite being assured he would serve in a non-combat role.
Derek Huffman, 46, feels he is being “thrown to the wolves” after being told that his job in the military would be as a correspondent or as a welder, his wife, DeAnna, said in a recorded plea for prayers, which has since been removed from her YouTube page.
Huffman has no prior military experience, DeAnna said, adding that his limited training was conducted in Russian. She suggested the language barrier has made her husband particularly unprepared for the horrors of combat.
“Unfortunately, when you’re taught in a different language, and you don’t understand the language, how are you really getting taught?” she pondered. “You’re not. So, unfortunately, he feels like he’s being thrown to the wolves right now, and he’s kind of having to lean on faith, and that’s what we’re all doing.”
Huffman joined the military in the hope of gaining Russian citizenship for his family through an expedited process. He also felt such service would allow him to “earn” the respect of his new countrymen, which is something he once said migrants in the United States refuse to do.
“The point of this act for me is to earn a place here in Russia,” he told Russian state media last month. “If I risk myself for our new country, no one will say that I am not a part of it. Unlike migrants in America who come there just like that, do not assimilate, and at the same time want free handouts.”
Undocumented migrants cannot join the U.S. military during peacetime. A program launched by former President George W. Bush allowed such immigrants to seek citizenship by serving in the military, but that pathway was shuttered during President Donald Trump’s first term.
DeAnna, 42, suggested her husband had been misled during the military recruiting process. She added that, after a month of service, her family had yet to receive any pay.
“When he signed up and had all of that done, he was told he would not be training for two weeks and going straight to the front lines,” she said. “But it seems as though he is getting one more week of training, closer to the front lines, and then they are going to put him on the front lines.”
Huffman moved his family to a village outside Moscow in spring. It was launched by American blogger Tim Kirby—who has lived in Russia for two decades—in 2023 to attract Americans seeking to escape the “liberal gender norm.” That project has been a flop, with United24Media reporting that only two families, including the Huffmans, have moved in.
Huffman, a native Texan, brought his wife, three daughters, and their family Husky, “Baby,” with him to Russia. The couple also have three sons from prior marriages who opted to remain in the United States.
Huffman’s admiration for Russia runs deep. The Russian state-operated news agency RIA Novosti reported last month that the couple honeymooned in Moscow.
“The city charmed us with its rich history, vibrant culture, and welcoming atmosphere,” DeAnna told the outlet. “Before that, we figured out whether moving to Russia would fit our family’s needs and values. However, it wasn’t until we saw Moscow in person that we truly felt a connection.”
DeAnna said that she was not surprised that her husband wanted to volunteer for the Russian military, even as it is in its third year of a bloody war with Ukraine. Ukrainian officials estimated this week that more than 1 million Russian soldiers have died in the conflict, which continues to rage on despite President Trump’s demands for peace.
”It didn’t come as a surprise to me,” she said of his joining the military. “He always spoke so highly of the country, its president, and its people, and he has a strong passion for doing the right thing.”
“I got upset when the doctor told me I had diabetes,” said Yurii. “Because uneaten sweets are waiting for me at home, and we’ve already bought lemonade for New Year’s.”
Yurii is 16 years old, and every day he starts with a long-acting insulin injection. Later throughout the day, ten minutes before each meal, he measures his blood sugar levels, calculates the amount of carbohydrates he will get from food, and injects the appropriate dose of insulin.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that changes your life forever and can be triggered by infections or, as it is in Yurii’s case, by severe stress – especially after what happened to his brother.
Chronic stress has been rising among Ukrainians since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, as Moscow continues to shell the country daily. The continuous sleepless nights and the fear of being hit by a drone or missile are affecting both the mental and physical health of the people in Ukraine.
In June 2025, Russians increased the number of drones and missiles launched at Ukraine increased by 60 percent, according to Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In addition, June saw the highest number of civilian deaths since April 2022 as a result of military actions: 232 people.
The invisible effects are compounding: Ukrainian children have begun to experience health conditions that could affect the rest of their lives.
Statistics show a rise in the number of patients with type 1 diabetes in the frontline Kharkiv region, and the number of people diagnosed with diabetes in general is also on the rise across the country.
Before the invasion, Yurii lived with his parents in the central Ukrainian city of Cherkasy. They tried to get out of town every weekend — whether that meant going fishing or mushroom-picking in the forest.
“Children need to breathe fresh air,” Olena, Yurii’s mother, told The Counteroffensive with a nostalgic smile on her face.
She begins the conversation by saying, “I am the mother of two wonderful sons.”
Yurii has a brother, Volodymyr, also known as Vova, who is 10 years older and who looked after Yurii from an early age.
“We walked all over Cherkasy together, went to parks, squares, the Dnipro River, and he treated me to McDonald’s. Vova [a nickname for Volodymyr] always told me, ‘When you grow up, we’ll go out with girls together. ’ And Vova loved everything related to the army,” said Yurii.
When Olena talks about her eldest son, her voice begins to tremble.
Vova died on May 3, 2022, while defending Mariupol at Azovstal, a strategic steel factory that was besieged by Russian forces for almost three months, a famous last stand.
He died after his car rolled onto an enemy mine.
The family only learned about his death six months later.
“One day, Vova’s commander called me, introduced himself, and asked how I was doing. I replied, ‘Do you know where my son is? Wasn’t he in captivity with you?’ He told me that Vova had died on May 3 and asked, ‘Didn’t you know?’ It felt like half my heart had been cut out of my chest at that moment,” remembered Olena.
Volodymyr was only buried in February 2023. After the tragedy, Olena began to have health problems: she constantly felt weak, and eventually doctors had to remove her thyroid gland so that she could get better.
In the fall of 2023, months after Volodymyr’s funeral, the family went to the Carpathians for a break. During the trip, Olena noticed that Yurii, then 14 years old, was drinking more water than usual and had lost a significant amount of weight. Despite being naturally thin and 1.74 meters tall (5 feet 9 inches), he weighed just 45 kilograms (99.2 pounds).
“Yurii took his brother’s death very hard. It wasn’t that he cried a lot, but as if something inside him had burned out,” said Olena.
Yurii and Olena returned to Cherkasy and went to see the doctors. While Olena had developed a problem with her thyroid, everything seemed normal in Yurii.
But when the doctor routinely tested Yurii’s blood sugar levels, they found he had developed type 1 diabetes.
“It felt like I was beaten to death with feet, after all the horror we had already gone through,” said Olena.
Many autoimmune diseases of the endocrine system occur in childhood or young adulthood, as these are periods of active growth and hormonal changes, said Natalia Pogadaeva, head of the endocrinology department at Okhmatdyt, Ukraine’s largest pediatric hospital, which was hit by a missile strike last year.
Genetics plays a significant role in the onset of diabetes, as in other autoimmune diseases. However, the trigger for their onset is usually stress, she added. The following six months after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the number of patients with diabetes and other immune diseases surged, she added.
Due to full-scale Russian invasion and the displacement of the Ukrainian population both within Ukraine and abroad, it is very difficult to determine the actual extent of the increase in diabetes, Pogadayeva says.
“Children who lived in Kyiv could have gone abroad and realized they were sick, or vice versa: a child moved from Kherson to Kyiv and is being treated in Kyiv, not where they lived,” she added.
Still, some statistics hint at the broader toll. For example, 398 patients with type 1 diabetes under the age of 18 were registered in the first 9 months of 2023 in the Kharkiv region, a frontline region in the northeast of Ukraine. During the same period in 2024, the number had already increased to 501 patients – a more than 25 percent increase.
According to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, 531,200 people were diagnosed with different types of diabetes in 2023, the first full year of the full-scale invasion. In 2022, the number was 489,934 – an 8 percent increase.
Many of the children who went to Okhmatdyt to get treated had either survived Russia’s occupation, had experienced the aggression firsthand, or had evacuated from Mariupol or Bakhmut, Pogadaeva said.
“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, among other things, logistics were also greatly changed,” said Pogadaeva, the head of the endocrinology department at Okhmatdyt.
Children who already had diabetes had a hard time accessing insulin and the supplies needed to measure their blood sugar. As a result, they had to be hospitalized.
Diabetes can have severe complications if not taken care of properly. Uncontrolled blood sugar can damage blood vessels, which are present in every organ of the body. If affected, the kidneys, the limbs, and the eyes are the first to suffer. In the long run, it can lead to kidney failure, loss of sensitivity, loss of vision, and even to the amputation of limbs.
Pogadaeva explains that our bodies have a stress hormone called cortisol, which can be released during periods of prolonged stress, such as experiencing daily shelling, night-time air raid alarms, and lack of sleep — all situations Ukrainian children have been experiencing for the past three years.
The release of cortisol leads to uncontrolled fluctuations in blood sugar levels, she added.
Yurii will start college this year. Olena fears that having to prepare for exams will add to the stress of the war. She said that while at her house, they have adapted to a diet appropriate for the disease.
Yet Yurii’s blood sugar levels are still fluctuating.
They relocated to a village near the regional centre to be closer to nature. There, Yurii has his workshop and chickens, for which he recently built a drinking trough.
The family fondly remembers his older brother, Volodymyr, who was posthumously awarded the Order for Courage, a state award given by the President of Ukraine for heroism shown in emergencies.
“It’s hard to say that anything in our lives has changed significantly because of the illness. Now it’s just a way of our life.
My husband is only sometimes dissatisfied, saying, ‘I don’t want porridge, I don’t want salads. When will we have varenyky [Ukrainian dumplings]?’ But that’s it, if the child can’t have it, then no one can,” Olena said.
A BBC Russian investigation can reveal that at least 240 Russian eighteen-year-olds have been killed fighting in Ukraine in the past two years. Many joined up straight from school taking advantage of new rules allowing them to bypass military service and go straight into the regular army as contract soldiers. Some of those on our list were killed within weeks. BBC Russian has been speaking to bereaved families to find out why school leavers whose lives are only just beginning, are signing up to die in Putin’s brutal war.
On 7 May 2025, pupils at School No. 110 in Chelyabinsk took part in a ceremony to mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
Dressed in tunics and khaki-coloured shorts, the older children paraded into the school hall waving Russian and Soviet flags. The younger ones followed behind – little girls in knee-high socks and boys in smart shirts. The children were also carrying pictures of former pupils who had gone on to fight in the full-scale war in Ukraine.
One of the pictures was of Aleskandr Petlinsky who joined up two weeks after his eighteenth birthday, and was killed just twenty days later. His mother Elena, and his aunt, Ekaterina stood side by side in the hall, tearfully watching the ceremony.
After a minute’s silence to honour the dead, Ekaterina took to the stage to speak about her nephew.
Sasha, as she called him was a determined and passionate boy who dreamed of a career in medicine and had got a place at the Chelyabinsk Medical College.
“But Sasha had another dream,” Ekaterina added after a pause. “When the special military operation began, Sasha was fifteen. And he dreamed of going to the front.”
She was referring to the full-scale war in Ukraine, which Russia launched in February 2022.
Sasha Petlinksy is one of at least 240 eighteen-year olds killed in Ukraine over the past two years, according to open source information compiled and confirmed by BBC Russian.
How did someone so young and barely out of school end up dead on the frontline, and what does his story tell us about the choices facing young people in Russia today?
Red lines and rule changes
Since the first months of the war in Ukraine, the involvement of very young people in combat has been a subject of debate in Russia.
At first, the focus was on army conscripts.
Vladimir Putin has pledged several times that no young men called up to do their obligatory military service at the age of eighteen would be sent to fight in Ukraine. However, in March 2022, just four days after Putin promised no conscripts were involved in the ‘special military operation’ the Defence Ministry admitted that some had indeed been sent into the combat zone.
The BBC has confirmed the names of at least 81 conscripts killed in Ukraine during the first year of the full-scale war. The Ukrainian authorities claim to have captured “hundreds” more.
The army is no longer sending conscripts to fight in Ukraine, but there are other ways that very young people are being drawn into the conflict.
When Ukrainian troops occupied parts of Russia’s Kursk Region in August 2024, conscripts guarding the border were among the first to come under fire.
But according to data gathered by the BBC the way most eighteen-year-olds end up on the battlefield is by signing up as contract soldiers.
In the spring of 2022, the Russian authorities changed the law in order to actively encourage men of fighting age to join up. And since 2023 regional authorities have been offering big cash payments to new recruits.
Initially young men who wanted to take advantage of the new rules had to have at least three months’ conscript service under their belts. However, in April 2023 this restriction was quietly dropped, despite protests from some MPs, and now any young man who has reached the age of eighteen and finished school can sign up to join the army.
MP Nina Ostanina, who is head of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children, warned that the changes would have dire consequences for vulnerable school leavers.
“Children just out of the classroom who want to earn money today by signing a contract will simply be unprotected,” she said.
“Contract service — a worthy future”
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russian teachers have been required by law to hold classes dedicated to the ‘special military operation’. And as the war has ground on, it’s become normal for soldiers returning from the front to visit schools and talk about their experiences.
Children are taught how to make camouflage nets and trench candles, and even nursery school pupils are encouraged to send letters and drawings to soldiers on the frontline.
Since eighteen-year olds were allowed to sign contracts to join the army, many Russian independent media outlets have reported that schools are increasing efforts to promote contract service.
There are many examples from across the country.
In Perm, schoolchildren were given leaflets with a photo of a middle-aged man in military uniform hugging his wife and young son, and the slogan: “Contract service — a worthy future!”
In the Khanty-Mansisk Autonomous Region, posters appeared on school noticeboards urging everyone to “Stand shoulder to shoulder for the Motherland”.
In Krasnoyarsk a poster with the slogan “Call now” was put up on a classroom board.
At the start of the new school year on 1 September 2024, a new subject was brought into the curriculum.
In a throwback to the Soviet era, senior students are once again being taught how to use Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades as part of a course called “The Basics of Safety and Homeland Defence”.
In many regions, military recruiters now attend careers lessons in schools and technical colleges, telling young people how to sign up as contract soldiers after they graduate.
In April 2024, Konstantin Dizendorf, head of the Taseyevsky District in the Krasnoyarsk Region, visited a local technical college to talk to the children about their futures. He singled out one particular student for praise. Eighteen-year-old Aleksandr Vinshu had already announced that he wanted to join the army. Vinshu was held up as local hero and allowed to take his final exams early in order to sign up as soon as possible. Seven months later in November 2024 news came that Vinshu had been killed.
Counting Russia’s young war dead
As part of our ongoing project using open sources to count Russia’s war dead, BBC Russian has looked at casualty figures from April 2023, when the law changed allowing school leavers to skip conscription and sign up to join the army.
We have identified and confirmed the names of 240 eighteen-year-old contract soldiers killed in Ukraine between April 2023 and May 2025.
All were enlisted as contract servicemen and judging from published obituaries, most joined the armed forces voluntarily. However, twenty-one were very recent school leavers who signed contracts while they were doing their military service. Families of some of these young men allege they were pressured to join up by senior officers.
Our data shows that the regions with the highest number of deaths among eighteen-year-olds are all in Siberia or the Russian Far East: We confirmed eleven deaths in Novosibirsk Region, another eleven in Zabaykalsky Region, and ten more in the Altai and Primorsky regions, respectively.
The BBC’s figures are based on open-source information and because not every death is publicly reported, the real losses among eighteen-year-old contract soldiers are likely to be higher.
However, it’s important to note that these losses, devastating as they are for the families concerned, are still dwarfed by the casualty figures for older men signing contracts to join the army.
From the open source data gathered by the BBC since the start of the full-scale invasion we have identified the names of 486 individuals aged 18–20 years who have been killed in Ukraine fighting as contract soldiers. This compares to 3,703 deaths of men aged 48–50.
While older soldiers may face higher fatality rates due to being in poorer physical shape, the stark imbalance likely also reflects a lower willingness among younger men to enlist, even when substantial financial incentives are offered.
This aligns with аn opinion poll conducted by the independent Levada Centre in May 2025, which showed thirty-five per cent of 18–24 year olds supported the war in Ukraine, compared to forty-two per cent of 40–54 year olds, and fifty-four per cent of those aged over fifty-five.
Taken together, these figures suggest that as a whole younger Russians are more reluctant to participate in the conflict and less ideologically aligned with its objectives. However, as the young men featured in this story show, some are still either susceptible to propaganda narratives or to pressure from the authorities.
Shining eyes
According to his friends, Aleksandr Petlinsky was a gentle young man who liked to help others. He loved drawing and was always ready to do sketches of favourite cartoon characters for his friends. He was also an active member of a local youth organisation, collecting books for local libraries, going on visits to local museums, and organising a meeting with a nurse who had worked on the frontline in Ukraine.
Everyone we spoke to told us Aleksandr dreamed of becoming a doctor, but no-one seemed to know why he also dreamed of joining the army and going to fight in Ukraine.
Was his romanticizing of the war a result of the patriotic education he’d been subjected to at school? Did he really understand that he would be involved in killing soldiers of a neighbouring country? Had he given any serious thought to all the peaceful civilian lives being destroyed in the war?
On 31 January 2025, Aleksandr turned eighteen. The first thing he did was to apply to take a year out of college so that he could sign a contract with the Defence Ministry.
“When he submitted the request I asked him what his mother would say,” the college secretary later told local journalists. “He said – what’s it got to do with my mum? It’s my choice. His eyes were shining.”
Just three weeks later Aleksandr had already signed a contract and joined his training unit. Just before he set off, he met up with his friend Anastasia.
The two former classmates sat on a bench talking about drawings. Aleksandr drew a torch with a flame on Anastasia’s wrist as a farewell gift.
It was the last time she would ever see him.
Handcuffed and beaten
The story of how eighteen-year-old Vitaly Ivanov from Irkutsk region in Siberia ended up in the army could not have been more different.
He was born and raised in Tayturka, a small working-class settlement two hours from Irkutsk, with a population of just 5,000 people.
In high school, he and his friend Misha, had worked part-time at a local boiler house and helped dig potatoes in gardens. In the summer, he earned money by taking inflatable bouncy castles round neighbouring villages.
During that time, he met a young woman who we’ll call Alina. They began dating, and Vitaly often visited her. He helped her too—digging potatoes at her dacha and fixing things around the house.
“He used to tell me that I was under his wing, under his protection,” Alina says. But sometimes, when they argued, Vitaly would threaten to leave and sign up for the army. “It was like, I’ll go and I’ll be fine,” Alina remembers.
When he turned sixteen, Vasily left school and got a place as a trainee mechanic in a local college. But he soon dropped out. When he turned eighteen he planned to do his compulsory military service and then go to Kazan to work shifts road building, his friend Misha told the BBC.
But in November 2024 everything changed. There was a robbery at a local shop and when the police looked at the CCTV they decided that one of the perpetrators looked like Vitaly.
Vitaly’s mother Anna told the BBC he was known to the police because the previous year he had been arrested after getting into a fight with someone she says was a local drug dealer. He was charged and sentenced to community service.
Vitaly was summoned to the police station and held there for several hours. When he was finally released he sent his girlfriend a Telegram video message, which she shared with the BBC. In it, Vitaly is crying as tells his girlfriend he was handcuffed and beaten up by the police. “Those devils were so horrible,” he says between sobs. “I was just so fucking shocked.”
Vitaly told his mother and his girlfriend that the police wanted him to confess to the robbery. His mother thinks it was the police who told him to sign a contract to join the army. “It’s understandable, he was scared, he was just eighteen,” she says. “They handcuffed him and beat him for two hours.”
Straight out of the police station Vitaly met Misha and told him he had decided to sign up to join the army. Misha was shocked: “I said, what do you want to do that for?” Come to Kazan with me to do the road building, You’ll be much better off.”
Misha told the BBC another friend also had tried to dissuade him but Vitaly deleted all their messages and cut off contact.
The day before leaving home, Vitaly called his mother, who had left for work.
“Mum, I’m leaving soon.”
“For Kazan? Okay, off you go.”
“No Mum you don’t get it. I’m going to the special military operation.”
Anna says she “cried all night”. “He was so secretive about it all. He didn’t tell me anything. Never complained. And did everything behind my back,” she says.
Alina remembers that during their last meeting Vitaly seemed completely calm. He bid her a restrained goodbye to her and told her not to cry. Then he calmly went home, packed his things, and left for the train station.
On the advice of a friend who had already been to the front, he decided to sign up in Samara Region instead of Irkutsk.
In the autumn of 2024, Samara Region that was offering some of the highest sign-up bonus payments in the country. Vitaly would have received about four million roubles in regional and federal bonus payments — that’s the equivalent of around fifty thousand US dollars, an almost imaginable sum for an eighteen-year-old village boy with little education and even less prospects.
A first and last mission
By their very different routes, and both just turned eighteen, Vitaly and Aleksandr arrived at the front at about the same time — in February 2025.
Alina recalls that while Vitaly was still in training, they stayed in constant contact. “He wrote that he regretted it. That he was having trouble sleeping,” she says.
“Mum, I’ve realized this is no joke,” his mother Anna remembers him telling her. After just two weeks training, Vitaly was assigned to a role in military reconnaissance.
“Son, did you learn anything in training?” Alina asked him.
The answer was not reassuring.
“Mum, to become a real recon soldier, you have to study for three years!” he replied. “I’ve only learned just a little bit.”
The last time Anna heard from Vitaly was on 5 February. He wrote that he was being sent on a combat mission.
“It was his first and last mission,” Anna says.
On 4 March, officials from the military enlistment office called Anna and told her that her son had been killed in action on 11 February 2025. He had served just one week at the frontline.
His body was brought back to Tayturka in a zinc coffin. Several dozen people came to pay their respects and then the coffin was taken to the local cemetery.
Officials from the city administration gave speeches at the funeral.
“They said he gave his life for our homeland, that he was brave and went off to fight. The usual stuff,” says Misha. “But everyone was asking why he did it, and saying it was pointless to go to war at such a young age. Many people still couldn’t believe it – including me.”
Vitaly’s family and friends did not comment on the fact that his participation in the war could have led to the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers or civilians.
Deeply upset
A month after Vitaly’s death, on 9 March, Aleksandr Petlinsky was also killed.
His friends from the local youth movement posted a memorial message online noting that he had “died in the line of military duty during the Special Military Operation”.
“How could he have even been there if he had only just turned eighteen a month before???” someone wrote in the comments underneath.
Aleksandr’s funeral took place in the memorial hall of the Russian Railways hospital in Chelyabinsk. “Everyone cried a lot,” his aunt told the school event. “You could hear the sobbing in the room.”
Officials gave speeches, but Aleksandr’s friends “preferred to stay silent” as one of them told the BBC.
Anastasia says they were all deeply upset by the fact that he had lived less than two months after turning eighteen and had spent just a couple of weeks at war before being killed.
Aleksandr’s mother, Elena, told the BBC: “As a citizen of the Russian Federation, I am proud of my son. But as a mother — I can’t cope with this loss.” She declined to say more.
The BBC was only able to reach Vitaly’s mother, Anna, on the second or third attempt — in the first minutes of the call, she was sobbing and unable to speak. She said keeps replaying her last goodbye with her son in her mind. “It still feels like it happened yesterday.”
Anastasia, Aleksandr’s friend, says that for her, the fact that eighteen-year-olds are signing contracts to join the army is now a very “painful subject”.
“They’re young and naïve, and there’s so much they don’t understand,” she says. “They just don’t grasp the full responsibility of what they’re doing.”
Vitaly’s friend Misha thinks the same. He spoke to the BBC from Kazan where he’s now working on the road-building project he and Vitaly were planning to do together. Asked whether he might decide to sign a contract to join up himself he said: “I don’t even want to think about it.”
“No one’s interested and no one cares”
Although the deaths of Aleksandr and Vitaly have deeply affected their friends and family, the fact that eighteen-year-olds are signing up and getting killed in Ukraine does not so far seem to have had wider resonance in Russian society.
The family of another very young man who joined up from school and was killed very soon after did try to campaign to stop high school graduates being sent to the frontline.
Daniil Chistyakov from Smolensk, was less than two months past his eighteenth birthday when he was killed. Like Aleksandr and Vitaly he had just arrived at the front. His family only found out he was joining the army on the day he signed up.
“I wrote to many agencies, trying to reach someone, to get the law repealed that allows eighteen-year-olds to sign contracts,” one of his relatives told the BBC. “But no one was interested or cared.”
Vitaly’s mother Anna has tried and failed to get the authorities to investigate the police officers who detained her son and who she believes are responsible for his sudden decision to sign up.
In her efforts to “get justice”, she also wrote a long letter about her son’s case to the state TV Channel One talk show Men and Women in Moscow. The letter was sent by recorded mail but no-one from the show ever came to pick it up from the post office.
Source: Anastasia Platonova and Olga Ivshina, “From the classroom to the frontline — the 18-year-old Russians fighting and dying in Ukraine,” BBC News Russian, 17 July 2025. I have lightly copy-edited the original text to make it more readable. ||| TRR
Earlier this week—in a story that reads as a perfect encapsulation of abuses by Trump’s immigration enforcement—masked ICE agents roughed up and detained a 71-year-old U.S. citizen volunteering as a legal observer to monitor them at a federal courthouse in San Diego.
Grandmother Barbara Stone says she was documenting the detention of asylum-seekers with the group “Detention Resistance” at San Diego’s immigration court when she was baselessly accused of pushing an officer. Multiple masked agents then pursued Stone, grabbed and handcuffed her (leaving bruises), confiscated her phone and purse, and detained her for over eight hours, she says.
Once Stone was released, ICE returned her bag but kept possession of her phone. Why? Stone says an ICE agent compared the situation to “a drug bust where they keep a drug dealer’s phone because I had used it in the crime.”
But the only “crime” of which Stone says she’s guilty is documenting immigration enforcement. If this is true, the episode would track with other apparent attempts by ICE agents to avoid accountability of late, for instance, by wearing masks so they can conduct raids and arrests anonymously.
In a statement to a local outlet, ICE accused Stone of assaulting an officer, citing “a 700% increase in assaults” against its agents over the last year (a statistic the agency uses to justify agents concealing their identities, as well).
That 700 percent increase, it should be noted, is a somewhat misleading way to say there have been 79 alleged assaults against ICE agents this year, compared to 10 in the same timeframe last year. Meanwhile, ICE interactions have become dramatically more frequent and aggressive.
ICE’s numbers unfortunately deserve further scrutiny, as the agency has been defining “assault” quite loosely. In another high-profile arrest of a U.S. citizen, for example, ICE last month detained New York City Comptroller Brad Lander for assault—an accusation not unlike when a schoolyard bully accuses his victim of getting in the way of his fist, as Washington Post columnist Philip Bump put it.
One might add, to this list of questionable ICE allegations, its new claims about Stone.
Source: Robert McCoy, “Why Did ICE Agents Arrest and Detain a 71-Year-Old U.S. Citizen?” The New Republic, 11 July 2025. Thanks to Tom Digby for the heads-up.
