You're reading: Mother of captured Russian army soldier calls on Russia to end war in Ukraine

Svetlana Ageyeva, the mother of Viktor Ageyev, a Russian soldier captured by Ukrainian forces in June, came to Ukraine on July 22 to meet with her son.

He is being held in a pretrial detention center in Starobilsk, a Luhansk Oblast city of 18,000 people some 700 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.

“My son didn’t tell me he was going to serve in Ukraine. He hid it from me, I thought he was going to serve somewhere in Russia. Now I want to talk to him and ask, how he managed to end up here,” Ageyeva said during video questioning published on the Security Service of Ukraine’s website.

Ageyeva also said that in the month since Ukrainian soldiers captured her son in battle, nobody from the Russian army command or government has contacted her.

Ageyev’s capture in Ukraine, along with his mother’s acknowledgement that he was serving in Russian regular army at the time, is seen as yet another proof that the Russian army is participating in the fighting in eastern Ukraine on the side of the anti-government militants – something that the Russian government keeps denying, more than three years after its invasion that launched a war killing 10,000 Ukrainians and dismembering the nation.

“We hope that after the meeting with her son, the mother and Russian journalists will inform Russian society that regular Russian army soldiers are still fighting against Ukrainian army in the Donbass,” Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said at a press briefing on July 22.

Hrytsak said that he hoped, after the meeting with her son in Starobilsk, Ageyeva will return to Russia and urge Russian President Vladimir Putin to renew the prisoner exchange and release all Ukrainian prisoners being illegally detained and kept in Russia, Russian-annexed Crimea, and Russian-controlled Donbas.

Russian soldier’s path

In video questioning published by the security service, known as the SBU, Ageyev said that he enlisted in the Russian military in February, having already served as a conscript a year before. He signed the contract in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Four days later, the commanders told him and other soldiers that they were going for a mission in Luhansk Oblast in Ukraine.

Ageyev said he bought a bus ticket and got to Luhansk, some 200 kilometers from Rostov-on-Don. Upon arrival, he signed another contract and joined the Fourth Brigade of the so-called Luhansk army of the militants.

According to the SBU, there were 15 Russian soldiers fighting in the Fourth Brigade of the militant forces in Luhansk Oblast. Ageyev identified four of them, including a man named Alexandr Shcherba, who he said came to Luhansk with him and was killed in the fighting.

Ageyev also said that the commander of his squad was a man with the nom-de-guerre Kaluga, named after a Russian city.

While admitting the Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine, Ageyev claimed that he didn’t see it as “Russia fighting a war,” but rather as “protecting the civilians from the Ukrainian army.”

A month after he was captured, Ageyev’s mother Svetlana Ageyeva came to Ukraine to seek a meeting with her son.

Mother Rusia

It took three days for Ageyeva, an English teacher, to travel nearly 4,000 kilometers from her home in Altai Krai to meet her son in the detention center in Starobilsk on July 22. The people of her village Topchikha chipped in to fund her trip.

After the meeting, the mother and son appeared before the press together. Ageyev said he wanted to go back home and his mother said she hoped that “politicians would stop the war that kills and injures both Russian and Ukrainian children.”

Russian Novaya Gazeta, whose journalist Pavel Kanygin accompanied Ageyeva on her trip, wrote that a few days before the trip, the woman got a call from a person who identified himself as an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service. The man allegedly told Ageyeva that the FSB knew about her plans to meet with her son in Ukraine and did not approve.

Novaya Gazeta wrote that Ageyeva was afraid that Ukrainian border guards wouldn’t let her enter the country, and then was surprised that Ukrainians treated her politely.
“I was afraid of I don’t know what, some kind of aggression or so,” Ageyeva is quoted as saying.

Ageyev wasn’t the first Russian soldier captured in Donbas. Russia has been denying the presence of its military in Ukraine, claiming that all soldiers killed and captured there were volunteers, who either quit the Russian military before traveling to Ukraine or went there while being on leave.

The most publicized was the case of two officers of the Russian intelligence agency, Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev. The two were captured in Luhansk Oblast in May 2015 as they were fighting against the Ukrainian army.

Russian authorities denied that Alexandrov and Yerofeyev were serving in the agency at the time of the capture. In May 2016, Ukraine exchanged them for Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who was captured in Donbas in 2014 and kept in a Russian prison for nearly two years.