People with mental disabilities recruited for the war against Ukraine

The website Idel.Realii has reported on a complaint from the family of a 30-year-old man from Ulyanovsk who – despite having been under the care of local psychiatric services since childhood – was nevertheless conscripted into the Russian army to fight in Ukraine. Similar cases had already been reported in Tatarstan, the Perm region and Udmurtia.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - According to his family, Daniil Rudnev, a 30-year-old illiterate man with a disability from Ulyanovsk, was persuaded to sign a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence and was sent to the war zone. A medical commission declared him completely fit for service, ignoring the fact that he had been in a psychiatric hospital for 18 years. Similar cases of the recruitment of people with mental disabilities have been recorded in the past in Tatarstan, the Perm region and Udmurtia. Idel.Realii has analysed why such ‘systemic errors’ are sometimes impossible to correct before unfit soldiers are sent into battle or die.

Daniil Rudnev is 30 years old, has been disabled since childhood and has been diagnosed with mental retardation. According to the published medical-social assessment, his disability has been permanent since childhood, and according to medical records from the V.A. Koposov Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital in Ulyanovsk, Rudnev has been registered with the local psychiatric service continuously since 2008. According to his family, he was deceived and tricked into signing a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence; the local medical board declared Rudnev perfectly healthy and fit for service, ignoring obvious signs of mental disability. Daniil cannot read or write and has significant speech difficulties; he graduated from a special school in Ulyanovsk and has never worked, except occasionally on a part-time basis.

According to some relatives, Daniil had previously expressed a desire to sign the contract, and to prevent him from doing so, his relatives confiscated his passport, which was not returned to him, meaning he signed the contract without it. Furthermore, his relatives were certain that, given his ‘D’ category of physical fitness and the fact that he was registered, he could not be conscripted: “He didn’t understand where he was going; his military ID was fake. The recruitment office claimed that Daniil had been asked whether he had any medical conditions and whether the medical board had issued a certificate. In the end, they simply forged it,” says a relative, who added that Daniil is now crying and asking to be brought home.

Aleksey Vakhrushev is 23 years old and comes from the village of Chernovskoye, in the Perm region. His story was told in March 2025 as part of the “Go to the Forest” project, which helps people avoid military service in the Russian army. Vakhrušev has been officially diagnosed with mental retardation: mild oligophrenia. He is registered with a psychiatric service, attended lower secondary school and does not know his times tables or understand proverbs. Despite this, in 2023 he was forced to sign a contract for military service. At the time of his enlistment, the medical report stated that “Vakhrušev has superficial and naive judgements; he does not take account of dates on the calendar, his attention is unfocused, he cannot explain the meaning of proverbs, his general knowledge is extremely limited and he is emotionally immature”. His mother, Olga Vakhruševa, recounted that in August 2024 her son was accused of stealing food from neighbours, but nothing was found during a search. Shortly afterwards, Aleksey signed a contract for military service.

"He is 22 years old, but by developmental standards he is still a child; he didn’t understand what war was, he thought it was an adventure. We tried to persuade him to refuse service, but the military recruitment office in Bolshaya Sosnova sent him to Perm, and there they sorted out the paperwork,” his mother Olga Vakhrusheva stated in 2025. Aleksey ended up at a training centre in the Chelyabinsk region, where they began to bully him.

In the autumn of 2024, Vakhrušev deserted his training unit, but was recaptured and shortly afterwards called his mother from the war zone in Ukraine.

It is well known that Olga Vakhruševa had already lost a daughter in 2018, when her daughter Viktoria was brutally murdered by an acquaintance, Evgenij Četvertakov. It later emerged that he had also killed another young girl, and he was sentenced to 19 years in prison. Now nothing more is known of Aleksey, as is the case with so many other Russians, disabled or otherwise, who have gone missing on the front lines in Ukraine.