When 21-year-old Daniil Mukhametov received notice to report for regular military service in the Russian Army, he chose a path to safety that involved a leap into the dark from a moving train and a manhunt aiming to track him down.
Mukhametov comes across as shy and reserved as he tells the story of his dramatic escape to the West in an interview with RFE/RL’s Current Time. The chain of events began in March this year, when he received call-up papers summoning him to a recruitment office in Domodedovo, near Moscow.
“I didn’t see that I had any option other than leaving Russia,” he said. But after receiving the notice that he was being drafted into the army for mandatory military service, he was also barred from international travel.
His answer was to buy a train ticket from the western city of Smolensk to Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. The train starts and finishes in Russia but passes through Belarus and then Lithuania. It does not stop in Lithuania, which is a member of the European Union and NATO.
‘I Hope I Don’t Kill Myself’
Mukhametov bought a ticket to Kaliningrad and boarded the train on June 17. The section of the route through Lithuania lasts 227 kilometers before re-entering Russian territory. Night had fallen. Mukhametov jumped.
Thinking back to that moment, he said his main thought was “I hope I don’t kill myself, because the train was traveling at about 40-45 kilometers per hour.”
According to Lithuanian media reports, the police said a railway guard noticed an open door as the train approached Kybartai, the last Lithuanian town on the border with the Kaliningrad exclave.
The Lithuanian authorities sprang into action. Hundreds of border guards and police began a manhunt with dogs, drones, and helicopters. On TV news reports, officials asked anyone who saw the fugitive to call an emergency number.
In Lithuania’s parliament, former Defense Minister Laurynas Kasciunas said “This is a matter of internal security…. We’re talking about possible sabotage groups.”
But somehow, Mukhametov evaded the dragnet. From Lithuania, he traveled onward by hitchhiking and taxi rides through Latvia to Estonia, where he caught a ferry to Finland. All four countries are in the EU’s Schengen area, where people do not usually need to present passports or identity cards to cross borders.
‘Recognized As A Suspect’
The Finnish authorities rejected Mukhametov’s asylum request on the basis that he had traveled through another EU country and that — under the bloc’s asylum rules — he should request political asylum there.
Facing deportation to Lithuania, he has sought to challenge the decision at the European Court of Human Rights.
Mukhametov fears Lithuania could send him back to Russia, where he would face imprisonment for draft evasion and persecution for seeking asylum in the EU.
Human rights activists have criticized Lithuania’s approach to asylum. An Amnesty International report in 2023 noted “many Russian and Belarusian nationals were refused asylum” amid national security concerns.
The migration department at the Interior Ministry told RFE/RL it would not discuss “possible scenarios” of Mukhametov’s situation, adding “every foreigner present on the territory of the Republic of Lithuania may submit an application for asylum.”
The Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office said that “the foreign citizen specified in your request has been recognized as a suspect” and that further decisions would be taken “in the pretrial investigation” once more information had been gathered.
If Mukhametov is returned to Russia, he could also be jailed for talking to Current Time, because RFE/RL has been classified as an “undesirable organization” by the Russian authorities, and for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Mukhametov said that, as a 17-year-old watching the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, he was horrified by it. “It hurt that there was nothing I could do to stop it,” he said.
His feelings about the war appear to have intensified over time.
“I could talk about what I see, about how so many die and come back to Russia in coffins,” he said, adding that draftees were being forced into signing contracts for ongoing military service. This makes it legally possible to send them to Ukraine.
Mukhametov emphasized that nobody else was involved in his decision to flee.
