Battlefield maps are one of Russia’s favorite propaganda tools. While the Russian army has, on average, advanced at a snail’s pace this year, dramatic visuals from its Defense Ministry and pro-war bloggers often exaggerate its progress, using bold arrows and shaded villages to create the impression its troops are sweeping through territory. This trend extends to the military’s internal maps, according to a former soldier who used to draw them for a living. For Mediazona, Vyacheslav Boyarintsev (a pseudonym) recently described his experience. Meduza shares an abridged translation of his firsthand account.

My conscription began on November 1, 2024. I was assigned to the Volgograd honor guard company. I was happy to end up there — it’s prestigious, and some people pay serious money to get assigned there. I was part of the 20th Motor Rifle Division of the 8th Combined Arms Army.

We served on Mamayev Kurgan, taking turns on guard duty. We also did parades, official ceremonies, and funerals for killed servicemen. I was in the rifle squad; we fired SKS carbines loaded with blanks into the air.

In December 2024, I decided to sign a contract with the Defense Ministry. Let me explain. In addition to the prestige, the deputy political officer promised us payouts of 2.5 million rubles ($31,000). He used to show us episodes of the propaganda program Besogon TV as “political education,” and every morning after breakfast he’d read out news about the latest successes on the the battlefield. It was daily brainwashing.

But the main thing that reassured me was that contract soldiers from the honor guard weren’t sent to the “special military operation.” It made sense — there were very few contract soldiers in the unit, and they needed us to train conscripts and attend events that required experience. I signed the papers on December 12.

I wasn’t worried about being sent to the front. Yeah, the contract was open-ended, but I hoped the war would end within a few years. I figured I’d serve quietly, get the money, and improve my financial situation.

But it didn’t go as smoothly as I’d pictured. First, contract service was hell. Nobody cared about young contract soldiers. Constant duties, constant call-ups. At that point, we’d already received 400,000 rubles ($4,960) from the ministry. And right after we signed, the commander came in and said: “Well, you signed the contract, you’ve got money — time to buy something for the unit, treat everyone.” The three of us pitched in and bought a ping-pong table. You can’t refuse. If you do, you get “sanctions” — more duties, more guard shifts, stuff like that.

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After a month of contract service, I realized I couldn’t stay there. The contract sergeants were rotten — they treated conscripts like garbage, didn’t consider them human, constantly bullied and harassed them, and constantly searched them and shook them down. I couldn’t stand treating people like that.

I knew I had to find another position. One option was transferring to an aviation unit in Tikhoretsk, but that was long and risky; they were sending contract soldiers from that unit to Ukraine. I needed something safer. I was advised to transfer to the operations section of the same unit as an assistant to the department chief.

That sounded like an easy job: sit in an office, drink tea, push papers. So I transferred.

‘You’re going to Avdiivka’

I served there quietly until July 2025. Then, they let me go on leave and told me that when I returned, I’d be sent to the combat zone. They said, “You’ll go to Donetsk, to a command post — they’ve got a bunker almost two levels underground, it’s practically safe. You’ll stay a bit, get combat veteran status, earn some money, and come back.”

I was scared to go. I’d seen how Ukrainian forces were wiping out command posts completely. And right as I was leaving, they hit the command post of the 8th Army in Donetsk — the army our division was under.

Still, they told me I’d just be “working with maps” — supposedly an easy job. So I agreed. I wasn’t exactly eager to do it — I understand it was an active war zone. But I thought, alright, fine, I can endure it for a month or two.

After my leave ended, I arrived in Donetsk. There, they drove me to the command post, where I was told, “Buddy, you’re going to Avdiivka.” That scared me — Avdiivka is much closer to the front line than Donetsk, maybe 20–25 kilometers (12–15 miles) from the contact line.

They took me to some forest, to the forward command post, which was just a timber-lined dugout, about 20 meters wide (21 yards) and probably 300-350 meters (330–380 yards) long.

I didn’t see any people in Avdiivka itself. Not a single local except one old woman selling food. Not one intact house or apartment building.

My duties consisted of updating the physical map, updating the electronic map, and updating the general’s tablet. Every evening, I took his tablet and drew in the day’s changes in the battlefield situation based on reports from the command post. For example: Russian troops advanced from this tree line to that tree line, or a bit further. On the maps, tree lines are divided into squares. I’d shade in the advancement — say, from square 16 to square 18.

At first, the job seemed insanely hard. Just a huge volume of work. I was the only person tasked with updating the electronic map, the tablet, and the printed map. And we constantly had to redo the attack plan.

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From the command post, they would send us one or two pages via the secure data system, with the tree lines labeled and notes on how far and where the troops had advanced since the last update. Twice a week, we printed two big maps for the Combat Control Group (GBU). All the branch chiefs updated their own information on that map. I drew in the positions and movements of the motorized rifle and tank regiments; the UAV chief added drone strike data; the artillery chief added his data; we marked incoming Ukrainian drone hits; and the GBU chief added airstrikes with glide bombs on Ukrainian troop concentrations.

Additionally, we printed smaller regiment maps, maybe 50 by 50 centimeters (20 by 20 inches), every day. Each regiment sent in its daily situation map. What was on those maps? Regiments’ attack plans for the next day. For example, on November 4 they’d send the plan for November 5. The maps showed how the regiments and their subunits would move, including their routes and numbers of personnel.

Fooling themselves

Most of the time, the command gives completely unrealistic orders during an offensive. I was the one who actually put these decisions on the map. They might plan for soldiers to advance 18 kilometers (11 miles) in five days, even though everyone understands that’s absurd.

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The information that regiments send to headquarters is mostly irrelevant and made-up. The infamous practice of shading in maps “on credit” that everyone talks about — it really exists.

Regiments report that they’ve fully captured places like Rusyn Yar or Poltavka. I shade those areas in, of course. Then I open [exiled anti-war journalist] Michael Naki’s latest video in the evening, look at the DeepState map, and see that all of Rusyn Yar is still a gray zone. And I also talked directly to chiefs of staff about regimental officers — they’d tell me, “This is bullshit. The data we’re sending is total bullshit. There’s no way we can be there.”

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Most likely, the falsification starts at the regimental commander level. They send the information to the division, and the division sends it to the army. And at the army level, the lies are even bigger. We’d receive electronic situation maps from army headquarters, and I personally saw that the numbers were completely unrealistic. The data I got from the regiments differed by one and a half to two kilometers (1–1.3 miles) from what the army sent. The army maps were wildly off — pure fabrication.

Let me explain how an “advance” is plotted. Say you have a forest strip one kilometer (0.6 miles) long. If two Russian soldiers sit at one end and two more sit at the other, that strip is automatically marked as fully captured on the map — as if the entire area is under Russian control. Two people sit somewhere and suddenly 300–400 meters (1,000–1,300 miles) get shaded in as “secured,” even though there’s no real fortified presence there at all.

So first they lie that the area is controlled, and then they send units there. In the end, they’re deceiving themselves.

In September, there was a case where the map showed that an area near Toretsk was almost fully under the control of the 33rd and 57th regiments. When marines and special forces went in, it turned out that Ukrainian forces were still there, and they wiped out all the Russians.

Everything the Z-bloggers say is mostly true. The inaccurate troop positions, the “meatgrinder assaults,” the soldiers conducting assaults on scooters, it’s all real.

There was the time when the 242nd regiment was supposed to reach Torske and Maiak — small settlements. I was the one who plotted that mission. Russian forces were massing in Rusyn Yar and were supposed to push north from there. Even back when I arrived, in the summer, the objective was to capture Maiak and Torske. By October, they hadn’t advanced even two kilometers (1.2 miles). I have no idea what they’re drawing on those maps.

Once I received a situation map from the General Staff. This was in September, when [Chief of the General Staff Valery] Gerasimov came to visit. They sent this map so I could make updated maps specifically for Gerasimov — to show him what our “actual” troop positions supposedly were. It was total nonsense; the positions on the map were drastically different from reality. There was no way Russian troops were where the map showed.

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So yes — I made maps specifically for Gerasimov based on those General Staff shadings. The division sends one set of data, but ahead of Gerasimov’s arrival, we were given a different one from the General Staff. And I had to print maps based on that version just for him. Absurd.

‘Most others understood perfectly well’

My superior, Colonel Chernik, treated me terribly. I think he’s mentally unstable — a moral degenerate and an energy vampire. He’s 45 or 46 but looks much older. Short, wrinkled, with a huge bald spot; always groaning.

He lives in some strange world of his own. He and some of the other officers called Ukrainians “Germans.” What infuriated me most was when they occupied Yablonivka. He came in all cheerful and said, “We finally liberated Yablonivka!” That kind of newspeak disgusted me to the point of physical revulsion. It’s horrible, truly — when you see with your own eyes what’s happening, and he calls it “liberation.”

There was also one other completely unhinged idiot who stood out. I swear, every day, he raved about launching nuclear missiles at Ukraine. He arrived as an attachment from the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade. A mobilized captain, about 50. He looked like a drunk, with slurred speech and robotic movements. He’d previously served in the regiment responsible for Russia’s nuclear arsenal. He left the service as a captain, and during the war he was mobilized.

Before he joined us, this lunatic had been in Kursk region. He told me how they cut off the heads of Ukrainian POWs and put them on stakes.

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There weren’t many like him, though. Most others understood perfectly well that the war was criminal and unwinnable, but they kept doing their jobs. They had no other options.

No one believed in a ceasefire. The head of my section, Chernik, said that until we take Odesa and the Kharkiv region, we won’t stop.

I’ll be completely honest. First and foremost, I didn’t want to take part in any of this. I didn’t want the status of a Russian soldier or a combat veteran. I didn’t want awards, I didn’t want to wear them. For me, personally, that’s horrific. It violates my conscience, I’d put it that way.

To me, the Russian army is the modern equivalent of the Third Reich. No different. That’s what I believe. I don’t want to be a fascist, a Nazi — I just want to live and bring good into the world. I don’t want to kill anyone.

The second thing was my own life. The shelling was intense — it was terrifying. You understand that your life could end today. You’re always thinking about it — there were strikes day and night. The worst was when a HIMARS salvo landed — it missed us, but it hit just across the road.

When I was still in Avdiivka, I decided I was definitely getting out. And then I saw a Mediazona video about ways to escape the front.

They sent me on leave, and I never returned. I went home, rested, recovered, and started planning my escape from Russia. My relatives knew nothing. My parents only found out I was gone when the unit started calling them.

I still can’t believe I actually got out. Sometimes I look around and think, “Wow — everything’s calm, everything’s okay.” Although sudden loud noises still scare me. And at night I keep dreaming of the bunker, of walking through its hallways and offices.