Three Years Gone

More than 2,100 men from Russia’s Tomsk Oblast have been sent to fight in Ukraine since the Kremlin announced its “partial mobilization” in September 2022, as part of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Three years later, about one in four of these recruits is dead, missing, or wounded, according to a list of names compiled by the independent outlet Vazhnye Istorii.

“I don’t want to leave, shoot or see any reason to take other people’s lives,” 23-year-old children’s sports coach Nikolai Koksharov of Tomsk wrote on VKontakte in September 2022. He attached songs from the banned punk band Pornofilmy and from Lumen’s “Gosudarstvo” (“The State”), which carries the line, “I love my country and hate the state.”

Koksharov was typical of those drafted from the region: young and without seniority. The oldest mobilized man from Tomsk was 60 years old, the youngest 19. Although officials promised that only trained reservists would be taken, the draft in Tomsk turned out to be uneven. 

Former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said 1.1% of eligible men nationwide would be called up. But Vazhnye Istorii found just 0.5% of reservists were mobilized from Tomsk city, compared with 0.8 percent in smaller towns and 2.1% in rural districts.

Education also played a role. Men with higher education were one-fourteenth as likely to be mobilized than those without it. Before the draft, more than a third of the men worked as drivers or manual laborers; nearly one in five had accounts in ride-hailing or delivery apps.

By Vazhnye Istorii's count, at least 522 men from Tomsk have been killed, wounded, or disappeared in Ukraine. No fewer than 11% have died. The first confirmed deaths occurred just 32 days after the mobilization began. Six men from Tomsk were killed on October 24, 2022, including 28-year-old woodworking plant employee Sergei Kandakov, whose wife said he received almost no training before being sent to the front.

“He called me quickly and said they had been issued rifles and were being taken somewhere. He sent me a photo with the gun,” his wife Yulia told Vazhnye Istorii. “I asked if they’d been taught anything. He said, ‘No, absolutely nothing. We’re going on some assignment, but I don’t know where.’ They just lined them up, called names and took them away.” According to one account, Kandakov died alongside others after a failed assault: “They understood they wouldn’t survive, but the commander ordered them to go to the end,” Yulia said.

The outlet estimated about 13% of the mobilized have been wounded. Eighteen of the 289 injured men later died. Hospital records showed nearly half were classified as lightly wounded and more than a third as moderately wounded, but a military medic told Radio Svoboda that hospitals often downplay injury severity so as to return soldiers to the front faster and reduce compensation.

As of early 2025, only 12% of Tomsk’s mobilized, 251 men, had been formally recognized as veterans, a classification that entitles them to state benefits. Fourteen of those veterans have since been killed in action. Under Russian law, veteran status is due to all mobilized personnel, whether or not they return home.

There is no fixed term of service for mobilized troops. Soldiers remain in the army until a presidential decree ends their service. And three years after the initial call-up, no such decree has been signed.