Members of the Sibir Battalion. Photo: Sibir Battalion / Telegram
Ukraine has handed over to Russia as part of an exchange a 21-year-old student who had plans to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), investigative media outlet Verstka reported on Friday, citing his friends and Ukrainian military sources.
According to Verstka, Alexey Gerasimov was a former student of journalism at the Chuvash State University, who, friends said, openly supported Chuvashia’s secession from Russia. Chuvashia is a republic in Russia’s Volga region where local Chuvash, a Turkic ethnic group, form a two-thirds majority of the population.
“He would debate teachers, saying it was time for Chuvashia to secede from Russia. The teachers reported him and he was mobilised into the army,” Mishshi Oreshnikov, a Chuvash activist who fights for the AFU, told Verstka, though Verstka was unable to confirm this.
In November 2023, Gerasimov published posts in support of a Chuvash national liberation movement and footage of an interview with a fighter from the AFU’s Sibir Battalion, made up of Russians fighting for Ukraine, on popular Russian social media platform VK.
Alexey Gerasimov. Photo: Verstka
According to court data from Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region, Gerasimov crossed into the country on 23 January 2024 via the Russian Belgorod region and said he wanted to join the AFU. He was subjected to a polygraph and assigned to the Sibir Battalion the following month.
Gerasimov’s comrades-in-arms told Verstka he did not take part in either training or combat, with one fighter believing that he may have refused to sign up after the unit had suffered heavy losses. He was sent to a temporary detention centre for foreigners, with a court giving the order for him to be deported in August 2024.
Ukraine and Russia have conducted multiple large-scale prisoner exchanges following May’s talks in the Turkish city of Istanbul, and Gerasimov was included in one of them. Sibir Battalion fighters said they did not think this was due to malice, and might just have been due to incompetence in the Ukrainian migration service.
Another friend who wished to remain anonymous claimed Gerasimov could have himself asked to be part of an exchange, while a former comrade-in-arms said Gerasimov deleted messages on his phone just days before being sent back to Russia.
On 19 June, Russia’s financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring added Gerasimov to its list of “terrorists and extremists”, saying he now faced criminal charges for terrorism. This was confirmed by three Verstka sources, who said Gerasimov was in custody in Russia.