Oleksandr Mustiatse was 14 when Russia invaded in February 2022 and he was stranded in occupied Kherson region. He is 19 now, and the Ukrainian initiative Back to Ukraine says he is fighting for Russia.
The group reported the finding on July 28 and called it one of the first such cases to come to light. Mustiatse appears in a database of Ukrainian children under Russian occupation, which gives his hometown as Krynky, a village in the Kherson region that was captured and later destroyed. Activists found his page on VK, the Russian social network. It held photos of him in Russian military uniform, one showing the letter Z, a symbol of the invasion.
The page went offline in November 2025, and Back to Ukraine feared he had been killed. A fellow soldier then told the group otherwise. According to its account, Mustiatse was wounded in the fall of 2025, treated at the Burdenko Main Military Hospital in Moscow and sent back to the front.
The message exchange
On August 3, the activists found a second VK page, under the name Alexander Famenok, and wrote to him directly. They said Ukraine knew he was fighting for Russia and asked him to explain. He did not deny it. “I’ve always been for my own country. Russia has always been in my heart,” he answered.
The same day, the Ukrainian project Myrotvorets added him to its database as an accomplice in Russian aggression.
Back to Ukraine blamed what it called systemic work. “When a person born in Ukraine sincerely considers russia to be ‘their side,’ that’s not an accident,” the group said, and it called for a state information strategy aimed at people in occupied territories.
What is verified
Meduza, which published the story, noted that the group’s account has not been independently checked. Back to Ukraine exists publicly only as Instagram and Threads accounts, both created in the second half of July, and it is unclear who runs it. Ukrainian media picked up the story, as did Mykola Kuleba, the former presidential commissioner for children’s rights and head of the charity Save Ukraine. Meduza said that, as far as it knows, nobody besides Back to Ukraine has tried to contact Mustiatse.
The group says he is not alone. It named 19-year-old Hryhorii Chymbur as a member of Russian military intelligence, and said other teenagers taken from Ukraine have been photographed with Russian military symbols. It also flagged Pylyp Holovnia, a teenager from occupied Mariupol adopted in 2022 by Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of complicity in deporting Ukrainian children. On August 4 she said Holovnia had enrolled at a Moscow university to train as a prosecutor.
Under the Ukrainian project Bring Kids Back, launched at President Zelensky’s initiative, 1.6 million Ukrainian children are under Russian control, in occupied territory or in Russia itself. Only 2,441 have been returned.
Sources
- Ukrainian teen from occupied territory found serving in Russia’s army, says Back to Ukraine project — Meduza
- Missing Ukrainian teenager resurfaces in Russian military ranks | Dagens.com
