“Can you smell it?” Alisa Sadovnikova says she asked her husband, Sergei, as they paddled their craft -- a kayak with a homemade sail -- from Russian waters into Turkish waters one morning this June. “It smells like freedom.”
The Russian couple, who had deserted their units amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine, were on a desperate eight-day journey across the Black Sea, hoping to escape Russian military police and reach Europe after more than 18 months on the run.
Under constant threat of detection by passing ships and drones, the Sadovnikovs traveled more than 330 kilometers by sea, surviving four storms on open water and enduring three full days without food, they told RFE/RL's North.Realities through intermediaries.
“We had no strength left. The wind was against us and the waves were brutal. We were expending all our energy just trying to stay in one place,” Alisa, 30, said of the final night of the couple’s Black Sea crossing.
She said hunger and fatigue had brought on severe hallucinations and panic, adding that the end of the grueling voyage “was awful. You could see the shore, but the sea wouldn’t let you reach it.”
Finally, in hopes of leaving behind the war they had once cheered for, “walking dead” from exhaustion, the two staggered ashore near the Turkish city of Espiye and fell to the ground.
The couple planned to seek asylum in Spain, one of the few European countries where Russian deserters may apply for it. But nearly two months after reaching Turkey, they are now in danger of being deported to Russia.
Sergei and Alisa Sadovnikov
RFE/RL confirmed the identities of Alisa and Sergei Sadovnikov and verified some aspects of their biographies, military service, and journey, but was unable to independently verify other details of their accounts.
'The Enemy Was Right In Front Of Me'
Long before they came up with the idea of fleeing Russia by kayak across the Black Sea, Alisa and Sergei had met while serving in the same military unit in the rear. At the time, both were ardent supporters of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which President Vladimir Putin launched in February 2022.
Alisa left behind the cafe she had opened with a friend in Moscow and her job as a math teacher in Zelenograd, near the Russian capital, to join the military in the fall of 2023. By then, Sergei had already gone to war twice.
He says that he first served as a medic with the Wagner mercenary group in 2022, then returned to the war late in 2023 after signing a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry after Wagner was disbanded in the wake of an abortive mutiny.
Before the war, Sergei said, he had spent more than five and a half years in prison on a drug-related conviction and later worked as an unskilled laborer. When he later served alongside Alisa, he taught her tactical medicine, she recalled -- and she also served as a medic.
“We were genuine Z-supporters of the worst kind,” Alisa said, using a letter that symbolizes avid backing for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. “We believed what we were told on television. We went [to fight] for the motherland...against the ‘Ukrainian fascists.’”
Alisa salutes with a Russian flag in the background.
Russian officials and state-controlled media have often falsely portrayed Ukraine and its leadership as Nazis or fascists and invoked distorted narratives of World War II to encourage military enlistment.
Looking back, Alisa said her reasons for going to war were “irrational.” What she witnessed during her year of service gradually turned her against the system she had supported before.
“The enemy wasn’t where we had been told it was -- it was right in front of me,” she added.
After falling in love and serving together for some time, Alisa and Sergei were separated when Sergei was redeployed to the front line with the 76th Pskov Air Assault Division. It was then, the two said, that they saw sides of Russia’s invasion they had previously overlooked.
Sergei was wounded the second time he was sent into battle -- and was soon sent back into combat despite his injuries, he said. He described what followed as a “meat grinder,” saying that he lost a friend in the fighting.
“Everything became clear to me,” said Sergei, 37. “They started taking assistants from my group and sending them on assault missions. Right before my eyes, about 100 meters away, two entire companies were wiped out.”
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'Simply Medieval': Russian Soldiers Held In Pits And Cellars For Refusing To Fight In UkraineRecalling his service after reenlisting in 2023, Sergei said he witnessed serious human rights violations committed by the Russian military, including against its own soldiers.
“They beat soldiers for the slightest offense, tied them to trees or handcuffed them… Or they put them in pits, where they could be held for months,” he said.
The treatment of local residents in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine at times was even more dire. According to Sergei, Russian soldiers beat civilians, stole from them, and sometimes shot them.
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Post Office Massacre: Russian Soldiers Shot Five Ukrainian Civilians Seeking To Defend Their Village, Investigation Finds“I was looking for the fascists we had been told about.... But I didn’t see anything like that in Bakhmut, Zaporizhzhya, or Kherson,” he said. “We should never have started this fight. Putin has bled the Russian people dry and is destroying Ukrainians. I am simply devastated. I don’t know how to ask [the Ukrainian] people for forgiveness.”
Meanwhile, Alisa sought to reunite with her husband and escape the abuse she said women suffered in her unit.
Alisa while serving in the Russian military.
“Women were treated horribly in our unit. The prevailing attitude was that ‘a woman is the lowest kind of scum’…. They would say, ‘What, do you want me to unzip my fly for you?’” she said. “I quickly realized I had to get out of the army.”
Alisa was "haunted by a sense of hopelessness," she said, and came to realize that she had nothing against Ukrainians but had built up “a lot of anger toward those in power [in Russia] and the commanders.”
“They steal everything and then send the boys to their deaths with nothing but their bare hands and pitchforks…. I simply began to hate them,” she said.
Alisa said that, with the help of a lawyer, she “appealed to every possible authority” to rejoin Sergei and have him redeployed from his new division, which was operating in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhya region at the time. That never happened, but she was eventually transferred to the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, which is closer to Zaporizhzhya.
The idea of deserting the army together then began to take shape.
'We Lived Like Rats'
After multiple unsuccessful attempts to resign from military service in 2024, Alisa went on leave with no intention of ever going back. Soon, when Sergei was rotated off the front line in the Zaporizhzhya region, the couple seized the opportunity and decided to risk everything, they said. They headed for Russia.
"We left Zaporizhzhya in a convoy, and I was put in charge. When we crossed the border, we stopped, and my wife brought me civilian clothes and cash,” Sergei recalled. “A car pulled up, I got in, and we drove away.”
He said the Russian military spent hours searching the convoy for him. But he was gone, and the couple quickly reached the Krasnodar region in southern Russia and went into hiding.
For months, they lived "like rats," Alisa said.
Shortly after arriving in the regional capital, the two threw away their SIM cards, identified nearby surveillance cameras, and changed apartments four times in just one week.
According to Alisa, wanted posters with her photograph were put up all over her hometown of Zelenograd, and military police repeatedly visited her mother.
A wanted notice for Alisa Sadovnikova.
“We stayed inside the apartment, and every time we heard the elevator coming up, my stomach knotted with fear,” Alisa said. “We lived like rats, going outside only along two routes where we knew for certain there were no cameras."
Desperate to escape their “prison-like” existence after six months in hiding, the couple moved into a forest. They spent the warmer months in tents, but as the cold weather began to set in, they returned to the city and tried to find a way out of Russia.
The pattern for the sail Alisa and Sergei made for their escape by kayak.
After ruling out a route through northern Europe over deportation risks and Georgia due to landmines from the country’s war with Moscow-backed Abkhaz separatists, they settled on a third option: crossing the Black Sea to Turkey.
With the money they had scraped together from various jobs, they bought a kayak. Fearing detection by radar, they removed all its metal components, camouflaged it in the color of the sea, and made a sail.
For a week, they monitored boats and ships at sea to find the best possible route, they said, and decided to set off from a point between the Russian cities of Sochi and Tuapse.
Alisa said the chosen departure point was not the shortest option, but added it secured safer route: “It meant covering a greater distance, but at least we would be safer.”
Marine traffic along the route of the Sadovnikovs’ Black Sea crossing. The green line roughly traces the course they say they took from Russia to Turkey.
Escaped Russia, Detained In Turkey
After eight days at sea and a couple of days resting, the couple continued their journey, and headed west across Turkey with their sights set on Spain.
Back in the water, though, they were intercepted by the Greek Coast Guard as they attempted to enter Greece via the Aegean Sea in their kayak. Alisa said the officers took their phones, watches, batteries, sail, and paddles and returned them to Turkish waters, where they were picked up by Turkish border guards.
Within a few days, the couple found themselves at a deportation center in the western Turkish city of Aydin, facing a deportation order.
Alisa alleged that a security guard at the center recently hit Sergei in the head while a surveillance camera in the facility was switched off.
“They always keep the doors shut, even though this is not a prison,” she said, adding that she was allowed to see Sergei for only two hours a week and speak to him by phone for 15 minutes a day.
Reports by human rights groups have documented allegations of repeated physical violence by staff at the Aydin Removal Center. Former detainees reported being severely beaten by guards before their forced removal from the country.
The couple’s lawyer, Koran Aygun, said the Sadovnikovs had recently been transferred from Aydin to another removal center in Kutahya. His challenge of the deportation order has suspended the process, but the future is uncertain.
According to Tvyordy Znak, an organization that helps Russian deserters safely leave the military and settle abroad, the couple could face up to 10 years in prison if returned to Russia.
Tvyordy Znak says it verifies deserters’ stories. Alisa and Sergei contacted the group while preparing to paddle to Greece.