Young Russian Lieutenant Was Shocked by the Attack on Ukraine. He Made Contact with Ukrainians and Became the Most Valuable Agent

In February 2024, Russian military personnel gathered at a training ground near the Ukrainian city of Vuhledar. For several days, they practiced operations ahead of a planned offensive. Senior officers, who arrived with the command of the 36th Motorized Rifle Brigade, were supposed to observe the exercises.

Among those present was young Lieutenant Lev Stupnikov, who was responsible for communications in one of the battalions. He discreetly photographed the soldiers and sent a message to his Ukrainian contact: "There should be 120 to 150 people here."

The officer had provided the coordinates of the location even earlier. Now, the Ukrainian side only needed confirmation that people had gathered there.

"Get away immediately," came the curator's order via Telegram.

Lieutenant Stupnikov approached a group of drivers smoking near their vehicles, said he had a stomach ache, and asked for wet wipes. After that, he walked behind some nearby trees and squatted down, pretending to relieve himself. A moment later, a missile strike hit the training ground. The blast wave knocked the man off his feet.

When he got up, he saw dozens of dead and wounded. The Ukrainian curator asked him to confirm the results of the attack and send photos. "There's nothing to photograph, it's just a mess," Lev replied. Later, he reported that 68 Russian soldiers had been killed and another 60 wounded. Among the dead were ten officers, including Colonel Hussein Musayev, commander of the 36th Motorized Rifle Brigade.

This was the first major strike that Ukrainian forces carried out with the help of information from the Russian lieutenant. In the following months, thanks in part to information from Stupnikov, the Ukrainians destroyed several hundred occupiers in various operations.

As journalists from The Wall Street Journal found out, the officer not only provided information about his brigade but also deliberately disabled military equipment. At the same time, he continued to serve alongside the very people he was working against.

From Military Academy to the Front Prematurely

Lev Stupnikov grew up in the family of a former Soviet serviceman who retired in Kazakhstan. He was a schoolboy when his family repatriated from Kazakhstan to Omsk. At 17, he entered the Budyonny Military Academy of Communications in St. Petersburg, but even during his studies, he began to become disillusioned with the army.

According to him, corruption flourished in the military system: for the opportunity to go on leave, for the opportunity to be assigned to a better place of service – everything required bribes. And all the equipment was run down. The young man wanted to resign and work as a fitness trainer. But in 2022, resigning became impossible.

His attitude definitively changed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Stupnikov was shocked by reports of bombings of Ukrainian cities and the deaths of civilians. Meanwhile, at the academy, cadets were regularly read boastful, overconfident reports from the front and shown Putin's speeches.

Павялічыць

Lev did not support the war but was smart enough to hide his views. Some of his classmates tried to resign, but their applications went unanswered for months. In April 2022, amid the Russian army's need for new officers, he, along with approximately 450 other cadets, was prematurely graduated from the academy with the rank of lieutenant. Stupnikov was sent to serve in the Russian Far East.

In November 2023, they were redeployed to the front. Even earlier, he, along with his mother, Tatiana Yantzen, had consulted human rights activists about the possibility of leaving the army. When the deployment to the front became known, the woman suggested her son flee to Kazakhstan during a layover in Moscow. Relatives lived there who could take him in.

The young officer did not dare. He feared the consequences of desertion and consequently arrived at the 36th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade, which operated in the Donetsk region. In the occupied village of Nikolskoye, he was appointed head of communications for the battalion. In this position, he had access to information about the location and movements of units, command plans, and broadcasts from reconnaissance drones and surveillance cameras.

In February 2024, Stupnikov's mother contacted Dmitry Karpenko, a Ukrainian programmer who cooperated with military intelligence. He was known for his interviews with Russian prisoners on YouTube and also collected information from Russians willing to help Ukraine.

Since October 2023, Karpenko had been offering 250,000 rubles (about $2,700) for useful military information. Not only soldiers, but also employees of state companies and even Russian FSB officers sent him information.

Lev wrote to the Ukrainian via WhatsApp, stated his rank, unit, and place of service, and reported that he was ready to cooperate and surrender to Ukrainian forces. They agreed to regularly exchange information and use a special code to verify messages. If the code was missing, it could mean the informant had been exposed.

Karpenko offered to pay Stupnikov for the information provided, but the Russian categorically refused the money.

Strikes on His Own Brigade and the Threat of Exposure

After the first strike on the training ground near Vuhledar, Stupnikov continued to serve, participated in the evacuation of the dead and wounded, and pretended to have suffered a concussion himself. The FSB began an investigation, and soldiers' phones were confiscated, but the lieutenant managed to hide the device he used to contact the Ukrainians.

Despite the danger, he continued to transmit information about offensive plans, unit deployments, radio frequencies, and equipment movements. In addition, he engaged in sabotage: disconnecting surveillance cameras and disabling drone control equipment.

In March 2024, thanks to his information, the Ukrainians struck a brigade officers' meeting. In May, the AFU attacked a former hotel building where two assault units were located. Twenty soldiers were killed then, including a captain. Another target was a command post during a leadership meeting.

In total, The Wall Street Journal reports, the information provided by Stupnikov helped the Ukrainians destroy more than 300 Russian military personnel.

After a series of precise strikes, the command began to suspect there was a mole in the battalion. By summer, of the officers who were in the battalion when Stupnikov arrived and were involved in planning operations, only he remained alive: the others were killed, wounded, or transferred. In June, one of the commanders stated that their unit apparently had its own "Stierlitz" and looked at the lieutenant.

The informant himself almost died once due to a mistake. At the end of May, he mistakenly sent the Ukrainians the coordinates of the building he was in, not the place he intended. Soon a shell flew there, part of the walls collapsed, but the man survived.

Amid escalating suspicions, further stay in the Russian brigade became increasingly dangerous.

Crossing a Minefield Under the Watch of a Ukrainian Drone

In early July 2024, Karpenko announced that the Ukrainians had prepared a plan to evacuate their agent. On the night of July 6, Stupnikov left his deployment location with a smartphone and a military radio. When a Russian soldier at an observation post noticed him, the officer explained that he was checking cameras and radio communications.

Next, he had to cross a mined neutral strip. The route was predetermined by Ukrainian servicemen, and during the crossing, a drone of the 72nd AFU Brigade hovered over the area, monitoring Stupnikov via a thermal imager.

Lev carefully placed his feet so as not to step on a mine or trip a booby trap; he illuminated his path with his phone. He could be spotted and fired upon at any moment by both his own forces and Ukrainians from other units.

The journey to the Ukrainian positions took 40 minutes. In front of him, three armed figures emerged from a dugout — even more on edge than he was. Stupnikov remembered that the machine gunner who asked him for the password had trembling hands. And how absurd the password was in this grey zone, pitted with craters and strewn with ruins: "Nut shop."

Exactly at 8 AM the next morning, Stupnikov called his mother and said that he had reached where he was supposed to be. This was their coded phrase, meaning the escape had succeeded.

Павялічыць

On the Other Side of the Front

After crossing to the Ukrainian side, Stupnikov handed over a phone to the military with access to broadcasts from Russian drones and surveillance cameras. The Ukrainians used this information for several more months.

Soon he met Denis Kapustin, commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), in which Russians fight on the side of Ukraine. Kapustin offered Lev to join the corps as a communications specialist. However, he immediately warned him: if he agreed, he would have to stay in the unit until the end of the war.

The man hesitated. After dangerous service and escape, he could have tried to start a peaceful life abroad. But at the same time, he understood that even outside of Russia, he could become a target for Russian special services.

One example was pilot Maxim Kuzminov, who in 2023 flew a Russian helicopter to Ukraine and received an award for it. A few months later, he was shot dead in Spain.

Lev decided that staying in Ukraine was safer for him than hiding in another country. Two days after the meeting, he informed Kapustin of his consent.

Since then, the former head of communications of the Russian battalion has been serving in a unit that fights against his former comrades-in-arms.

This decision ruined his marriage. He got married while studying at the academy. After his escape, he offered his wife to move in with him, but she refused. The woman said she wanted a quiet life, away from the war and close to her parents.

"That was your dream, not mine," she wrote to him. After that, the woman stopped responding to messages.

Later, when the defector's story became public, his wife was interrogated by Russian investigators. In an interview with state media, she called her husband's actions a betrayal and stated that he had betrayed not only the country but also her.

Павялічыць

But his mother and younger sister were absolutely on the side of their son and brother. After crossing to the Ukrainian side, the officer was considered missing for some time. The Russian command had no definitive confirmation that he was alive.

Karpenko, meanwhile, helped arrange for the woman and her daughter to leave Russia. In February 2025, they traveled through Moldova to Ukraine, where Tatiana met her son for the first time in a year and a half. However, she did not understand why he went to fight again when he had finally managed to leave the Russian army.

To her question of whether this was truly their war, Lev replied that he felt responsible for participating in the Russian invasion and considered it the duty of Russians to help stop it.

Павялічыць

Now, the former lieutenant continues his service in the RVC, engaged in military communications. Among his opponents are soldiers from the same 36th brigade where he previously served.

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