Don’t you just hate it when you join the army and a year into your service you realise that all the military lark isn’t really for you. What would you do? Try your damnedest to figure out a way home? Stick it out? Or alternatively go on a 10-year-long exile into the wildness and pretend that you’re dead? “Surely not” I hear you say. Well that’s exactly what one man did.
The Russian soldier was presumed dead in 2004 but reappeared from the freezing wasteland a decade later. The army deserter had been stationed in the remote Kamchatka Peninsula back in 2003. However, a year into his tour he wandered off, as if disappearing into thin air.
Of course a search was undertaken to locate the man, whose name is as much a mystery as his disappearance, but it was called off when a body was found. His family falsely identified the missing relative as their own flesh and blood, they even buried the poor soul.
The regional branch of the interior ministry revealed in a statement that “he lived in Kamchatka all this time, mainly hiding in the forest. He got by with odd jobs and did not attempt to get in touch with his family.”
