The 25-year-old Russian conscript jumps 100ft to his death in front of his mother after being ordered to return to the war zone – as Moscow ‘covers up’ a spate of suicides.
- Mikhail Lyubimov’s mother saw him jump out of a window in her apartment on the tenth floor
- His death comes amid a spike in suicides that Moscow is accused of “covering up”.
A Russian soldier in Putin’s war “took his own life” by falling 100 feet from a skyscraper after being ordered to return to the combat zone the next day.
Mikhail Lyubimov, 25, was seen by his mother – a cleaner at the Russian Foreign Ministry – jumping out of a window in their tenth-floor apartment, reports said.
His death comes amid a spike in suicides linked to the war in Ukraine, which Russian authorities consider a “cover-up.”
The mobilized man suffered from “panic attacks” and started drinking over fears of his return to fighting, said his mother Natalia, 43, who works in the department of Putin’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov.
Russian fighter Mikhail Lyubimov, 25, jumped from his tenth floor window instead of returning to fight Putin’s war in Ukraine
Mikhail Lyubimov’s death comes amid a surge in war-related suicides that Russian authorities are “covering up”.
Thousands of Russian soldiers have called the Ukrainian “I want to live” hotline
Some 6,500 Russian military personnel have surrendered to the Ukrainian government on a cell phone number dubbed the “I want to live” hotline.
The Ukrainian government claimed 6,543 Russian military personnel, many of them on the frontlines, called the hotline between September and January.
The hotline was set up following the mobilization of 300,000 Russian civilians last September.
The call center is in an undisclosed location and Russian military personnel are screened using personal information and their service number, the Guardian reported.
Lyubimov had served in the Navy as a conscript but was drafted into the war in Ukraine as a soldier.
He died in Moscow’s southern Tsaritsyno district on his first break from action, a day before he was due to report back for another frontline assignment.
“Natalia said she saw her son jump out of a window of her tenth floor apartment,” the report said.
“The woman called the police and an ambulance, but the man could not be saved.”
When he was sent to war in October, his longtime girlfriend Ksenia had posted: “You will come back.”
Some details have surfaced about other men who took their own lives instead of fighting in Putin’s war, but there are claims that many more such cases have not been publicly disclosed.
Vladimir Potanin, 46, of Kurgan, killed himself with a razor blade less than a week after being mobilized at a training facility in the Sverdlovsk region.
A 28-year-old man mobilized from Shushary, Leningrad Region, took his own life on October 2 at a training center in Vyborg.
Alexander Ivanov, 57, a mobilized lieutenant from St Petersburg, was found dead in the village of Krupets in the Kursk region before being sent to the front.
Denis R., 33, a mobilized man from Revda, Sverdlovsk region, committed suicide in the Belgorod region just before he was due to be sent to Ukraine.
Reportedly, holdouts are often held in makeshift prisons of hell near war zones as commanders try to intimidate them into joining the war.
Mikhail Lyubimov died in Moscow’s Tsaritsyno district on his first break from action, a day before he was due to report for another front line assignment