By the time his U.S. deportation flight touched down last summer in Moscow, Artyom Vovchenko had been drained of his fighting spirit.

He had deserted the Russian military and fled his homeland in opposition to the war in Ukraine. He had spent 13 months in three U.S. detention centers before being denied asylum in America. And he had been deported in chains by the Trump administration back to Russia, where he faced up to 10 years in prison.

After he landed, security officials at the Moscow airport saw that Mr. Vovchenko, 27, was wanted by military prosecutors. By then, his despair about his treatment by Russia and the United States had swelled into resentful resignation.

“To hell with you all. Do whatever you want. I know I’m right,” Mr. Vovchenko said he told himself. “I had made my peace. Basically, I was ready to die.”

The New York Times first reported on Mr. Vovchenko last year after he was swept up in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. What followed for him was an encounter with a Russian system overwhelmed by soldiers who had fled the front in Ukraine or suffered injuries, an apparatus dotted with loopholes despite President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggressive wartime authoritarianism.

As the days turned to weeks at the military base where Mr. Vovchenko awaited trial, his will to fight for his own future returned. He said he bided his time quietly, prayed every night and summoned his discipline from years of practicing martial arts. He began devising a plan to escape.

“I simply put my hope in the Lord,” Mr. Vovchenko said. “I figured, if God helps me on this path, then that means this is how it’s meant to be. If he doesn’t let me pass through, well, then that’s my destiny.”

‘Completely Opposed’

The son of a security guard and a hairdresser, Mr. Vovchenko grew up in a family of modest means in a provincial town in southern Russia.

Conscripted into the military after college, he said he was forced to serve on a contract for an additional year against his will.

When Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Mr. Vovchenko was horrified, having long viewed Ukrainians as brethren.

“I couldn’t come to terms with it, thinking, ‘What the hell? On what grounds?’” he said.

Convinced that his unit was about to be sent to Ukraine, Mr. Vovchenko fled, first traveling to Indonesia to coach jujitsu and later going to Mexico, where he crossed into the United States in 2024 to claim asylum.

He was sent to a detention center in Mississippi. There, he worked for a dollar a day in the kitchen making porridge, he said. One day, while moving a 150-pound vat of food, he said, he slipped and injured his back.

“Even in the army, where I certainly faced mistreatment, I never experienced anything as bad as the way they treated us there,” Mr. Vovchenko said.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said, “Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE facilities is false.”

‘Extreme Stress’

After losing his case in the United States, Mr. Vovchenko was herded onto a military flight last summer.

His last chance to save his freedom, he thought, was to persuade the Egyptian authorities, during a layover in Cairo, to let him go to Indonesia, where he still had a valid visa, rather than to Russia.

What began as a series of polite requests quickly went awry.

He went to an airport restroom, where he held onto a pipe and said he was not going anywhere. His Egyptian guards descended on him, he said, pummeling his torso. A sharp pain shot through his back, he said, before a guard began choking him with the collar of his shirt.

Finally, a man with a gun arrived and threatened to shoot him, he said.

As Mr. Vovchenko slackened at the threat, the guards lifted him up, tied his arms and legs “like a sausage” and carried him onto the plane to Moscow.

The Egyptian government did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Vovchenko’s treatment.

‘Like an Alien’

Back in Russia, the chaos of a military system stressed by the war in Ukraine played in Mr. Vovchenko’s favor.

He was held in a military jail for two days before being sent to a base outside Moscow. The base is normally a training center for troops specializing in communications systems but, according to Mr. Vovchenko, also now houses a detention facility for soldiers.

The cells were filled with wounded service members, many of whom were suffering from mental illness or deteriorating health, he said.

The atmosphere was better than what he experienced in U.S. detention, he said, with some Russian officials relating to him as a human, even if they berated the soldiers as “traitors.”

Security was not as tight as it would have been in a traditional Russian prison. The authorities did not confiscate his phone or his passport, he said, searching his bag only for weapons. They had encountered few people like him who had spent years abroad, he said, and took to calling him “the American,” despite his protests.

“To be honest, I was like an alien to them,” Mr. Vovchenko said.

With so many wounded soldiers, there was no chance for Mr. Vovchenko to be treated by the state health authorities, he said. He gathered money and became one of the dozens of detained soldiers transported regularly by guards to local private health facilities.

Doctors explained that Mr. Vovchenko had suffered three herniated disks, one of which was protruding from his spine by 11 millimeters.

Over months of visits, during which his guard would wait for him to be picked up and taken back to the base, he began researching how to escape.

“It’s like preparing for a competition,” he said. “You can’t spend too much time just thinking about the competition itself. You simply focus on specific tasks, the key details, and then you perform.”

‘Completely Lost’

One day, he walked in for treatment, he said, and once out of view of the guard, left and caught a taxi.

He was prepared. He knew exactly which route he would take and how he would avoid being tracked. He calculated that he had about three hours to leave the Moscow region before a manhunt would stymie him.

Facing a long prison sentence or a forced trip to the front line, the risk seemed worth taking.

“I simply couldn’t bring myself to give up, to let my entire life just slip away,” Mr. Vovchenko said.

Mr. Vovchenko’s name had been withdrawn from wanted lists while he was in pretrial detention at the military base, which is standard procedure for the Russian courts, he said.

He took multiple vehicles to the border with Belarus, a state that allows free movement to and from Russia. He had read on the internet about the possibility of leaving Russia through Belarus, after other antiwar Russians, including Maria Alyokhina, a member of the punk protest band Pussy Riot, publicly recounted taking the route.

Rapid Unit, an underground organization that helps spirit Russian political prisoners to safety, verified Mr. Vovchenko’s identity and assisted him, according to an official at the organization, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

It helped coordinate Mr. Vovchenko’s departure, assisting him mostly in Belarus. The group adapted the plan as circumstances changed, and handled tickets, logistics and the search for temporary housing, together with partner groups. The route had to be rearranged several times, the official at Rapid Unit said, but ultimately, Mr. Vovchenko made it out of Belarus to a safer place.

The Times agreed not to publish Mr. Vovchenko’s current whereabouts for security reasons.

Having regained his freedom, Mr. Vovchenko is trying to pick up the pieces of his life. His back problems are still plaguing him, and his money has run out.

“I feel completely lost right now,” he said.

Dmitry Valuev, the president of Russian America for Democracy in Russia, a U.S. group that aids Russian asylum seekers, put together a fund-raiser for Mr. Vovchenko. It has so far raised only $2,000 of its goal of $12,000 to help him resettle.

For his part, Mr. Vovchenko said he regretted mistaking the United States as a place where he would be welcomed and not fully understanding the U.S. immigration system. He is trying to put away the paranoia of being on the run and stop the nightmares he has been having, in which people regularly show up to take him away.

He did manage to compete recently in a jujitsu tournament after weeks of trying to heal his back on his own, a small victory at a bleak moment.

“I have my own goals, my own dreams,” Mr. Vovchenko said. “I just want to live my life.”