He Lost a Leg for Russia. Then, He Says, His Country Betrayed Him.

After being locked up for murder, Aleksandr Abbasov-Derskhan signed up to fight in Ukraine, thinking it would give him a shot at starting his life over. All he needed was to survive the front lines.

But after leaving prison six years early to join Storm Z, a Russian military unit made up of convicts, and losing his right leg to an anti-personnel mine, Mr. Abbasov-Derskhan believes he was deceived. He was misled not only about the war’s aims, he said, but also about the benefits he would receive after he came home.

“I risked my life, but it is unclear for what,” Mr. Abbasov-Derskhan, 39, said recently in an interview in Lyubertsy, a working-class suburb of Moscow.

“Recruitment officers told us, ‘You will have payments like the others who are on contract,’” he said. “They attracted us with the promise that we would be able to rehabilitate ourselves, that we would become a full-fledged part of society. That didn’t happen.”

Mr. Abbasov-Derskhan first spoke with The New York Times for an article early last year about Russian soldiers facing long recoveries from injury. His decision to speak again is a measure of his desperation. Publicly criticizing the Russian government, especially about the war, can carry severe personal and legal risks.

He is among a small number of former convicts who have given interviews to journalists as a last resort. The Times was not able to verify all of the details of Mr. Abbasov-Derskhan’s account, but his story mirrors the accounts of others, as well as confidential complaints filed by soldiers and their families that were inadvertently posted online by the Russian government last year.