Former Russia international Alexey Bugaev dies at 43

Former Russian national team footballer Alexey Bugaev, enlisted to the Russian Army in a prison where he was serving a 9.5-year sentence for drug trafficking, died in the war in Ukraine, his father, Ivan Bugaev, confirmed to the Russian sports portal 'Sport24'.

“Unfortunately, the news about Alexey's death is true. It happened today - on Monday,” the father of the former Russian defender said.

Bugaev, who was 43 years old when he lost his life in Ukraine, played for Russian teams Torpedo Moscow, Tom, Khimki, Krasnodar and Lokomotiv Moscow, with which he won the Russian Super Cup. He played 7 games for the Russian national team, participated in Euro 2004 and retired in 2010.

In October 2023 he was arrested with 500 grams of mephedrone that he intended to sell in the resort city of Sochi, in southern Russia, and sentenced to prison.

His lawyers alleged that the police falsified evidence and tried to extort 3 million rubles (about $30,000) from the athlete, but the Prosecutor's Office found no evidence of this.

Russia has passed laws allowing indicted and convicted criminals to sign contracts with the army to fight in Ukraine, after which, depending on their merits on the battlefield, they could earn a pardon.

At the time, UN experts warned that the recruitment of convicts, which would also take place in prisons located in the territories occupied by Russian troops in Ukraine, could constitute a war crime.

Despite the insistence of the most belligerent, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is reluctant to call for a new mobilization of reservists, after the unpopularity of the one announced in September 2022, which provoked the exodus abroad of hundreds of thousands of Russians.