Faced with a severe shortage of soldiers for the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s Russia started recruiting convicted criminals from prisons. A person can be immediately pardoned by the president just for agreeing to fight – and it does not matter how dangerous they are.

The worst of murderers and rapists are able to get out and then hailed as national heroes by authorities. There are also criminals who have committed lesser crimes who are ready to gamble on their lives for freedom.

Not all of them are lucky enough to come back from the war and tens of thousands of them have been killed already. It is an aspect of the war that has not received much attention because the dead are often not known to the general public. This week, however, there was an exception that highlighted the controversial scheme.

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Aleksey Bugaev was once considered one of the most promising defenders in the country and he started twice for Russia at Euro 2004. Vitaliy Shevchenko, the coach who gave Bugaev his first-team debut at Torpedo Moscow in 2001, recalled in a Sport Express interview: “Aleksey could play at centre-back and left-back equally well. He was tough, won a lot of balls, and was capable of executing quality passes with just one touch to start attacks. He was more talented than Sergey Ignashevich.”

Ignashevich enjoyed an outstanding career, becoming an icon for CSKA Moscow and Russia’s most capped player. Bugaev, however, played for Russia just seven times, never fulfilled potential and retired at the age of 29. He could have developed into a major star but for a self-destructive lifestyle and an alcohol addiction. Last year he was given a nine-and-a-half-year prison sentence for drug distribution.

“He was always problematic,” Shevchenko said. “We did everything in our power to fight for him. We fined him, had a lot of conversations with him and his parents, sent him to the reserves and eventually loaned him out to Tomsk who controlled him at every step.”

It was at Tomsk, more than 2,000 miles away in Siberia, that Bugaev started to play regularly and behave properly. Upon returning to Torpedo in 2003, he became a starter and performed especially well in the spring of 2004, with the team sensationally leading the table.

This was perfect timing for Bugaev as the national team were having problems in central defence with the veteran Viktor Onopko and Ignashevich both injured before the Euros. The national team coach, Georgiy Yartsev, had little choice but to include the 22-year-old in the squad for the tournament.

He was on the bench for the 1-0 defeat by Spain in the opening fixture when Roman Sharonov was sent off. The youngster then took his place alongside Chelsea’s Aleksei Smertin in the following match against Portugal and performed well, despite Russia losing 2-0. Bugaev then completed 90 minutes again in the 2-1 win over Greece, the only defeat of the tournament for the eventual champions.

That could have been a source of pride and a sign of good things to come, but Bugaev did not take advantage. Upon returning to Moscow, he started to miss Torpedo training sessions and, by the end of 2004, the club lost patience and decided to sell the player while they could.

The champions, Lokomotiv Moscow, paid €2m (£1.4m) and offered Bugaev a three-year contract. The veteran coach Yuri Syomin believed that he could instil discipline in the talented footballer, but he was soon lured to the national team and Bugaev was lost without him.

Tomsk signed Bugaev again in 2006. The coach, Valeriy Petrakov, knew him well, but even he was stunned. “He was such a brilliant player,” Petrakov told Sport Express. “He had speed, strength and positioning. But it was all for nothing. Once Bugaev asked me for a two-day vacation following a good game, so that he would see his family in Moscow. I agreed and told him he deserved it. He then disappeared. It turned out that he was drinking all the time.”

Dmitry Tarasov, a Russia international midfielder who played with Bugaev at Tomsk, said: “He was a top defender but alcohol ruined him. We had to look for him in very bad places. It was an illness.”

In 2014, four years after his retirement, Bugaev gave a bizarre interview to Sovetsky Sport, first offering the journalist “to drink something”. He had a removal van and had entered a recycling business. “I don’t regret anything,” he said. Yet life did not go according to his plans.

Continued alcohol addiction led to huge debts and Bugaev eventually turned to crime. In 2023, he was caught with a package of mephedrone and arrested. Bugaev pleaded guilty to drug distribution and was given his sentence in September last year.

Aleksandr Mostovoi, Russia’s star player who was part of the Euro 2004 squad with Bugaev, said: “The situation is horrific. It’s not about football, because Aleksey forgot about it a long time ago. It’s a life story, and the problem is that we have millions of such stories in Russia. Watching the news is very depressing.”

One thing was clear for Bugaev, though. He was not about to go to jail, because there was now a way to avoid it. Even before hearing the verdict he told relatives that he had decided to go to war in Ukraine.

On Sunday came the news that Bugaev had died in the war and that it had not even been possible to recover his body from the battlefield. His fate is similar to many others but he still stands out. He was a footballer who had played against Luís Figo and Cristiano Ronaldo and, at one point of his life, seemingly had it all. Now he is dead because of a senseless war and Russia’s need to send more soldiers to the front.