He was the defender who had to stop Luís Figo, who faced a young Cristiano Ronaldo and who, at the time only twenty-three years old, seemed to have a bright career ahead of him. But on Sunday, former Russian footballer Alexei Bugayev appeared to have died at the front in Ukraine. He was 43 years old.
Bugayev was considered a talented defender when he went to the European Football Championship in Portugal with the Russian national team in 2004. On YouTube is images to see the match against the Portuguese team. Bugayev, in the white shirt of sponsor Nike’s iconic Total90 line, with the number 21 in a circle on the stomach, plays in the center back. Next to him is captain Aleksej Smertin, who carries the national team as a player for the great Chelsea.
Bugayev has the technical winger Simao in his pocket, but moments later he falls asleep during a deep pass to striker Pauleta. Goalkeeper Sergei Ovchinnikov then goes too far, touches the ball outside the penalty area with his hand and gets a red card. Partly due to the 2-0 defeat, the Russians finished last in the group.
Beer festival
Bugayev will only play a few more international matches after that, because after the European Championship he is quickly slipping away. When his Torpedo Moscow team gathers in a hotel shortly after the tournament to fly to two away games, he is missing: the defender is at a beer festival in Moscow, a former teammate told the Russian sports medium Sport24.ru. “He informed the team doctor that we should leave without him.”
Alcoholism becomes his greatest opponent. Six months after the European Championship, Bugayev moves to the Russian champions Lokomotiv, elsewhere in Moscow. But he doesn’t play much there, after which he moves to the smaller Tom Tomsk. Sometimes he manages to stay sober for a while, at least on match days. But after he smashed a shop window at a training camp in Turkey, his contract was terminated. He then tries at the smaller clubs Khimki and FK Krasnodar, until he stops playing football at the age of twenty-nine.
He disappeared from the radar until journalists discovered in 2015 that he now collected waste paper. Years later he works in a pawnshop – to pay off his debts, Russian media report. In October 2023, things went wrong when he took to the streets with half a kilo of mephedrone to sell the drugs – better known in the Netherlands as ‘meow meow’. Officers catch him. A court sentenced Bugayev this fall to 9.5 years in prison in a ‘maximum security’ penal colony in the Krasnodar region.
Two weeks of military training
There he found a way out: the war in Ukraine. Since the first summer of the war, Russian prisoners have been recruited with the promise of a pardon after the battle. First, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group visits the prisons to recruit mercenaries, later the detainees join the Russian army. The detainees replenish the ranks at the front, where great losses are suffered; according to Ukrainian figures, which cannot be independently verified, around thirty thousand Russian soldiers are killed every month.
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It is therefore a way out that is as popular as it is dangerous. At the beginning of this year, two prisons in the Krasnodar region closed: there were simply too few detainees left. But they receive barely two weeks of military training before being sent to the front. And once they get there, they serve mainly as cannon fodder. They are the first line of attack, Prigozhin once said, and therefore the first to die. As early as early 2023, it emerged that around 80 percent of the detainees who had joined Wagner had been killed, injured or captured in Ukraine.
“Bugayev could do everything on the field,” his former coach Valeri Petrakov told Sport24. “He was fast, could pass, shoot, position himself well, jump. And he was in phenomenal shape. It is tragic that he drank away his talent.”