The adopted great-grandson of Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, Anton Milaev, took part in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was taken prisoner in the spring of 2026. On July 6, the “Khochu Zhit” (“I Want to Live”) project — which Ukrainian authorities use to encourage Russian soldiers to surrender — published an interview with him.
Milaev, 45, is the biological grandson of Soviet circus performer Yevgeny Milaev, who was the first husband of Galina Brezhneva, the Soviet general secretary’s daughter. The Telegram channel Baza, which has ties to Russia’s security services, had reported as early as June 18 that Milaev had been taken prisoner; it also claimed, citing his mother, that Galina Brezhneva had raised her grandson “like her own.” In his interview with “Khochu Zhit,” Milaev said he had long “run away” from his family connection to the Soviet general secretary and had always preferred “to be an ordinary person.”
Milaev said he spent 19 years in the United States starting in the 1990s, working numerous low-skilled jobs before returning to Russia in the mid-2010s because he had “gotten tired of living there [in the U.S.] and working for the Masons.” He also spoke positively about the Soviet Union, saying that in Soviet times “there was a country, and now there’s chaos.”
In recent years, Milaev had been living in Moscow and working as a truck driver. He went to war in 2025 for the money — he needed to pay off a debt of one million rubles. He signed his contract in Kostroma and received a payment of 1.4 million rubles. He said he had planned to work as a driver at the front as well, but ended up in an assault unit.
Milaev had no prior military background. His training at a unit in the occupied Luhansk region lasted only three weeks, and he was taken prisoner after roughly two months at the front.
He said he had previously “wanted to see Nazis” in Ukraine and learned the stories about them were false only after he reached the front. “I think that to change your mind about this war, everyone needs to be here,” he said.
Leonid Brezhnev was a native of Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro). He served throughout World War II, beginning it with the rank of reserve regimental commissar and ending it as a major general. Serving as a political officer, the future Soviet general secretary took part in liberating many cities in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from the Nazis — Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Lviv, Mukachevo, and Uzhhorod.
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