Photo: The Canadian Press

A car drives on a street in the village of Loyga, northern Russia, Wednesday Oct. 10, 2018. The career trajectories of suspected Russian military intelligence agents suggest how important the military are for ambitious young men determined to escape the gloom and poverty of rural Russia, like Loyga where suspected GRU agent Alexander Mishkin grew up.

"First time here?" the conductor on the train that stops at the logging outpost of Loyga asks some departing passengers. "My condolences — there isn't even cellphone connection."

This desolate village, deep in the far northern Arkhangelsk region, is the hometown of one of the suspected GRU Russian military intelligence agents who is believed to have poisoned a former Russian spy in Britain. The other alleged attacker and an alleged military intelligence operative accused of a hacking attack in the Netherlands come from equally dismal places.

Their stories suggest how important the military and intelligence services are for ambitious young men determined to escape the gloom and poverty of rural Russia.

Owning a car in Loyga is almost pointless — all but two roads are mud and navigable only by all-terrain vehicles. Most of the houses are unpainted, looking leaden in the constant autumn drizzle. Only one train a day connects it with Moscow, stopping for just one minute for visitors to descend onto a bare platform with a line of oil tank cars on the side track.

"It's grey, and we have no roads," says Svetlana Lukina, chief of the village whose population of about 1,000 is a third of its onetime peak in the 1970s.

The chilly stillness of the village streets is interrupted by a dog's barking or the sound of a passing freight train. A 28-year-old man biking home from a shift at the railroad appears intoxicated.

"Only those who had nowhere else to go are left," says resident Yuri Poroshin, who occupies his time painting landscapes. "Only the drunkards and pensioners are left. Good young men are all gone."

Alexander Mishkin is one who got out, leaving the village for a military academy in St. Petersburg. The investigative group Bellingcat said he's the man known to British authorities as Alexander Petrov, one of the two suspects in the nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

For locals, Mishkin is an object of praise: he was awarded Russia's highest military decoration, Hero of Russia, and his portrait hangs at the local school, residents say.

Work in the military and especially in the intelligence agencies has a special allure to youth from villages or small towns who were raised on movies about Russian spies and war heroes.

Mikhail Trepashkin, a retired colonel in the Federal Security Service (FSB), says that under President Vladimir Putin, himself a former intelligence officer, the security apparatus has emerged as the only available social lift for rural youth.

"In Soviet times, people were using the (Communist) party to get ahead: if you have chosen this path, that means everything is going to be all right. Now the FSB or the GRU does that," he said.

"People from Moscow, (like) people from New York, are not so interested in a military career and being special ops," said military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. But thousands of miles away from the capital, "it's a way to get out of the misery of rural life in provincial Russia, and make a career."