When he was little, says his mother, Yuliya Makhnina, Vasily “was a pretty happy child.” She’d take him to the playground, to museums, and for swimming and taekwondo lessons.
But she’d met Vasily’s father, Alek Keytiyev, when they were still practically kids themselves. She was from Kazakhstan; he was from Uzbekistan. They’d moved to San Francisco for education, opportunity, and adventure, and they’d met in their late teens while working as security guards.
They put their college dreams on hold when she became pregnant with Vasily. When he was a year old and the combination of raising a child and working became too much for his parents to handle, Vasily lived with his father’s mother in Irkutsk, Siberia, for two years. A few years after Vasily had returned to the Bay Area, Yuliya and Alek divorced when Vasily was beginning elementary school, and that hit him hard.
On top of that, Vasily moved from one district to another and was behind. By fourth grade, he was regularly clashing with teachers.
“I kind of had an attitude,” he says. He got bored easily and had trouble sitting still. In retrospect, he suspects he had undiagnosed ADHD. “At no point did any of the teachers sit me down and ask if I needed help, if I was OK.”
Over the years, the situation spiraled. Vasily would get in trouble, that would turn him off of school even more, and he’d act out in progressively defiant ways.
In sixth grade, there were several homeroom computers that students could work on and print from, and he pulled up a video of himself doing the ALS Association’s viral online ice-bucket challenge. “It didn’t seem like a big deal,” he recalls. But his teacher got really upset and raised her voice. “I was a little bit traumatized,” Vasily remembers.
In middle school, the infractions escalated and the penalties multiplied.
A paper-towel holder in the bathroom was dangling off the wall, so Vasily and a friend decided to try to kick it all the way off, and then figured they’d keep kicking other fixtures loose too. A boy stole Vasily’s candy, so he punched him.
As a sixth grader, Vasily started hanging out with some eighth-grade skater kids who, he says, were a lousy influence. The group threw water balloons at cars, and rocks out of windows. Inspired by a moronic internet craze, Vasily snuck up behind a schoolmate walking home and thwacked him on the calf with a stick. The incident resulted in a two-week suspension, one of 22 suspensions he says he ultimately racked up.
By ninth grade, Vasily and a friend were expelled. Both had Eastern European parents, spoke English and Russian, and had “not a great home life,” says Vasily.
“We’d wrestle each other, follow kids and, like, make fun of them,” Vasily says. “People would get mad at us because we were disruptive. We just thought it was stupid. We didn’t pay attention. We didn’t turn anything in. We didn’t do the tests.”
“We were troubled,” Vasily says, and their teachers hated them.
Over the years, Vasily’s parents tried their best to be there for him, but they were also working long hours and scrambling to succeed in their careers — Yuliya in materials science for a microchip company and Alek in sales, first automobiles and then real estate.
Vasily’s freshman and sophomore years of high school were an academic disaster. Don’t fail any more classes, his counselor urged, or we’ll have to hold you back a year. He worried his dad would get ticked off at him again, so he avoided home and walked around aimlessly.
Then came the pandemic and the Covid lockdown. Those saved him. Classes moved online and the school was passing just about anyone for anything. “I pretty much just smoked a lot of weed and played a lot of video games,” Vasily says. Miraculously, he graduated in 2021.
“I was, like, ‘Look you’ve got to do something with your life,’” recalls Yuliya. “‘You’ve got to go to college.’”
Vasily did — at Riverside City College, east of Los Angeles — but he wasn’t motivated, and he was still smoking too much weed. It was a false start. “He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have a goal,” his mother says. “I think he was just lost.”
A Turning Point
Did he find himself? Or was he just fed up with himself? In any case, after about a year in Riverside, something in his outlook shifted.
Vasily wanted, he says, “to not be a degenerate anymore, fix all my behavioral issues.” But he also knew, he says, that “I couldn’t do it by myself.”
His grades at Riverside had been slipping. His life was still parties and pot. Then a friend wanted to join the Marines. “That’s a stupid idea,” Vasily told him. But what he thought was, I wonder what computer-related jobs the military might have? On a lark, he entered his contact info on a Marine Corps site. “A recruiter called me like an hour later.”
Before signing a contract, Vasily looked for the catch. He was eyeing the Marine Corps Reserve but feared a bait and switch, being coerced into active duty or transferred to a job he didn’t want. You train one weekend a month, with one two-week training yearly, the recruiter said. And you choose your job.
Vasily signed up, went to boot camp in November 2022, and trained as a computer network administrator. Now 21, he’s moved from Riverside back to San Francisco, is living with his father, and finished a year at City College of San Francisco.
The Marine Corps, he says, has given him “a better direction in life and unlocked my potential.”
Focusing on computer science, Vasily hopes to transfer in a year to the University of California at Berkeley, and then to earn a master’s in cybersecurity.
A nonprofit called Service to School has helped Vasily consider and plan those transfer possibilities. Its chief executive, Alexander (Alec) Emmert, explains that the organization mentors military personnel and veterans — the vast majority of whom come from enlisted ranks — to strategize on college selection and better convey their unique background on applications. It has more than 30 undergraduate partners, elite institutions looking for the professional hard and soft skills that applicants with military experience bring.
A former U.S. Navy submarine officer, Emmert discovered S2S, as it is abbreviated, when he was a graduate student at Georgetown University, where he volunteered to be one of S2S’s 1,000-plus volunteer “ambassadors” who mentor applicants. He went on to receive mentorship from an S2S ambassador when he applied for an M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. After getting his M.B.A. there, he worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company before becoming S2S’s leader. S2S works with more than 2,500 veterans or soon-to-be veterans annually.
With the encouragement of S2S, Vasily visited Berkeley’s admissions department. In his mind, he’d be met by a group of stuffy, elderly cranks waiting to spot a spelling mistake so they could toss his application in the trash. “But it was actually really pleasant,” he says. “It turns out they’re just a nice group of people.”
“Your application gets read twice. They just want to know who you are as a person,” he says. They told him high-school performance would be less of a consideration than what he’s done since. “It gave me hope.”
Vasily is getting good grades, he says, is passionate about his courses, and has traded weed for workouts. He plans to improve his Russian, which he hopes will expand his opportunities in the Marines and beyond.
The flip side of obstinacy, he and those around him are discovering, is persistence. A good friend, Andres, met Vasily in Riverside at a party. They were both interested in video games like Overwatch, and they talked about improving themselves. Vasily struck Andres as “someone who is just constantly trying to learn.”
Vasily’s enlistment was “incredibly sudden,” says Andres, and he worried it would hurt their friendship. But, he reasoned, “that’s the next, best step for him, so I in turn have to take that next, best step just to keep up.” While Andres is working at a recreation center now, he plans, inspired in part by Vasily, to re-enroll in college and work toward a career as a counselor or therapist.
Janey Skinner, who taught Vasily’s City College course on stress and resilience, calls him “a star student.” He came to the class not as a requirement but out of curiosity. “He is just very engaged, attentive. He really connected with other students well,” she says, and wrote a paper on the effects of adverse childhood experiences on long-term health. “His heart just broke open for this topic,” says Skinner.
‘A Changed Man’
Vasily’s family has grown. His mother, Yuliya, met Edward Moger, who works as a field engineer for an energy-consulting firm. They’ve been together for 13 years, and Vasily says Edward is chill and relatable. Alek, Vasily’s father, is married to a Ukrainian-born hair stylist named Olga, and they have a 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, and a 5-year-old son, Adam.
A few weeks before Vasily headed to Twentynine Palms, Calif., for his annual Marine Corps Reserve drill period in early June 2024, he attended a performance Adam was in at school. Adam and Olivia adore Vasily, Alek says, and Adam was in seventh heaven, telling teachers and friends, “This is my brother!”
“He’s a huge role model for both of them,” Alek says. And to Alek, that’s no surprise.
“The core of him is a kind and honest person who had good values ingrained in him.” There was “the period of his life where he just wasn’t together, and he needed something — not me, not the family — to kick him in the butt and maybe teach him some new tricks.”
Alek credits the Marines with doing that. “We are super proud of him.”
“When he came back” from boot camp, Yuliya says, Vasily “was a changed man.”
“Hearing about his childhood and the things he was going through,” says Andres, “he’s a very different character.” Vasily can veer toward stubbornness at times, says his friend, “but when he has a goal, he’ll definitely hit it.”
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