The number of Ukrainian soldiers deserting their positions has soared in 2024, according to a new report, as Kyiv contends with persistent Russian advances and uncertainty over what the new year will hold for its war effort.
More Ukrainian soldiers deserted between January and the end of October this year than in the previous two years of full-scale war with Russia, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
Kyiv prosecutors opened 60,000 cases against soldiers for leaving their positions between the start of the year and October, according to the report, totaling nearly twice the number in 2022 and 2023 combined.
Over 100,000 soldiers have been charged for desertion since February 2022, The Associated Press reported late last month, citing Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office. Newsweek has reached out to the Ukrainian military for comment via email.
More than twice as many Ukrainian soldiers have been charged with desertion this year than in 2022 and 2023 combined, the Financial Times has reported. The spike in desertions has hampered Kiev’s ability to replenish its thinned-out ranks.
Ukrainian prosecutors opened 60,000 cases against deserters between January and October of this year, the British newspaper reported on Saturday, noting that those convicted face prison terms of up to 12 years.
For some of these men, desertion is seen as the only way of getting off the front lines to rest. Ukrainian lawmakers dropped a provision from a bill earlier this year that would have allowed the country’s longest-serving conscripts to be demobilized in the coming months, and service members told the Financial Times that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) lacks the manpower to give troops shorter four-week rotations off the front lines for rest and retraining.
”They’re just killing them, instead of letting them rehabilitate and rest,” one officer told the newspaper.
Those killed are replaced by ill-trained and unfit draftees. In an earlier article, Ukrainian commanders told the Financial Times that on some busy sectors of the front, 50 to 70% of these new conscripts are killed or wounded within days of starting their first rotation. Those who survive often go AWOL as soon as they can, the newspaper reported.
Some choose to desert while at training camps in NATO countries. An anonymous Polish security source told the Financial Times that around 12 Ukrainian men abscond from training centers in Poland every month.
Earlier this week, a Ukrainian MP told the Associated Press that as many as 200,000 soldiers may have deserted since the conflict with Russia escalated in 2022.
There are around 350,000 active-duty soldiers in the UAF, although heavy losses – more than half a million since February 2022, according to the Russian Defense Ministry – have seen the country’s longest-serving soldiers replaced first by almost a dozen NATO-trained divisions, and then, after these divisions were chewed up during last year’s disastrous counteroffensive, by unwilling conscripts.
Press-ganged off the streets and dragged out of nightclubs to serve, these draftees include the blind, the deaf, and the mentally handicapped, according to recent media reports and testimony from Ukrainian lawmakers.
”Men who are the right age for the military draft are scared to walk freely in the street,” one draft-dodger told The Telegraph earlier this week. A recruiter concurred, telling the newspaper that approaching a potential conscript is often “like dealing with a cornered rat.”
The UAF is seeking to recruit around 160,000 new soldiers in the coming months. To reach this target, the US has begun pushing the Ukrainian government to lower the minimum draft age to 18, down from 25, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
