Some 60,000 soldiers have reportedly been prosecuted for leaving their positions this year
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| Ukrainian Military Desertions Skyrocket - Latest Reports |
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.