Alarm in Ukraine over increasing number of army deserters

In May 2023, Kiril Babii was convinced that he would fight until Crimea, his homeland, was liberated from Russian occupation. Babii was a lieutenant in the 43rd Ukrainian Artillery Brigade. He volunteered at the start of the invasion in February 2022, giving up on his dream of becoming an architect, as he explained in an interview with EL PAÍS. But something broke inside him at the end of 2023. “A month ago I asked myself: ‘What if the war lasts five years, Kiril?’ And I started crying. I don’t want to spend three more years in the war. I’m exhausted,” Babii wrote on Instagram in November 2023.

Babii also said that on February 27, 2024, when his two years of service were up, he would leave his regiment via “voluntary demobilization,” or SZCH as it is called in Ukrainian military slang. It was the last message he posted. Babii fled and is now missing. He is one of 45,543 soldiers who have deserted from the Ukrainian army between January and August 2024, according to data from the Prosecutor General’s Office leaked to the Ukrainian press. This accounts for over half of the 81,167 cases registered by public prosecution since 2022. Military personnel consulted by media such as Hromadske or LB claim the figure is at least 100,000; the equivalent of 10% of all personnel currently serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

An identical case to Babii’s has caused a national sensation and led to the issue being addressed for the first time in many Ukrainian media outlets. Serhii Gnezdilov, a soldier in the 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade, announced on his social networks that he would abandon military service until it was specified for how long he would continue to serve in the war. Gnezdilov added that he was also fed up with the corruption that allows a person to avoid being drafted in exchange for a sufficient amount of cash. The Security Services of Ukraine (SSU) arrested him on October 9. He is accused of evading his responsibilities under martial law.

Ukrainian authorities distinguish between voluntary demobilization and desertion: the former accounts for the majority — 66% — of the total. These are soldiers who do not return to their regiment after being granted leave, claiming personal obligations, negligence in their unit, or alleged inaccuracies in their enlistment documents to refuse to rejoin the ranks for a period of time. Deserters are those who disappear permanently and without providing any reason. Both cases constitute a crime, punishable by sentences of between five and 10 years in prison. But the problem is so widespread that the Ukrainian parliament approved a new law on August 20 that allows soldiers who have gone SZCH to return to the army without any penalty after receiving a first warning. “The situation is very difficult; we cannot pretend that it does not happen. That is why we have been discussing it for a long time in our meetings with the General Staff and the Defense Ministry,” parliamentary deputy Fedir Venislavskyi admitted on NV radio Sunday.

Last April, EL PAÍS spoke to an officer who left his brigade as a “voluntarily demobilized soldier.” He is now at home and has no intention of returning to the front. He alleges negligence on the part of his commanders. He maintains that he has fought for over two years in the current war, and also did so in the 2014 Donbas conflict against pro-Russian separatists, and that he deserves to return to civilian life.

Why are there so few arrests among SZCH and deserters? Andriy Pisarenko, a lawyer and commander of a mortar unit in the Da Vinci battalion, said the main reason is that the SSU does not have enough material resources to deal with so many cases. Pisarenko assumes that there are many more escapees than the official figures indicate, but that some commanders prefer not to report it, to avoid problems or out of camaraderie. Diana Makarova, a well-known volunteer for the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the Donbas conflict broke out in 2014, commented on Facebook on September 23 that there are already so many escapees that it is difficult for the government to deal with the issue without risking a crisis. “Mass desertion has begun and will only grow, and the more deserters there are, the harder it is to punish,” Makarova wrote.

“You go to the army to fight for freedom and what you find is that you are deprived of freedom for an indefinite period of time; you don’t know when it’s going to end,” explained a deserter consulted by this newspaper in April, who prefers to remain anonymous to avoid being arrested. It is the same thing that Babii wrote in his farewell message: “I ask for changes to transform the army from an institution that is the same as a prison to one that properly defends the state in a long-term war.” Igor Lutsenko, commander of a drone unit in Hromadske, echoes these sentiments: “The army has to stop being a prison for heroes.”

Discomfort with the mobilization law

Lutsenko confirmed that the situation is extremely complex because while civilians who have been in the army since the beginning of the war want to return to their lives, practically no one wants to enlist today, and those who do arrive at their units demotivated by poor prospects for success on the battlefield. Unrest in the Ukrainian army soared in April 2024, when the new mobilization law was passed. Hundreds of thousands of volunteer fighters from 2022 expected that the law would return them home after three years of service — that is, in 2025 — but both the government and the General Staff ruled out demobilization because the country cannot afford to lose soldiers, let alone experienced ones.

An officer from a brigade fighting on the Zaporizhzhia front, who received permission this summer to visit his family abroad, explained to EL PAÍS in September that when he crossed the border, Ukrainian customs officers told him that they assumed he would not return. He did, but he provided his own experience as an example of the shortage of veteran soldiers: of the troops his battalion had in the summer of 2022, only 5% are still active today. The rest were discharged due to wounds or killed in action.

Not only does the Kremlin have a larger population to draw upon to swell the ranks of its army, it also has more drastic methods of recruiting and, above all, of discouraging its troops from deserting. Testimonies from Russian soldiers and videos recorded by Ukrainian drones near the front prove that summary executions are common for those who abandon their post.

In addition to the exhaustion of these Ukrainian civilians who enlisted to defend their country, there is also a lack of training and sufficient weapons to resist the current Russian advance. A hundred soldiers from the 123rd Brigade of the Territorial Defence Forces made the news when they left their posts en masse on the Donetsk front on October 3 to protest against the lack of training of new recruits and, above all, the lack of ammunition and military resources to confront the enemy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy took this lack of motivation into account when he presented his plan for victory during trips to the United States and Europe, stating that the war could be over in 2025.

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