Desertion in AFU. In half a year, twice as many soldiers escaped from front than in the whole of 2023

The escape of military personnel from the Armed Forces of Ukraine has reached an alarming scale. In the first half of 2024, law enforcement officers in Ukraine opened almost 29,800 new criminal cases related to the escape of military personnel: 18,600 under the article on voluntary abandonment of a military unit and 11,200 under the stricter "Desertion", according to the statistics of the Prosecutor General’s Office. This number has already exceeded the figures for the entire year 2023 - when 24,100 new investigations were initiated, and is more than three times higher than the figure for 2022 (9,400 cases), DW writes.

It is reported that since the beginning of 2022, the prosecutor's office has registered 63,200 such criminal proceedings. If we compare this number with the number of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (880,000 people), we can conclude that almost every 14th serviceman escaped from the army during the full-scale war.

As the publication notes, official data do not reflect the real scale of the problem, according to HR officers and lawyers familiar with the situation of the escape of servicemen from units. Some say that the real number of cases is three times greater than the number of criminal cases, others even four times. "In April 2022, the soldier left the unit voluntarily, and until today no criminal case was registered. And I had five out of nine such cases without a case in my list for one region," says a personnel officer of the 28th mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Viktor Liakh, from the Odesa Region.

Commanders are also obliged to report the escape of subordinates to the Military Law and Order Service (MLS) - a special law enforcement formation within the Armed Forces of Ukraine. At DW's request, they did not want to disclose the number of such messages and comment on the statistics of the prosecutor's office, referring to the confidentiality of the data.

However, the service admits that there are enough reasons for the "commitment of voluntary abandonment of a military unit by servicemen". In a written response to DW, its recently appointed chief, Colonel Vitalii Levchenko, in addition to purely subjective factors, such as "the desire to temporarily evade duties for rest" or "the low moral and psychological state of servicemen called up for mobilization", indicates joint military problems. First of all, this is "emotional overload and exhaustion... associated with a long-term stay in the area of ​​hostilities without rotation" and "insufficient level of assistance from the command in solving family and social problems," the military officer notes.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, since the beginning of the war, 13 soldiers have been sentenced for fleeing the battlefield or refusing to take up arms.

During the 2 years of the war in Ukraine, 270 soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were convicted of desertion.

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