Ukraine facing desertion crisis as at least 60,000 soldiers abandon frontlines in 2024

Ukrainian prosecutors opened 60,000 desertion cases between January and October this year, almost double the figure recorded for 2022 and 2023 combined, The Financial Times (FT) reported on Sunday.

In a landmark case in October, hundreds of soldiers from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)’s 123rd Brigade abandoned their positions in the town of Vuhledar in eastern Ukraine, after arriving, in the words of one of the deserters, armed “with just automatic rifles” and only 20 tanks to cover their positions instead of the promised 150.

Vuhledar, a strategically important town in eastern Ukraine that has been devastated by fierce fighting since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was finally captured by the Russian military in early October. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the time that it was “only right” that AFU soldiers had withdrawn from the town in the interests of “self-preservation”.

Asked at the time by Novaya Gazeta Europe to comment on the situation in Vuhledar, Israeli military expert David Sharp said that the AFU should have withdrawn its units from the town several days earlier in order to reduce losses, as once the high-rise buildings in the city were either destroyed or very significantly damaged, Vuhledar became extremely difficult to defend.

An AFU soldier from the brigade who spoke to the FT anonymously said that his unit had not undergone a single troop rotation in the three years of war, which had led to chronic exhaustion among the troops and to even more casualties. 

There had also been “no reason” to put more soldiers in harm’s way to defend Vuhledar, he said, adding that holding the city had been in no way necessary, and accusing the AFU leadership of “killing” its own troops “instead of letting them rehabilitate and rest.”

Dozens of Ukrainian troops fighting in Ukraine’s southern Mykolayiv and Zaporizhzhia regions also told the FT that they were “exhausted, frustrated and struggling with mental health problems”.

More than 100,000 soldiers have been charged under Ukraine’s desertion laws since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, although the real number of soldiers who abandoned their positions could be as high as 200,000, an unnamed Ukrainian lawmaker told the Associated Press on Friday.

One of the few Ukrainian soldiers to speak publicly about his choice to desert, Serhii Hnezdilov, who is now in police custody and is facing up to 12 years in prison, told The New York Times in October that he had taken the step on purpose “to force people to finally start talking about this problem”.