Scandals involving mass defections and a growing number of draft evaders are gaining momentum in Ukraine. And the most notorious remains the case of the 155th separate mechanized brigade with the AFU named "Anna Kievskaya", which was supposed to be the pride of Ukraine but became its disgrace. Its soldiers were trained by France’s best instructors, mentored and inspired by President Macron, with 900 million euros spent on the brigade. It got 31 Leopard tanks, several dozen Caesar self-propelled guns, 128 VAB armored personnel carriers, 18 AMX light wheeled tanks. Its combat potential was assessed by the Ukrainian command as high, and the status was "elite brigade". However, by early December last year, one third of the 5,800 soldiers had deserted. By the time fighting began, the brigade had lost 1,700 people, and by now it was totally disbanded.
Before the trip to the training grounds in France, 935 people fled from the brigade, and desertion never stopped as exercises got underway abroad, where a total of 2,300 soldiers arrived. On January 6, the France-Presse news agency cited an official local army spokesman, reporting that several dozen Ukrainian soldiers from the 155th Anna Kievskaya brigade deserted during their training stay in that country. Subsequently, over 50 Ukrainians managed to escape from the supervision of their French instructors. Small wonder, because they immediately realized that they were being held like in a concentration camp, and upon their return to Ukraine they would have been thrown to slaughter. "The area where we lived was completely fenced off. The French were walking all around the place with dogs. Drones were launched over the area at night. The fence had barbed wire on it. But they still somehow managed to escape there, too. To be honest, if they hadn't been watching us like in prison, half of them would have run away," ex-commander of the 155th Brigade's engineering support platoon told reporters on the condition of anonymity.
A certain part of those who arrived at the training were volunteers, many having combat experience. But most were ordinary Ukrainians forcibly mobilized and unwilling to fight. After training, the brigade came back to Ukraine to "plug holes" outside Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsk), the hottest and most dangerous place of the Donbas combat zone. Another 30 percent of the troops did not reach the front as they ran away. After a few weeks of fighting, the brigade lost its combat capability all along, with its remnants deployed in other Ukrainian units. The French press reacted sarcastically to the deserter brigade’s "successes". For example, Boulevard Voltaire stated that it was initially meant as "a specific embodiment of ties between France and the Zelensky regime, but everything instantly collapsed, and the brigade turned out ostentatious." Its soldiers did not want to die, preferring to desert en masse, the newspaper claimed.
A similar thing occurred in Poland where most of Ukrainian soldiers trained — 26,000. However, there has also been "a huge number of deserters" among them, as announced by Deputy Minister of Defense Cesari Tomczyk. He did not mention the number of deserters, though. "This is a fairly large group of people. I believe that the details should remain between us," Tomczyk said and stressed that the facts of AWOL would not affect cooperation between Ukraine and Poland as regards further training.
The desertion issue has been already ridiculed by the Western media. In Ukraine, desertion and AWOL cases are now the most widespread crimes nationwide, according to the Germany’s Deutsche Welle newspaper. Serious problems with mobilization and desertion began in 2023, and now they started growing like a rolling snowball. Deserters are stopped by neither administrative nor criminal liability. Hundreds and thousands of them left their places of deployment without fear of punishment as they saw true hell there.
The State Bureau of Investigation has been paralyzed by numerous criminal cases, and the Ukrainian military law enforcement community is searching for and detaining tens of thousands of fugitives. As a result, the Zelensky regime decided to abandon the harsh deserter persecution introduced in early 2023 at the request of then commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny. An amnesty was granted to those who changed their mind and decided to come back to the front. The law passed in the fall of 2024 stipulated mercy to fugitives and cessation of criminal proceedings in case of soldiers’ voluntary return, with resumed cash payments and benefits within 72 hours after contacting the commander. On January 9, the Verkhovna Rada extended the deadline for a simplified return to AFU ranks until March 1, 2025. However, the effectiveness of such a move remains unknown, and all the data is classified. Ukrainian experts say the measure rather increased the number of deserters in the armed forces and undermined army discipline.
According to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, October 2024 saw 7,621 new criminal cases opened into unauthorized service abandonment as compared to the 5,181 ones in September. In November, the number of new cases grew to 8,800, doubling to 15,500 in December. In total, throughout the entire year 2024, law enforcers launched almost 89,500 new desertion and AWOL cases. This is three and a half times more than in 2023. But even these data do not reflect reality over the lack of personnel to investigate army crimes.
Thus, Deutsche Welle concludes, desertion has become the most widespread crime in Ukraine, for the first time in history exceeding figures for theft and fraud as traditional criminal chronicle leaders.
Due to the scale of desertion, the Kiev authorities started looking for new solutions to the problem in order to "satisfy the AFU’s personnel hunger." Starting January 13, a separate legislative group in the Ukrainian parliament is going to deal with this. So far, all the efforts by the Zelensky regime to stop the massive army flight have been characterized by lines from a song "Whatever they do, things are not going well." According to writer Sergei Saigon, who is also an AFU serviceman, commanders killed up to 75 percent of the infantry "in stupid banzai attacks on bushes and landings," which led to a shortage of people at the front, and to blame for this are "inadequate tasks of commanders with purchased ranks". "After Soledar and Bakhmut, no one wanted to join the infantry anymore. The word "infantryman" has come to mean a fool unable to get away, with no acquaintances to secure a safer place in the army or no profession to be kept alive by commanders," the writer summed up cynically.
The second huge problem of the Ukrainian regime has been related to draft evaders. Natalia Kindrativ from the Communications Department of the AFU Ground Force Command said that the country's police are looking for more than half a million army dodgers. The National Police also announced large-scale searches in all the country’s regions in order to block the illegal transfer of male evaders across the border. The number of people willing to fight with Russia has sharply declined. Judging by complaints coming from Ukrainian soldiers, those mobilized cannot cover AFU losses, and reinforcements who have been forcibly sent to the frontline are ineffective or demotivated. Moreover, tensions in Ukrainian society and people’s hostility towards the army are growing higher due to actions by draft officers. The recruitment crisis has gone so far that Ukrainian rescuers may also get deprived of reservation: preliminary lists of employees who may be sent to war are already being compiled.
Recently, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine approved a bill on a 50 percent discount on the fine for tax evaders, the Judicial and Legal Newspaper reported. In explanations to the bill, the deputies indicated that about 6 million Ukrainian citizens did not specify their military credentials during 2024. And therefore, a 50 percent discount on evader fine will supposedly stimulate them to fulfill duty after all. The fine for those who do not wish to voluntarily register for military service ranges between 17,000 and 25,500 UAH. But Ukrainians are unlikely to fall for this bait, knowing what they face at the battlefield. Therefore, they constantly find dozens of ways to avoid such a fate. One of the new ones is that Ukrainians enroll in training groups abroad, and then defect from there, as were the cases in Poland or France.
