In the long hot summer, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers broke records for the growth of desertions

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Since the morning of August 6, when Ukrainian troops broke through the border and occupied some border settlements in the Kursk region of Russia, debates have not subsided about the meaning and consequences of this sortie from a military-political point of view. The end of the battles for this territory is still far away. At the moment, it is only clear that such an attack against the backdrop of the collapsing Ukrainian defense in the Donetsk region came as a complete surprise to many.

In particular, the focus of attention during the battles for the Kursk region was on the border gas metering station in Sudzha (Suja), through which Russian gas is supplied to Europe. Its continued work despite hostilities around it became another symbol of the fact that war is war but international business goes as usual. From the posts of Netherlands-based Donetsk emigrant Andrey Shokotko:

“Dutch families will be warm this winter. With full gas reserves, the chances of an extreme increase in energy bills are limited.” Thanks to Zelensky and Putin, whose reliable partnership (so brilliantly confirmed in Sudzha) does not allow us in Europe to freeze. But it is not entirely clear – why do they send their serfs to kill each other? And why do slaves, knowing about the Russian-Ukrainian business partnership, go to kill each other?

Ukraine and the RF flatly refuse to formalize the war as a war. They are sophisticated in inventing terms. All for the sake of continuing cooperation with each other, maintaining trade relations, earning money together for the “elite”. The slaughter of slaves only helps business – in this case, by raising gas prices. In general, it is even fair that the slaughter of serfs is not registered as a war. After all, there is no war between the “elites”, and the states of the Russian Federation and Ukraine do not belong to serfs. In these territories, serfs are a resource. Expendable material.

After Sudzha, only the mentally retarded will want to voluntarily go to this war. Or those suffering from severe forms of patriotism, which is the same thing. The fraternal partner regimes of the RF and Ukraine dispose of their slaves, earn money together, are close friends with their organisms and easily agree on everything that brings in income. At the same time, they set patriotic hamsters against each other in order to maintain power and earnings.”

Secondly, the Kursk events once again showed that the gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, which copes well with plundering the budget or persecuting dissenters, is completely powerless in the face of a real threat.
“In the border areas of the Kursk region, where fighting has been going on all week, there are no police, no firefighters, no doctors, no representatives of the administration. According to official information, more than 76 thousand people left the settlements (most of them left on their own, since there was no organized evacuation, contrary to the statements of the authorities), but there are still people there, mostly elderly. The devastation of villages and towns has become a catalyst for rampant looting. Shops are being robbed, there is a collapse in Korenevo, supermarket Magnet was simply destroyed. No water, no gas, no electricity. “There was no organized evacuation, and if there was, then why didn’t we hear anything about it?” a local resident writes. A similar situation is in other border municipalities. Kursk residents are sure that the administration representatives, having abandoned people to their fate, themselves provoked the collapse in the border areas. At present, it is impossible to reach the administration of Korenevsky district of Kursk region by phone. People are forced to self-organize in order to protect themselves and their property and essentially perform the functions of state and law enforcement agencies,” told one of Russia’s largest political Telegram channels on August 11. The same scenes took place at the beginning of Russian invasion in the south of Ukraine, when the Ukrainian authorities had already disappeared and the Russian ones had not yet been established.

Thirdly, the invasion of the Kursk region has caused an enthusiasm in the ranks of Ukrainian patriots that has not been observed since last year’s “coffee in Crimea until the end of spring.” We have dedicated a separate material “The volcano of patriotism“ to this issue, someone from the Ukrainian project on monitoring street kidnapping for military service replied to it: “There is an opinion that the Kursk offensive is diverting people’s discontent and distracting from the topic of TCRs [territorial centers for recruitment]. And I tell you that it is very noticeable. The videos about the TCR scum have decreased about five times. People got distracted by looking at maps of the offensive. But the TCR occupiers did not disappear anywhere. And they catch people on the streets at the same pace.”

However, the absence of queues of people wishing to join the army suggests that the patriotic upsurge occurred not among conscious objectors (like from the Evader’s Manifesto sent us by anonymous anarchist reader this summer), but among those who supported Ukraine from the couch long before this, and just were demoralized by its constant fails.

Finally, the rapid August advance of Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region and the rapid advance of Russian troops in the region of Donetsk clearly demonstrated how both states lack soldiers sufficiently seasoned in battle and motivated to die for one Vladimir or another. What, other than the military themselves, can stop the carnage when the peace talks of politicians are once again indefinitely disrupted?

Due to the reluctance of Russia to transfer large forces from Donbass to the defense near Kursk, conscripts began to be recruited en masse. The Kremlin’s promises not to use guys aged 18-20, who are often without any military skills and were not going to fight, do not apply to this territory. Those who survived the border breakthrough are being forced to sign contracts in order to be sent back to the front lines.

The mother of a conscript named Yulia told the Russian pacifist Telegram channel ASTRA in mid-August, “my son and his comrades were miraculously taken out of the front line by their commanders, where they had been standing before the invasion. The military prosecutor’s office forced them to return to their positions, but the boys flatly refused. Now they are in Kursk, in a military unit. They want to send them to the 3rd echelon of defense behind the assault groups in the Kursk region.”

Simple disobedience is not enough. To not be turned into mincemeat, you need to leave this conveyor belt of death altogether. We wrote about the escape of nine convicts from the Belgorod military training ground at the end of July. Their fate is still unknown. On August 12, at least 500 people who refused to fight were taken from the location of the 138th motorized rifle brigade in the military settlement of Kamenka near St. Petersburg, where the detention center for wanted servicemen is located, ASTRA reported. Among the refusers were those with serious health problems, as well as those who were ready to go to prison, just to avoid going to the front: some were under investigation for a criminal case of leaving their unit, some were awaiting a military commission. This video shows the dispatch of a group of 150 who refused to participate in hostilities.

“From the words of people close to them, yesterday at about 6 pm they received a message from the men who were there that they had suddenly been called to line up, and then, without any explanation, they were put in KamAZ trucks and taken to a military airfield under guard. The first “batch” – about 300 people – were sent in an unknown direction. The second part – about 150 people – ended up by morning 7 km from Kursk at a military training ground. “They took us, grabbed us like a parcel, put us in and took us away,” their wives and mothers say. The military was not given any explanation or told where they were being sent. “As Comrade Colonel said, they are disbanding the center [in Kamenka], but he doesn’t know where they are being taken,” an ASTRA source said.

According to the source, about 10 people flatly refused to board the buses. They are currently being held in a separate room and are being threatened with being sent to a pretrial detention center. The part that was taken to the military training ground near Kursk has already been sent with machine guns in an unknown direction. At the same time, about 20 people managed to escape.”

On August 19, the same channel reported on one of those sent by plane to the training ground near Kursk, who did not want to return to the war because of his injury: “According to his wife, at the training ground in the Kursk region, the commanders told them: “Run, if you can.” As a result, as she claims, 37 soldiers managed to escape – with automatic rifles and bulletproof vests. Later, they were found and detained by military police. During a second attempt to escape, the interlocutor’s husband was hit with a stun gun, and another soldier was chained to a pole. As a result, all of those who escaped were put in military Urals and taken away in an unknown direction. Later, he alone was dropped off and sent to headquarters near Belgorod, where the others were taken – to where he does not know. The mobilized man himself was in Kamenka under the article on unauthorized leaving of the unit; his trial was scheduled for September. “We decided that prison was better than all this. He is wounded, covered in fragments. He can barely walk. He passed the military medical commission in Kamenka, they told him: you are category B, but we will write A. You have arms and legs, go fight,” his wife told ASTRA.

Before that, a scandal arose in the same 138th brigade with the stormtroopers’ commander, Yevgeny Zarubin from Kursk, who spoke about the heavy losses in Volchansk. In July, he and a subordinate named Sergey were discharged from hospitals. Both believed that they had not fully recovered. The soldiers were promised to be sent for further hospitalization, instead they were accused of unauthorized leaving, after which they were beaten and put in a pit. Then both were taken away somewhere with bags over their heads. On August 27, Zarubin was found in the Kamenka detention center, where he is being held under guard in solitary confinement, beaten at night, and threatened with being “taken to the front and set to zero.“
On July 11, in the border village of Kozinka of the Belgorod region, contract soldier Alexey Zhuravlev from the Republic of Chuvashia killed two colleagues with a machine gun and wounded another. After that, he fled with the weapon and was caught a few days later. There is a version that he responded to bullying and humiliation, according to another version, he simply did not want to fight and did not see another option to escape.

Another Russian collective, “Go by the Forest,” helps Russian civilians and soldiers avoid participating in the war. The spokesman of this organization Ivan Chuviliaev reported for the Assembly’s article “Long hot summer” that during the 4 months of the warm season from May to August they provided assistance to 120 deserters, and that the majority of deserters do not contact the activists: “120 requests is normal in the absence of force majeure. In winter and spring there were many prisoners and wounded. In the summer there were none. There was one such request from the Kursk region, and only because the person escaped on the way. This is explained by the fact that they do not need us to desert. They can leave themselves, run away. This is not the occupied territory of Ukraine, where there is military police, the FSB [Federal Security Service] and others. This is Russian territory, there are no checkpoints there that were set up 10 years ago, like in Lugansk or Donetsk, and I think there is simply no military police. They will contact us when they understand that they cannot live illegally and have to leave. Those who serve in the military are sent to the Kursk region, no one pays them anything, no one holds on to anything. It’s a GULAG [Stalin’s concentration camp], they are sent there, they don’t run away of their own free will. Are there any contract soldiers among those who participate in the battles near Kursk? Yes, there are. Those who were forced to sign a contract or had a cross put in their contract without their knowledge.”

On August 24, they posted a letter from some woman: “My son was detained for helping deserters and has been held for three weeks in an unknown location. He is not a serviceman. They organized a raid and detained him. They took him along with his car and are holding him in an unknown location. We have not been able to find him for three weeks. According to rumors, the military commandant’s office detained him, although he is not a serviceman. We called the commandant’s office – they said they do not have him. Kidnapped in a bandit-like manner by the FSB [Federal Security Service]. We’re knocking on everyone’s door. Yes, you’re right, it’s a complete organized crime group.” Also in August, “Go by the Forest” received more than a hundred requests on various issues regarding the reluctance to fight in the Kursk region.

The most fertile ground for desertion, of course, is the forced mobilization of “the free people of a free country.” The Associated Press describes these preconditions in an article from August 22: “While Ukraine presses on with its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, its troops are still losing precious ground along the country’s eastern front – a grim erosion that military commanders blame in part on poorly trained recruits drawn from a recent mobilization drive, as well as Russia’s clear superiority in ammunition and air power. “Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying,”said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade.”
Ukraine is fighting the heroes of anarchism even a century after their death: a year ago, on July 26, 2023, in Verkhovtsevo of the Dnipropetrovsk region, a monument to the legendary sailor Anatoly Zhelezniakov, who died there, was dismantled. A deserter from the tsarist navy, he returned to service under an amnesty in 1917. He became an iconic figure in the overthrow of Ukrainian nationalists in Kharkov, then – in the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in Petersburg with the sacramental phrase “The guard is tired”. He died in a battle with white guards in 1919 (there is a version that he was eliminated by the Bolsheviks)

Will the understanding that both sides are enslaved people lead to fraternization among soldiers? For now they prefer to save themselves separately, although one of the exceptions may be the following story. A Ukrainian army instructor told one of the main political Telegram channels of Ukraine about mass desertion from the training unit. In a post from July 17, he said: “A couple of months ago, reinforcements arrived – seafarers were taken off the ships and sent to serve in the marines. These are contractors, whom at the beginning of the war, when signing a contract, the Ukrainian Navy command promised that they would serve only on ships. But recently, the command removed personnel from several ships at once. They were transferred to marine brigades. On the way from the ships to training, some of these guys escaped. Almost none of the escapees were found. I think that many have already fled from Ukraine.” The location of the events is not specified. However, since we are talking about mid-May, it is likely that the events took place as Ukrainian troops were hastily pulling together reserves to stop the Russian offensive north of Kharkov. Marines of the 36th brigade are now fighting there. And the Telegram channel of the Atesh movement, which works for Ukrainian military intelligence in Crimea, wrote on July 15 about the 810th marine brigade from Sevastopol: “After numerous failures in Krynki, part of the brigade has already advanced to the Kharkov section of the front. Due to heavy losses in the Kherson direction, more than 100 people refused to take part in further combat operations. The wounded are left in hospitals in Henichesk and Skadovsk. They do not have time to fill the staff with new people, and the command reports 75% of the brigade’s combat readiness.” If seafarers from both sides refused to shoot at each other, can this be considered a kind of remote fraternization?

On August 6, the following question was raised in the largest Telegram chat that provides aid for those seeking to escape the country: “They are going to take a friend of mine abroad for training at the end of the month. After he was thrown there by force, of course, he did not become a patriot and wants to get out. They are bringing him to Britain, they are going to put him on an aircraft. They will transport him through Poland, any ideas on how he can get out? Need to have someone else’s experience, or your own, if you have it.” One of the moderators answered the following: “There were cases when people left right on the road in Poland. It is possible to leave in any country… Only in the last half year, I have communicated with people who left while in Slovakia, Germany, Poland and Britain (but their further fate is unknown there). Let him try to leave on the road in Poland, by all means. There are a couple of training camps in Britain – on the mainland and on some separate island. Accordingly, it is impossible to leave the island at all, and if from the central part, then the question of legalization and further existence is unclear. Even if they take away the documents, he calmly leaves the Poles for Slovakia and legalizes himself with a photo.”

And an article from August 2 on the Deutsche Welle website became especially loud last month, noting that during the full-scale war, almost every 14th Ukrainian serviceman had fled:

“The problem of military personnel fleeing the Ukrainian army has reached alarming proportions. Unable to punish deserters, the government is ready to forgive them, if only they would return to duty (…) The policy of strict discipline, which the Ukrainian Armed Forces command insisted on so much during the first year of the full-scale war, has obviously failed, and desertion from the army has become widespread and unpunished – almost all of DW’s interlocutors interviewed for this article agree on this. The shortage of personnel is prompting the new leadership of the General Staff to use not only the stick, but also the carrot (…) Now unit commanders, who previously sought to quickly dismiss deserters from their positions, are calling everyone, asking about the problems and reasons preventing them from returning to service. Personnel officer Victor Lyakh traveled around five regions in May – he found several dozen fighters from his 28th separate mechanized brigade at their home addresses. “The order was: convince everyone to return. But how can I, an old man, persuade that young guy when his wife is standing behind him, and with a child in her arms? I promise that they will return the vacations, that the criminal case will be closed. Well, he says, when they close it, then maybe I will come back,” he says. The harsh sanctions that did not stop the military from fleeing are now scaring them away from returning, DW’s interlocutors from different units confirm.”
As stated on August 15 by the Kharkov spokesman of the Security Service of Ukraine Vladislav Abdula, the deserted contract soldier is suspected of setting fire to 6 vehicles of the Armed Forces during one night. The 22-year-old guy from the Volchansk community was allegedly actively looking for job on Telegram, a representative of Russian intelligence offered him money. He was taken into custody and faces up to 10 years in prison (intentional destruction or damage to property). He filmed his actions in preparing and carrying out the task on his phone, for each arson he was supposed to receive 40 thousand hryvnya. On August 19, security forces also reported the arrest in Cherkassy region of a 21-year-old deserter, a contract soldier from one of the region’s military units. He, according to investigators, was also looking for easy money and recruited a 23-year-old unemployed acquaintance to do so. They allegedly tried to burn down 8 relay cabinets, and were caught red-handed during another attempt. They face life imprisonment under the article on sabotage.

What was discussed in the revelations of Kharkov people from our publications “The time for fragging?“ and “SZCh as a new trend“ has been confirmed: no matter what kind of totalitarianism the state builds, it is not able to cope even with such a protest, if it is widespread. Therefore, on August 21, the parliament adopted bill No. 11322, according to which a person who has left his unit without permission or deserted for the first time can return to the same unit with the consent of the commander without any punishment. The severity of the current situation in the troops can be judged by the haste of the vote – it was supported in the first reading just a month earlier, on July 16.

Kiev journalist and military serviceman Volodymyr Boiko writes on August 20 in his blog: “The author predicts that in the summer there will simply be no one to defend the Ukrainian positions. Since the beginning of a full-scale war, at least 150,000 military servicemen deserted from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, mainly – in the last half a year. And every day the rate of desertion increases. On the Toretsk and Pokrovsk directions [in the Donetsk region], the defense of 1 km of the front is often held by only 3-4 soldiers. Well, how held – they sit in a pit covered with planks (called a “blindage”), hiding under non-stop mortar fire. After the blindage is destroyed by a mortar shell, 5-8 Russian infantrymen enter the position – and so the enemy gets through. It is impossible to organize a normal defense – not for one that does not have armor, but for one that does not have enough people: riflemen, machine gunners, grenade launchers.”
Weapon of the alleged Lutsk shooter turned out to be non-military

Finally, on the night of August 27, an unknown person opened fire on the security post of the Lutsk city TCR in West Ukraine. Senior soldier M. was wounded and hospitalized for treatment. Despite the return fire, the attacker managed to escape. People in local chats suggested that it could have been a busified one who escaped with a weapon. Not long before, our magazine published video from a Kharkov resident about how in the same Lutsk two kidnapped ones unsuccessfully tried to incite others to revolt against the mobilizers. On September 4, news broke of the arrest of a 40-year-old suspect. He did not explain the motives for the act; he faces life imprisonment.

If you are facing a prison term for desertion or SZCh (unauthorized leaving of a military unit), you can wait for the trial at home. With competent lawyers, the process can last a year or more. But if you take the bait and come back, they can immediately send you to the very hell where the chances of survival are slim. So think about whether to use the new law or not.

Partial abolition of criminal punishment can also increase the flight of the military. For example, the Provisional Government in Petrograd declared democratization of the army and amnesty for deserters. As a result, the collapse of the army accelerated so much that it effectively demobilized itself and ceased to exist by the beginning of 1918.

Unite! Demobilize! Don’t utilize!