The turn of 2024 and 2025 for Ukraine: desertion has become nationwide mainstream

Special thanks to our French comrades from the Solidarity Initiative Olga Taratuta in preparing this material

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The rapid collapse of the army of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which fell apart between November 27 and December 8, has attracted a lot of attention in Ukraine. For many in the country, it became the main event of the end of 2024. A paradoxical situation has arisen: Ukrainian official propaganda is praising the successes of the pro-NATO and pro-Turkish forces against Assad as a brilliant victory over Russia, while at the same time the NATO-backed Ukrainian dictator himself is increasingly risking a repetition of Assad’s fate.

In the last days of November, the worldwide English-language media confirmed what the Assembly had been reporting throughout the fall. ABC News, citing “one lawmaker with knowledge of military affairs,” wrote that there could actually be as many as 200,000 deserters in Ukraine and that “it’s a staggeringly high number by any measure, as there were an estimated 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers engaged in combat before the mobilization drive began.” They also acknowledged that desertion was one of the main reasons for the fall of Ugledar. The Financial Times added that some of those who abandoned the 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade due to their unwillingness to defend Ugledar have already returned to the front, while others are in hiding and some are arrested. The same article also reports, citing an anonymous representative of the Polish security service, that an average of 12 Ukrainian soldiers desert from training grounds in Poland every month. This too was revealed by us earlier.

18,984 new criminal proceedings were registered under Articles 407 and 408 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (unauthorized leaving of a unit and desertion) in November 2024, according to the Ukraine’s Office of Prosecutor General. This is almost twice as much as in October 2024, when 9,487 criminal cases were registered under these articles. December 2024 added 17 593 new criminal proceedings under these articles.

In January 2024, there were only 3,448 criminal proceedings. And in total, from February 2022 to December 1 of this year, 114,280 criminal proceedings for cases of desertion and AWOL have already been registered. Kiev-based pro-Trump journalist Volodymyr Boiko, also fighting in the 241st Territorial Defense Brigade, posted about this on December 7:

“The Ukrainian army can already be spoken of as deceased. Moreover, if 19,000 reports [of escapes] were entered into the register in November 2024, this does not mean at all that this is how many servicemen deserted. 19,000 is, in fact, the highest possible number that can be registered under this category of crime. Because in each case, the commander of the military unit must first appoint an official investigation, consider and approve the results of the official investigation, send a report on the committed criminal offense to the State Bureau of Investigation or to a specialized defense prosecutor’s office, and there they must consider the report and type the text into the register. Neither do military units have such a number of specialists who could conduct official investigations in such amounts, nor do the prosecutor’s office and the State Bureau of Investigation have sufficient employees to enter tens of thousands of reports on desertion into the register.”

Against this backdrop, Law 4087-IX was adopted on November 21 and came into force on November 29. According to this new law, those who are guilty of unauthorized leave of their unit (SZCh in Ukrainian, SOCh in Russian) or desertion are not only allowed to voluntarily return and serve without criminal punishment, but their military service and contract are also continued. For this, they must have returned by January 1, 2025. Then the parliament extended the deadline for the return without criminal liability until March 1, 2025 – apparently, there are not many who want to do so.
"Freedom for political prisoners. Deserters of the world, unite!" Paris, December 21

"Every deserter brings peace closer." Paris, December 21. Text report and some more photos

Last month, a host of the Ukrainian female military YouTube channel said that in the Kupyansk direction of the Kharkov region, almost the entire second company in the 152nd Battalion of the 117th Territorial Defense Brigade committed SZCh because of their “butcher commander.” Ukrainian war correspondent Yury Butusov reported on the scandal with the 155th Mechanized Brigade “Anna of Kyiv,” which was trained in France and sent to Pokrovsk. Several thousand people who had been forced into busses for the draft were recruited there, and more than a thousand of them “went home immediately upon arrival.” In the post from December 31, he explained that even before the brigade had fired its first shot, 1,700 servicemen left without permission. After that, the State Bureau of Investigation started to work on this. From the words of Butusov, the 155th Brigade went for training in France in October. At that time the unit already had 935 people in SZCh. Then, more than 50 servicemen fled in France. More than 900 million euros were spent on this scandalous formation. Less well known is that on January 8, the State Bureau of Investigation detained a senior lieutenant from this brigade, who himself went to SZCh and incited his subordinates to do so. He was taken from the Rivne region to Kiev and sent to custody without bail. “A colleague from work showed up, he had been forced into a bus. [He had been] mobilized in the spring, got out of the Zaporozhye front. He says that when they started to be chopped up with everything they had, they decided to go home. The whole company went into SZCh together with their commander. What’s the point if they are being caught? Doesn’t matter. Now he is at home. Alive,” messaged someone on December 18 in the Kharkov local chat of Northern Saltovka.

On November 25, some of the mechanisms used to combat the escape of recruits were described in the public Telegram group UFM for mutual aid to cross the border outside checkpoints:

“The main problem with training camps is that everyone is watching each other there, because at the formations they immediately tell you that SZCh is bad and for an unsuccessful SZCh you will be beaten up really hard. And they immediately talk about collective responsibility – if someone leaves your tent, then they will cruelly chase around everyone in the tent.
The neighboring platoon was chased around all night when one of them left. There they were chased to the shelter all night, like an alarm, woken up with training grenades, push-ups with the whole company in full gear, in short, they will mock everyone to the fullest, so that everyone knows that if your comrade-in-arms gets out, you will be given hell. Lie on your belly for an hour in the mud and so on.
This is done so that if you suddenly see that your companion has decided to leave, you will immediately run to inform on him, turn him in, and so on, so that your life does not turn into hell. Therefore, everyone is happy to turn each other in. Therefore, any patrol, even if it is comprised of kidnapped people, and especially [if it is comprised] of them, because the patrol must march in circles for 24 hours with full gear, and if they let someone go, then after a 24-hour visit, they will not have slept, will not have eaten normally, and will run and jump with 20+ kilograms on their bodies.
So if you go into SZCh, no one must know about it, no one must see you. Even those who are there in the forest for some reason on some stupid duty. And all these stories about how there are no fences there, that someone just went and left – that is bullshit. If you have decided to leave, your main enemy is your neighbor in the tent. ”

However, a deserter from the Kiev region, who wished to remain anonymous, has a slightly different experience with this matter:

“Of course, there is a fair amount of truth to this. But not everything is so gloomy. Now training camps are staffed almost 100 percent with those who have been forcibly mobilized. Training companies are slightly diluted with ideological, zealous idiots and even women. The remaining 99 percent are potential SZCh. And everyone knows this very well. And this is already a basis for basic solidarity. In my company at the Yavoriv training ground, when another soldiers disappeared, many wished him good luck aloud. And this happened almost every day. Naturally, we were pestered when we had to run to dugouts, when our rations were taken away and all that stuff. But since someone fled every single day, I simply don’t know what would have happened if no one had fled.
I was taken in on June 17. I fled on June 30. And I left for Romania on September 25. They started looking for me somewhere in November. I wasn’t at the front. Thank god, I managed to escape before I took the oath. If you’re an SZCh and you’re caught a second time, you’ll most likely be released with a written commitment to return to your unit. That’s what the guys who were caught a second time told me. I didn’t leave [the country] right away. I went back home to Brovary. I prepared for three months and then went to Romania. Who knows if I was wanted or not? I didn’t live at my address. Now I’m definitely wanted. The cops are calling my relatives.”
Someone in SZCh caught in Chernivtsi. Autumn 2024

Those who are busified in Kharkov are usually sent for training not to the west of the country, but to the Dnepropetrovsk region in the east. This evidence from November 29 tells about what is waiting for them there:

“The day before yesterday, a comrade was packed [from the street], yesterday he was already in training, in Dnipro, 120 km from the front. The convoy was greatly reinforced, it’s impossible to escape, like in a concentration camp. The young pastor was beaten, because he had refused to sign up… The mobilization of priests, as we see, is more important than the mobilization of the police.
That’s what’s happening now… And those who refuse doing anything at all are being sent to zero [to the cutting edge at the front line]. A company of avatars [drinking soldiers]. They disappeared without a trace… Without docs, without registration. They were simply kidnapped and for meat. Brutally. They take away phones, docs, they don’t give a shit where you want to go. If you’re not a deputy – they don’t give a shit. There was a guy, a pastor, they broke him, beat him up… They took him to zero somewhere… Full of securities, and checkpoints in the town, several on all sides. [He could] Go to the toilet only with a senior. To the store – with a receipt and only with a senior, only 5 people can go...”

If this is accurate, it means that the same method of “zeroing out” is used in the Ukrainian troops to get rid of undesirables, as is the case in Russian units on the eastern front. At the same time, another source told us in the last days of autumn that two to three weeks ago, 50 people were brought to Dnieper and 37 of them fled.

The lucky ones manage to escape before they end up in these facilities. “This week my workers were going to work, they took away all five of them. When they were bringing them to training, a van broke down near Kharkov. There were 11 men, and the other two with automatic rifles. The men said, either you let us go to the field, or we’ll kill you, there are more of us. They let us go. Now everyone is in Kharkov, barely got there,” a Kharkov owner of a residential housing business wrote us on December 22. On January 4, in the central united enlistment center of Zaporozhye, 7-8 kidnapped men barricaded the entrance with beds and other objects in the room, and began calling for help from the only remaining phone, demanding respect for human rights and a "legal solution" to this issue. Tear gas was used in response. One of the prisoners, who suffered from epilepsy, began to have an attack. According to other besieged ones, he was taken away somewhere by the employees in a dying state, and nothing is known about his fate. The footage shows how other people also began to choke and ask for help. The riot was suppressed and the barricades were dismantled the same day. No violations of the mobilization process were noted by the authorities. As the head of state said a year ago, in Ukraine you can't just breathe air because we are at war!

On the morning of January 13, the disappearance of the first company commander with the rank of captain was discovered in the 3rd Mechanized Battalion of the 143rd Mechanized Brigade near Kupyansk. The mobilized officer left his weapon, took his personal belongings and personal car

On December 14, the above quoted blogger Volodymyr Boiko posted:

“Kilometers of trenches were dug near Kurakhove [a town in the eastern Donetsk region]. I recently spoke with the deputy commander of one of the battalions in that direction – he says that a Russian tank mistakenly drove into our positions, drove for 10 minutes until it realized that it had lost its way, and then turned back. Not a single shot was fired at the tank, because there was no one in the positions.
An infantry company from near Kherson was transferred to this battalion as reinforcement – so out of 90 people, three reached Kurakhove, the rest ran away on the way. And this is the situation everywhere. And what is happening in the training centers? Take, for example, military unit A1363 – a training center located in the Samarivsky (formerly Novomoskovsky) district of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Recently, 70 recruits “got on skis” there in one day. Before that, on November 10, 2024, four people escaped, one of whom is a relative of my acquaintance. The escapee says that there is no military training, during the three weeks of stay in the training unit, the recruits were only engaged in digging toilets and doing some household chores, and the main reason for the escape was “hazing” and bullying of the newcomers.
Therefore, on November 3, four people also escaped, and in just one month, 30 servicemen deserted…Analyzing the statistics of war crimes, back in February-April 2024, I predicted that at the end of the summer the front would begin to collapse, and by the spring of 2025 the army would simply disperse.”

Individual rebellions against the state and the war have also become more frequent after the initial decline in autumn. In November, we recorded at least four cases in Kharkov alone. In particular, a 39-year-old man, after fleeing from the army a year and a half ago, met with weapons the cops that came to his apartment in response to his threat to kill a patrol policeman. He had an automatic rifle, a pistol and grenades. Still, he was detained without shooting. On November 27, in the village of Trostyanets in Vinnytsia region, a 57-year-old man came to the enlistment center in response to a summons and stabbed a 53-year-old sergeant of the facility in the right collarbone, sending him to intensive care with arterial damage. "Because he wanted to send me to war," the visitor explained his act. On the night of December 28, three border guard vehicles were burned down in the Transcarpathian border town of Chop: Mazda, Peugeot and KIA. A 22-year-old local resident, after being detained by the police, explained his act during the interrogation by pointing to his “hostile relations” with the transport owners.

At about 8 pm on January 13, on one of the main streets of Kharkov, people blocked the road to a "bus of invincibility" of the district enlistment center. Two men and a woman got out of civilian cars, one of them had a starter pistol. Having smashed the van's window with the pistol, they got into a fight with the pixels. The cops detained the owner of the pistol and seized his car. It is alleged that he is a 49-year-old entrepreneur who came to save his nephew. He was notified of suspicion under Part 1 of Art. 114-1 of the Criminal Code (obstruction of the lawful activities of the Armed Forces) and Part 4 of Art. 296 of the Criminal Code (hooliganism with especially aggravating circumstances). Another defendant is being sought. The kidnapped nephew worked as a driver and is already mobilized. He is a witness in the case.
Traces of the night attack on Poltava Way in Kharkov

On November 25, a border guard in the Khmelnytsky region was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the premeditated murder of his immediate superior (the chief of the communications group). The 36-year-old junior sergeant, who served as a technician-driver and was mobilized to the State Border Service in August 2023, went on duty with a weapon on February 6 last year and during his duty met the commander, with whom he had an unfriendly relationship. After that, he went with him towards the canteen and shot him in the stomach with an AK-74. The colonel died on the spot. At the trial, the accused claimed that he murdered had previously beaten him and another colleague, that he had obsessive thoughts due to the conflict, and that he fired the shot in a state of passion. A forensic psychiatric examination refuted this claim, revealing no signs of any severe mental disorders. Witnesses also confirmed that the accused was calm and balanced that day.

Of course, there is a number of similar news from the other side of the front line. Thus, on October 29, criminals recruited to the front from a pretrial detention center and who escaped from their units almost killed a representative of the authorities in the Leningrad region. As the local website 47news wrote the following day, they turned out to be 30-year-old Aleksandr Igumenov, 30-year-old Mark Frolov, and 37-year-old Vladimir Nikin. “The commander of the search and investigation group of the Ministry of Defense has already outlined the circumstances in a report: they moved to the house in the village of Yanino in the Vsevolozhsk district. The officers carefully checked the landing and began to wait for him near the house. When he appeared, the officer and his subordinates jumped up, but it turned out that Igumenov was not alone. There were two more with him. Igumenov grabbed a pistol, practically put the barrel to the officer's forehead and specifically outlined the prospects for his service – either they leave and let them go, or the Ministry of Defense will lose several warrant officers and an officer. As stated in the documents, "in order to avoid casualties among civilians" the search party agreed to the demand and retreated. Or rather, pretended to retreat, calling for police reinforcements. The Ministry of Defense employees themselves stood around the house in case the trio began to jump out, say, through the windows. The storming of the special forces was usual. They broke down the door, slammed everyone. All three were on drugs. Today, dialogues began with everyone in the Military Investigative Committee exclusively within the framework of Article 338 of the Criminal Code – “Desertion.” Each of them has several convictions, mainly for theft.”

On October 25, near the village of Kremyanoye in the Kursk region, Dmitry Slepnyov, deputy commander of the 2nd Motorized Rifle Battalion of the 810th Marine Brigade (military unit 13140 from Sevastopol), was reportedly killed by his soldier. During a service meeting at an observation post, the captain got into a verbal conflict with private Alexander Ryabov. He shot the officer three times in the head with an AK-74. This was published by Ukrainian sources; there was no confirmation from the Russian side.

On the evening of November 12, ten contract servicemen escaped from military unit 57849 in the working settlement of Kochenyovo near Novosibirsk without weapons. According to the local website NGS, “about 30 people from all over the Central Military District, who had previously arbitrarily left military units for various reasons unrelated to service, were assigned to it.” Most were from the Krasnodar Territory. The soldiers smashed the unit’s premises with the words “Look, there’s a riot going on here” and filmed it on camera, left the village in a taxi, and were later all detained. Before the conflict, some of the escapees reportedly demanded medical aid, and the reason for the riot was that they did not want to be sent back to the front. According to information from Telegram channels, as of November 15, more than a hundred holders of SOCh status from this unit were nevertheless flown to Rostov-on-Don.
Burnt-out detention center in Yakutsk

On the night of December 20, five military servicemen died and seven were hospitalized with smoke inhalation due to a fire at the detention center on Vilyuisk Lane in Yakutsk. In this facility, soldiers who went AWOL were kept in torture conditions. According to emergency services and Russian authorities, the prisoners set the building on fire themselves while trying to escape. In total, there were several dozen detainees there. In the spring of 2024, there were complaints about the conditions of detention. During the inspection by the Military Prosecutor's Office of the Yakutsk Garrison, numerous violations of federal legislation were revealed, and orders were issued to the management to eliminate these violations.

As it became known on January 15, the previous night 31-year-old Andrey B. from the Republic of Kalmykia stole a parked car on Rokossovsky Street in Volgograd. The owner of the car left the keys in the ignition. Social media say that before the driving away, he was at a collection point for soldiers who left their units without permission, and was probably trying to escape from there. 500 meters from the scene, there is the military commandant's office of the Volgograd Garrison. Then, the serviceman was detained and handed over to the military police. The car was handed over to the owners in good condition, nothing was stolen from it.

One way or other, in November 2024, Russian troops captured 4.7 times more territory than in the whole of 2023. In the first four days of 2025, they already took eight villages south of Pokrovsk, and only several kilometres left to the border of the Dnepropetrovsk region, where there had been no hostilities yet and fortifications are minimal. Despite such a critical situation, there is no visible patriotic upsurge among the population of Ukraine. Too many working people no longer see any fundamental difference in who will rob them.

For those fluent in Ukrainian, we also recommend our recent publication of beautiful revolutionary poetry about the history of Kharkov.

Those who read Russian may also be interested in the Assembly's analysis about the involvement of special services in many of the arson attacks on military vehicles and administrative buildings in our city and generally in Ukraine.