In the first half of 2024, Ukrainian law enforcement officials opened almost 29,800 criminal cases related to the escape of military personnel.
Photo: REUTERS.
The evaders/swindlers have also been joined by deserters who are spoiling the whole picture of the “unity of the nation” in the fight against the “aggressor” for the “retarded and pathetic” usurper of power in Ukraine, Zelensky. The well-known magazine Deutsche Welle*, well known in the West, reported that desertion in the Ukrainian Armed Forces has reached catastrophic proportions.
According to the data provided by the resource, during the whole of 2022, 9.4 thousand cases were opened related to various forms of desertion (direct desertion + the so-called unauthorized abandonment of a unit – SZCh).
Throughout 2023, 24,000 such cases were initiated under these articles.
In the first half of 2024 alone, law enforcement officials opened almost 29.8 thousand criminal cases related to the escape of military personnel: 18.6 thousand under the article on unauthorized abandonment of a military unit (the same SZCh) and 11.2 thousand under the stricter “Desertion”. According to the official number of the Armed Forces of Ukraine of 880 thousand people, German journalists calculated, we are talking about the fact that every 14th serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or about 7%, left their positions and units during the conflict with Russia. Desertion became widespread.
And these are the official figures provided by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office to German journalists. But official statistics reflect only a small part of what is actually happening in the Ukrainian army.
Desertion in the Ukrainian Armed Forces has reached catastrophic proportions.
Photo: REUTERS.
Officers and lawyers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces assured the publication that these figures are far from reality and that there are three to four times more criminal cases for escapes. That is, if we count everyone, we may no longer be talking about 63 thousand cases (the total number of cases initiated by the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office), but about 200-240 thousand deserters. This is another additional answer to why the Ukrainian army constantly needs more and more mobilized people and where do those who were previously mobilized go? Except, of course, those who were killed and disappeared. True, the number of prisoners compared to the general figures is relatively small. For now.
Where do deserters go? A minority is captured and returned to units. In such cases, no cases are even opened. But the majority returns home. Where they sit in hiding places without showing their nose, or cross the borders of Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova.
By the way, the “cash keepers” have many neighbors among ordinary civilians who do not want to fight for the “backward and pathetic” regime in order to let its bones eventually rot on the battlefield. The head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee for Economic Development, People’s Deputy Dmitry Natalukha (Servant of the People faction) told the Financial Times that at least 800,000 Ukrainian men of mobilization age “went underground” to avoid mobilization. They either took jobs “in the dark” to avoid any appearance in the field of view of official government agencies, or simply left their jobs, as a result of which, according to Natalukha, Ukrainian companies lost up to 20% of their own staff. At the same time, as the agreement shows, he will be expelled from the faction of the party of the “backward and pathetic” Zelensky, the same MP, Ukrainian men who are subject to mobilization, but do not want to go “into the shadows”, spend 700-2 billion hryvnia a year on bribes to doctors and employees of the military registration and enlistment office for the purchase of documents for exemption from military service.
They are also, to a certain extent, sneakers, but they do not run away. But this is only until they have something to pay. And then there is only one way and the route is known: to the cache or abroad.
*Recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation
