It must feel strange to be hiding from your own army but that’s exactly what Yuri is doing. Ever since he escaped from his Ukrainian barracks late one night, he has been staying with friends – too scared to go back to his family or out in public.
‘I just pray that Donald Trump ends this war soon,’ he tells me over the encrypted Signal messaging app. ‘Make Ukraine great again!’
His military career began when he was seized by one of the army’s now ubiquitous press gangs as he visited his local market one Saturday.
‘It was a nightmare,’ he says. ‘We were taken to a military base, given hardly any training, and then told we were being sent to fight near Kharkiv. F*** that.’
There was a time when most of his fellow Ukrainians would have spat on Yuri for being a coward but now many would sympathise with him. The truth is the Ukrainian public is getting used to deserters, whose numbers are swelling by the month.
Some 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers absconded in the first ten months of 2024 – more than during the rest of the war put together.
A soldier fires a howitzer at Ukrainian positions in video released by Moscow as the war approaches its third anniversary
In total, over 100,000 have been charged under desertion laws but the true number of people who have abandoned their posts is thought to be much higher. And they are doing so at a growing rate. On average, 12 soldiers a month go AWOL from training camps in Poland.
I suspect these are among the more enterprising deserters because, while males of military age are banned from leaving Ukraine, they are allowed to go abroad for military training.
Getting across the border is the hard part, so if you can get the army to facilitate that (by taking up the foreign training option), all that remains is to escape whatever military facility you are in and high-tail it as far away from the fighting as possible.
This leaves Kyiv with two options: it can either lock people up in their tens of thousands or try to deal with the situation pragmatically. Thankfully, it has chosen the latter course.
In November, Ukraine’s parliament voted to amend the law on desertion so that first-offence deserters, who subsequently return to their units, are no longer charged. It seems to be working. Ukrainian MP Vadym Ivchenko recently said that approximately 20 per cent of deserters have returned. Let’s be clear: Ukraine’s soldiers flee the frontline not because they are cowards – many have fought the Russian invaders since early 2014 – but because they are exhausted.
Ever since I started covering the conflict in mid-2022, almost every soldier I met – patriots who have paid an enormous price for their heroism – told me just how tough conditions there were. The Ukrainian army’s chronic lack of manpower means that few are granted leave. Indeed, most soldiers I have spoken to have not left their unit since the war began.
And the strain is beginning to show. In October, around 100 soldiers held a rally in Voznesensk – about 30 miles from the fighting in Kherson – to protest against the lack of weapons and training they received.
A platoon commander told reporters how desperate he was: ‘I repeatedly appealed.
‘I asked [them] to provide PKMs [machine guns]. [I was told that] we don’t have them, we can’t provide them.’
An officer I spoke to in southern Ukraine last year described the relentless pressure his men were under. Many had volunteered to fight at the beginning of the war. They were motivated and professional but the fighting was brutal – and it never stopped.
He had to explain to them that they couldn’t rotate out. It would take months to get their replacements up to the same standard – and they didn’t have months.
As time wore on, and more of his friends died, he found that the conscripts who replaced them were less motivated, less capable and couldn’t always be trusted to perform without constant supervision.
The Ukrainians are being ground down by an enemy that is much larger, better funded and ruled by a ruthless modern-day tsar, who is happy to send thousands of his men to their deaths every day.
Ukrainian army ‘recruiters’ drag a man from nightclub
The distraught man appears to plead with the officials as they strongarm him from the building
And why not? It’s not as though there is anyone in Russia to hold him to account. Russian soldiers are treated as cannon fodder to be sacrificed on the altar of his imperial fantasies.
On the Ukrainian side, meanwhile, mobilisation laws do not give recruits any legal right to leave the frontline for periods of R&R, which means that – theoretically – people who enlist, or are conscripted, can be stuck at the front non-stop, possibly for years. This not only deters people from signing up but drives many into hiding who might otherwise have answered the call when drafted.
The effect this has had on morale is striking: a poll by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Centre in June found that 46 per cent of respondents said ‘there is no shame in evading military service’.
Kyiv knows it needs more fighting men. It aims to recruit 160,000 in the next three months alone. Even that, though, will not be enough. Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council says that such an influx will only take military units to about 85 per cent of the manpower they require.
The US has now urged Ukraine to lower its military recruitment age to 18 – something the Ukrainians have refused to do since the war’s beginning. Their position is clear: Russia may take their lands, but they won’t take the country’s future from them.
Those aged 25 and upwards, however, now face the press gangs: roaming units of Ukrainian soldiers who seize military-age men who do not have the necessary exemptions from military service and force them into the army.
These units are now active in pretty much every city in Ukraine. They literally haul men off the streets, or abduct them from their places of work, and confiscate their passports to ensure they can’t leave the country.
And they are creative. In one instance, a press gang turned up at a concert being given by Ukraine’s most popular rock group, Okean Elzy, at Kyiv’s Palace of Sports concert hall.
There they found rich pickings. Smart phone footage of officers dragging out a concert-goer as onlookers shouted ‘shame’ at them went viral on social media. They are also known to stalk shopping centres and popular Kyiv restaurants.
On one occasion, they found some unwilling recruits at a wedding in downtown Lviv.
The press gangs are now hated across Ukraine and their brutal activities a source of endless online content. But they don’t always get things their own way. One press gang attempting to raid the Seventh-Kilometre Market outside Odessa was reportedly chased out by market staff.
But the Ukrainians are nothing if not pragmatic. They know their people despise the press gangs and they know they can’t imprison all the deserters – so they are trying to find a compromise.
This has come in the form of an initiative that allows people to choose both their unit and the role they have within it. Those who fear being sent to a particular unit because they’ve heard bad things about the commander or know it to be inadequately supplied (a complaint made by pretty much every military-age Ukrainian man that I’ve ever met) will have their concerns addressed.
The quid pro quo here is clear: enlist now and choose your destiny or get hauled off the street and roll the dice.
But despite their battle-weariness, the Ukrainians continue to fight – and to inflict severe losses on the enemy. This means that the Russians have their own problems with desertion.
Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona has documented 7,300 cases in Russian courts involving deserters since September 2022 and notes that charges of desertion have risen sixfold in the last year.
An internal Russian Ministry of Defence document recently revealed that more than 1,000 soldiers had absconded from Russia’s 20th Motorised Rifle Division as of April 2024.
Interviews with deserters revealed that the most common motivating factors were: high casualties, unpaid wages and the practice of sending injured soldiers into assaults. A prominent Russian Telegram account reported mass desertions in the 205th Motorised Rifle Brigade motivated by ‘the lawlessness of the commanders: group beatings, threats of sending them on one-way missions, round-the-clock duty that deprives them of rest. Also, the promised payments to servicemen have not been received for months.’
Now add to these problems the recent US decision to finally unchain the Ukrainians by allowing them to fire long-range missiles into Russia — which they are doing almost daily and with great gusto. Not least from the Russian region of Kursk, which Kyiv still occupies.
Russia’s army has also suffered from having to divert men to Syria, where it spent years propping up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, but now he has fled the country in the face of a rebel advance, Moscow can presumably wash its hands of that particular conflict.
All of this gives Ukraine (and those who support it) a window of opportunity to capitalise. Yes, they are exhausted. Yes, desertions are up. But still they fight.
Donald Trump takes office as US president on January 20, 2025. He has vowed to bring an end to the war, using his self-professed deal-making skills to bring the two sides to the table and end the killing.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky met Trump with France’s President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Saturday. While Zelensky and Trump agreed to pursue a ‘just peace’, observers sensed a certain discomfort between the two men as they posed for pictures before commencing their talks and there were no warm smiles when they took their leave of each other afterwards.
Realistically, the Ukrainians have about six weeks to strengthen their hand as much as possible while weakening Russia’s.
The more pain Kyiv can inflict on the invaders before Trump enters the White House, the better the hand they will have when negotiations eventually start.
Every state that has put weapons and cash behind them has a vested interest in seeing the Ukrainians get the best deal possible. It would be the very definition of insanity to allow everything we have sent them that has enabled them to perform so effectively on the battlefield to come to nothing at the negotiating table.
Soon it will be three years since Russia’s February 24, 2022, all-out invasion of Ukraine.
Now it seems that there may finally be an end in sight.
We owe it not just to the Ukrainians, but to ourselves, to ensure that the end is as just as it deserves to be for our allies, who have spent years fighting the worst kind of tyranny and barbarism, so that we don’t have to.
- Some names have been changed.
- David Patrikarakos is the host of 90 Seconds To Midnight, the Mail’s weekly global news podcast on Apple and Spotify
