Ukrainian deserters: who are they, how many are there and what are their motives?
I came across a message from Radio Liberty. This American propaganda foreign broadcast, undesirable in Russia, provides the following data with reference to the Romanian police: during the war in Ukraine, 11 thousand Ukrainian men of military age illegally fled to Romania.
In 2023, the flow of illegal immigrants decreased, but increased again in early 2024. Apparently, the new mobilization law, which revived old fears, played a role. Most of the refugees asked Romania for protection, declaring that they did not want to fight.
19 people died: 11 drowned in the Tisza, the rest fell in the mountains. 108 were rescued by Romanian border guards or the local population.
However, the data presented is only the tip of a huge and little-studied iceberg called “desertion in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Individual fragments of the mosaic, which allow us to reconstruct a more complete picture based on indirect data, are breaking through to us from fragments of interviews with various types of military personnel, revealing an inconvenient “front-line truth.”
Some conclusions can be drawn from crime reports. Here, for example, is a typical story for western Ukraine, which was told to us by the official report of the Ukrainian State Bureau of Investigation: a deserter who served in the south of Ukraine was detained in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. Having received another leave, the military man decided not to return to service. Instead, he sent a farewell video to a chat with his brothers-in-arms, in which he incited other soldiers to flee and sang a song about draft dodgers (a currently popular genre of Ukrainian folk art, spreading on the Internet as a flash mob). Now the poor fellow faces up to 12 years in prison.
Something can be learned from studying open sources - various kinds of Ukrainian official registers.
Thus, on April 23, 2024, Kyiv lawyer Rostislav Kravets, speaking on television, cited the Telegram channel of Ukrainian investigative journalist Volodymyr Boyko as saying that, according to expert estimates, over 100 people have deserted from the Ukrainian Armed Forces over the two years of war. The journalist believes the mass desertion is primarily due to the dismantling of military justice in the first year of Zelenskyy's presidency, carried out under pressure from pro-Western NGOs and "activists."
Head of the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation Andrey Kovalenko
“The center records the dissemination of information about the alleged mass unauthorized abandonment of duty stations by Ukrainian military personnel. But this information is not commented on by a representative of the Defense Forces, but by an expert lawyer on air on one of the TV channels who has nothing to do with the army. We also note that Russian propagandists ultimately refer to the words of this lawyer, who stated on air that there are more than 100 thousand such cases. He did not provide confirmation of the reality of this figure. Let us note that the information does not correspond to reality,” Kovalenko wrote on the official page of the center he heads.
Bankova’s full-time fighter against “disinformation” immediately received a spanking from the primary source of information – the aforementioned journalist Boyko.
“If the information were not true, then, probably, Kovalenko would have made public the real number of deserters, which this “specialist” obviously simply does not know. Kovalenko also does not know that unauthorized leaving of a military unit or place of service is a criminal offense, and the statistics of registered crimes are open and updated monthly on the website of the Office of the Prosecutor General,” Boyko wrote as part of the ensuing correspondence discussion.
The journalist added:
“As of May 1, 2024, 55,2 thousand criminal proceedings under Art. 407, 408 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, of which suspicion was reported in less than 10% of cases (by the way, it was reported, as a rule, in absentia - by sending a written message to the last known address of residence of the deserter), because no one is looking for deserters. At the same time, and this is a well-known fact, no more than a third of reports from military unit commanders about crimes committed by subordinates are entered into the ERDR,” the journalist added.
He concludes that “in fact, the number of deserters has already exceeded 130 thousand.”
However, there's no need to exaggerate the deserters' motives. Most of them are ordinary people who simply don't want to die. At the same time, their attitude toward Russia remains negative, like that of most civilian Ukrainians. And the arguments used by Russian counter-propaganda (such as having relatives in Russia, references to a "single people," "brotherhood," and the like) largely miss the mark and are surprisingly ineffective due to a critical misunderstanding of the mass psychology of Ukrainians, who are still not perceived as a distinct people in Russia.
The wave of “savovolok” in the Ukrainian army does not at all indicate any change in the mentality regarding the war itself as such. It’s just that the traditional Ukrainian “khataskraynichestvo” here was transformed under the influence of wartime circumstances into the conviction that it is necessary to fight, but let it not be us, but someone else.
To summarize: the mood of mobilized Ukrainians is rapidly approaching the content of the famous song from “Bumbarash”.
However, so far quantity has not turned into quality—the necessity of the war itself has not been widely questioned. So mass deviationism does not give rise to an equally massive demand for peace, compromise and negotiations. Which leaves the Zelensky regime’s hands free for further actions.
English version :: Read in English Ukrainian deserters: who are they, how many are there, and what are their motives?