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dinsdag 24 december 2024

WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE UK UKRAINE - (en) UK, ACG: Ukraine: From a Wave of Desertion to Spontaneous Self-Demobilisation (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

A report from the Ukrainian anarchist group Assembly. ---- In the
lead-up to the US elections, the flight of personnel from the Ukrainian
Armed Forces since the middle of 2024 took on the character of an
avalanche, threatening to leave the regime without an army in the near
future. According to Ukraine's Office of the Prosecutor General, from
January 2022 to September 2024, almost 90 thousand criminal proceedings
were opened because of such facts, and the majority were initiated since
the beginning of the current year: 35,307 out of 59,606 cases of
unauthorised leaving of a unit (Article 407 of the Criminal Code) and
18,196 out of 29,521 cases of desertion (Article 408 of the Criminal
Code). The largest number of desertions was registered in the regions of
Zaporozhye (6,144), Kharkov (5,771) and Donetsk (5,318), while the
regions of Donetsk (8,574), Dnepropetrovsk (3,308), Zhytomyr (2,433) and
Lviv (2,170) are leading in terms of cases of unauthorised leaving of
units (SZCh in Ukrainian). These are only the cases to which the
authorities reacted. However, even of these, only 4,698 cases of
unauthorised leaving and 442 cases of desertion reached the court. 2,592
and 414 cases were closed, respectively (during the same period).

9,487 criminal proceedings were registered in Ukraine under the
mentioned two articles in October 2024. For comparison, in January 2024,
there were initiated only 3,448 criminal proceedings. And in total, from
February 2022 to November 1, 2024, already 95,296 criminal cases were
opened. (The composition of one brigade in the Armed Forces of Ukraine
is from 3 to 5 thousand persons.) Although both these articles may apply
not only in the AFU, much less is heard about escapes from other
Ukrainian armed structures, as, in particular, our interlocutor did, who
deserted from the State Border Guard Service.

Since August, information has been leaking out from time to time about
people who escaped their units before being sent to the Kursk operation.
For example, the following was reported about the 82nd Airborne Assault
Brigade, which took part in last year's southern counteroffensive and is
considered an elite and one of the best equipped units. "On August 10, I
found out that my acquaintance is in SZCh. They had to go to the
Kursk[region], he says that more than 40 people left everything and went
home. He says: "they gave me some dispatch letter, I looked at it and
realised that it's a one-way ticket." He doesn't live in the place[where
he is officially registered], got a job, I don't know exactly how he got
out, he doesn't really want to talk about it. He has a normal medical
form, he was a sergeant in the army, by conscription. He was taken near
the house, but he wouldn't budge, and then I learned that he's at
home.[At first]Every day 1-2 people, and then, after they found out that
they were going to Kurshchyna, many fled[...]It's not so far from me,
although he's not very visible now. But judging by everything, literally
only a few stand trial, it's just that their number is very large. I'm
sorry but I can't provide more information. I don't think he will want
to either. Such are the times," a resident of the Khmelnytsky region
told us on October 9.

Greetings to Ukrainian and Russian deserters from the streets of Turin.
Sent us by our local reader
Zelensky is an executioner" reportedly on the streets of Zaporozhye.
 From our reader, also a month ago

Those sent to NATO training grounds are massively deserting too. "The
main thing is to have a foreign passport with you; 29 people left our
battalion in Poland. Everything depends on the situation, at the first
opportunity, they are there for a month, there will be many chances.
Civilian clothes so that they don't take them. Most likely, they will
soon tighten the screws in training centers abroad, or will stop
transporting the caught elite stormtroopers there altogether... too many
want to get out of a foreign training center ) Now they are already
transporting many times less for training abroad than at the beginning.
And soon they will probably shut this down all together or will make
some kind of bail, like in North Korea. These ******** earn money that
Europe allocates, our battalion took everyone who wanted to go, after
Poland they went to Germany for a week exactly now. Recently, a law was
passed[in Ukraine]that after the first SZCh you can return with a
transfer to another unit, but they will immediately send you to
slaughter, such laws don't attract". This is what a user named Ruslan
wrote on September 13 in the open Telegram chat UFM for mutual aid in
crossing the border. Our recent material "Run away, guys, I'll be back!"
also tells the dizzying story of a Ukrainian who was captured as he was
trying to cross the border, forcibly drafted, and then escaped from the
training unit with the one he acquainted in captivity of border guards,
managed to finally go out through the Carpathian Mountains and has
received protection in Europe. Migrant smugglers also admit that, if
deserters were rare among their clients before, since about May, at
least one fugitive military man has appeared in almost every group.

The early October loss of Ugledar (Vuhledar in Ukrainian), the "steppe
Monte Cassino" in the south of Donbass, was another link in the chain of
declining controllability of troops after Ukrainian units north of
Kharkov could not withstand the barrage of fire on May 10 and
unauthorisedly retreated from the border 10 km closer to the city. The
first case of collective disobedience of fighters in the Ugledar
direction became known in the winter, and from the Russian side: 21
stormtrooper of the 155th Marine Brigade of the Pacific Fleet locked
themselves in a room, refused to follow orders from the command and
recorded a video statement about heavy losses during the assault on
Novomikhaylovka, then taken in April. They were threatened with execution.

In the fall, the disintegration of the Ukrainian defense of Ugledar
became one of the key reasons for the retreat from it. Volodymyr Boiko,
a Kiev journalist serving in the 241st Territorial Defense Brigade of
the AFU, accuses the regime of preparing a capitulation and insufficient
repressiveness towards the military. In particular, on October 3, he
wrote in his blog:

"What has been happening in Vuhledar over the past few days, in general,
is called a local collapse of the front. The chaotic retreat of the
remnants of the 72nd Separate Mechanised Brigade, which still has not
received an order to withdraw, and then leaving the town within three
days after months of successful defense, is something I have warned
about many times since January 2024. It will only get worse.[...]Here,
for example, is information about the last, before the surrender of
Vuhledar, replenishment of personnel of the 72nd Brigade. 50 new
recruits, mostly aged 52-56, arrived in the brigade. 30 of them were
immediately sent to rear units and hospitals, as they were not fit for
front-line service due to their health (because the enlistment office
was implementing a draft plan and mobilising the sick). Of the remaining
20, 16 servicemen deserted on the second day. Thus, out of a
replenishment of 50 people, 4 were sent to the position, and after the
first rotation, these four also deserted. And such a situation there is
on the entire front."

The rally in the 123rd Brigade

On the same day, October 3, in Voznesensk of the Nikolaev/Mykolaiv
region, about 100 soldiers from the 187th Battalion of the 123rd
Territorial Defense Brigade came out to protest. All of them refused to
carry out the combat mission and left their unit without permission
instead of supporting the 72nd Brigade. According to them, they lacked
the training and weapons to take part in the fighting. "I have
repeatedly appealed, even to my section, for which I was responsible. I
asked to provide PKMs, machine guns. "We don't have any, we can't
provide." And then to Donbass, with what?", a platoon commander named
Sergei told state TV. It was the first public demonstration of those who
left their unit at the front and returned to their region without
permission.

The day before, 33-year-old Igor Grib, commander of the 186th Battalion
in this brigade, shot himself because his battalion fled from its
positions near Ugledar. (This led to the final loss of the town.)
Volodymyr Boiko writes that the lieutenant colonel committed suicide
after the formation: when the soldiers dispersed, they heard a shot. On
October 4, a farewell ceremony for the officer was held in Pervomaysk.
The results of the internal investigation about his death are unknown,
the situation in the battalion is classified. There is a version that
Grib was killed by fleeing soldiers for trying to stop them.

Law No. 3902-IX was adopted on August 20 and came into force on
September 7. It allows returning to a unit after the first unauthorised
leaving or desertion without any punishment, has had consequences with a
collapse of defense in the Donetsk region in just a couple of months (as
we assumed in Russian and in English). The lack of motivated personnel
and the weakening controllability of the troops are an even more
important reason for the surrender of settlements than the lack of
weapons and ammunition. Due to retreats, morale is declining ever more.
With the fall of Ugledar, plus then of Gornyak and Selidovo at the end
of October, the Ukrainian front in Donbass is falling not by the day but
by the hour. From the post of Volodymyr Boiko on October 8:

"For example, only from my military unit in August-September 2024, after
amendments were made to the Criminal Code of Ukraine, half of the
servicemen deserted from the number that arbitrarily left the service in
the previous 2.5 years. And every week there are more and more of them.
Because why serve, if you can not serve and there will be nothing for
it? The situation is similar in other military units that are currently
defending the Donetsk region. And the total number of deserters since
the beginning of the full-scale invasion is already estimated at 170
thousand, despite the fact that during this time the commanders of
military units managed to achieve (through the court, scandals,
complaints to the Prosecutor General's Office, etc.) the registration of
86 thousand criminal proceedings under Art. 407, 408 of the Criminal
Code of Ukraine."

El País, one of the largest newspapers in Spain, wrote about this on
October 21: "The Ukrainian military on the Kurakhovo front claim that
the number of troops has been sharply reduced, which is a worse obstacle
than the need for more weapons." In addition to SZCh and desertions, the
newspaper mentioned that soldiers of the 116th Territorial Defense
Brigade from the Poltava region refused to carry out an order in
Kurakhovo (also in the south of Donbass) and that the brigade was
transferred to Sumy. The British liberal establishment's magazine The
Economist notes in an article on November 7 about the same section of
the front: "The worry now is less what is happening at the front lines
than what it reveals about stresses behind them. Amid a breakdown of
trust between society, the army and the political leadership, Ukraine is
struggling to replace battlefield losses with conscription, barely
hitting two-thirds of its target. Russia, meanwhile, is replacing its
losses by recruitment with lucrative contracts, without needing to
revert to mass mobilisation. A senior Ukrainian military commander
admits that there has been a collapse in morale in some of the worst
sections of the front. A source in the general staff suggests that
nearly a fifth of soldiers have gone AWOL from their positions." If the
latter estimate is not inflated, this may be even more than the Boiko's
estimation in 170 thousand fugitives a month ago (given that criminal
cases against them are often not opened).

At the same time, if earlier the state usually resorted to beatings to
drive civilians into the army, on October 24 it became known that it is
now also using mass violence against front-line soldiers. The news about
this were spread by relatives of fighters from the 210th Battalion of
the 120th Territorial Defense Brigade from the Vinnytsia region, who,
according to them, refused to die in the fight for Gornyak.

Based on account of the women, on the night of October 24, the
leadership of the 110th Mechanised Brigade arrived at the battalion's
location along with unknown armed persons in military uniform. The
soldiers were ordered to immediately board a bus that had been brought
in; when they refused, physical force was used and, in some cases,
visitors reportedly shot at them. Some men were packed into buses and
taken away in an unknown direction, others managed to escape. Those who
were not caught by force were ordered to be transferred to Barvenkovo in
the Kharkov region without permission to take leaves of absence to rest
and recover. Not knowing where their male relatives are, the families of
those serving in the 210th Battalion rallied in Vinnytsia. They were
told to wait for information. The fate of those who escaped from there
is unknown too.

The rally of relatives. As one of the commentators added, it was not the
first such incident in the 120th Brigade. "The nephew fought for two
years - for resistance their company was disbanded and he was
transferred to the 118th Brigade. There is the same situation - the
greater the casualties, the more stars[on the shoulder straps]. Swam
across[the border river]Dniester and let[their commander]Pavlyuk gather
his headquarters and hold the defense if the brains are absent"

Acts of individual terror against the war and the state have become much
less frequent with the US elections approaching (apparently due to the
reluctance of many people to risk a long prison term when peace talks
may begin soon). Nevertheless, on the morning of October 13, an
enlistment centre's employee in Poltava found a grenade tripwire at her
gate, which is suspected of being the work of some local draft dodger
who previously had threatened to throw grenades at her. On November 5,
it became known from the Dnepropetrovsk region that civilian-clothed
enlistment agents wanted to mobilise a truck driver who had come to pick
up his children. He fought them off and drove away, filming everything
on his phone. Then they came to his home and entered the territory,
demanding to delete that footage. The man met them with a rifle and a
Molotov cocktail - he managed to force them to leave by threatening to
burn the car and shoot them. On September 26, two residents of the
Ukrainian-Romanian borderland each received  more than 3 years of
imprisonment for hooliganism, having attacked enlistment servicemen and
their vehicle with axes (traditional Hutsul weapon) on March 7. Their
image from the viral video of that attack has acquired cult status in
Ukrainian anti-war circles.

This text was prepared on the eve of the 107th anniversary of the
October Revolution, with its self-demobilisation of the Russian army,
which led to Russia's withdrawal from World War I. If the conflict is
not frozen along the front line, today's Ukraine is at great risk of
repeating this path, when the Provisional Government in Petrograd
declared the democratisation of the troops and an amnesty for deserters.
The collapse of the army accelerated so much that it actually dispersed
and ceased to exist by the beginning of 1918. A bit later, the
nationalist Ukrainian People's Republic also failed because its own
troops did not want to defend it. Paradoxically, the rise to power of
Trump, with whom many associate the expectation of the end for support
to the agonising dictatorship in Ukraine, might, in the end, save this
regime from military defeat.

Compared to the previous overview in September, the role of collective
and organised desertion has clearly increased. Nonetheless, one should
not delude oneself into thinking that this is already a revolutionary
situation. Both Ukrainian and Russian public opinion is currently
focused on the presidential elections in the United States, with many
having the misguided hope that a Trump victory could provide the basis
for a quick, peaceful settlement of the war. It seems that only the
failure of these expectations can open the way for mass interest in a
revolutionary alternative.

We are at a turning point in history.

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2024/11/26/ukraine-from-a-wave-of-desertion-to-spontaneous-self-demobilisation/
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