The following text is a translation of a report by the Assembly Group -
Kharkiv, assembly.org.ua ---- The rapid collapse of Bashar al-Assad'sarmy in Syria, which crumbled between November 27 and December 8, has
attracted a lot of attention in Ukraine. For many in the country, it has
become the main event of the end of 2024. A paradoxical situation has
arisen: official Ukrainian propaganda praises the successes of 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 at risk of following Assad's fate.
In late November, the world's English-language media confirmed what
Assembly had been reporting all fall. ABC News, citing "a lawmaker with
expertise in military affairs," wrote that there could be as many as
200,000 deserters in Ukraine and that " this is a staggering number by
any measure, given that there were an estimated 300,000 Ukrainian
soldiers engaged in combat before the mobilization began ." It also
acknowledged that desertion was a major reason for the fall of
Ugledar[Vuhledar]. The Financial Times added that some of those who
deserted the 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade because of their
unwillingness to defend Ugledar have already returned to the front,
while others are in hiding and still others have been arrested. The same
article also reported, citing a Polish security service official who
wished to remain anonymous, that an average of 12 Ukrainian soldiers
desert from training camps in Poland each month. Something we have been
reporting about for some time now.
According to the General Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine, in November
2024, 18,984 new criminal cases were registered under Articles 407 and
408 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (unauthorized abandonment of a unit
and desertion). This is almost double the number of cases registered
under these same articles in October 2024. In December 2024, 17,593
cases were registered. In January of the same year, there were only
3,448 cases. In total, from February 2022 to December 1 of this year,
114,280 criminal cases have already been registered in cases of
desertion and absence from duty. Pro-Trump journalist Volodymyr Boiko,
also a fighter in the 241st Territorial Defense Brigade, posted about
this on December 7:
The Ukrainian army can already be considered dead. Moreover, even if
19,000 reports[of desertions]were registered in November 2024, this does
not mean at all that this is the real number of servicemen who deserted.
19,000 is, in fact, the highest possible number that can be registered
in this category of crimes. Because in any case, the commander of the
military unit must first instruct an official investigation, review and
approve the results of the official investigation, send a report on the
crime committed to the State Investigation Bureau or a dedicated
prosecutor's office, and there the report must be reviewed and finally
registered. Military units do not have enough specialists to conduct
official investigations of this scale, nor do the prosecutor's office
and the State Investigation Bureau have enough employees to enter tens
of thousands of desertion reports into the register."
In this context, Law 4087-IX was passed on November 21 and came into
force on the 29th. According to this new law, those who are guilty of
unauthorized abandonment of their unit (SZCh in Ukrainian, SOCh in
Russian) or desertion can not only voluntarily return to service without
criminal punishment, but also continue their compulsory or contractual
military service. The only obligation was to return to the force by
January 1, 2025. Then the Parliament extended the deadline for return
without criminal liability until March 1, 2025 - apparently, not many
people want to do that.
Last month, a host of the Ukrainian Women Servicemen YouTube channel
reported that near Kupyansk in the Kharkov region, almost the entire
second company of the 152nd Battalion of the 117th Territorial Defense
Brigade deserted because of their "butcher commander." Ukrainian war
correspondent Yury Butusov reported on the scandal involving the 155th
"Anna of Kiev" mechanized brigade, which was trained in France and sent
to Pokrovsk. Several thousand people were recruited who had been forced
to ride buses for conscription, and more than a thousand of them
"returned home immediately upon arrival." In her December 31 post, she
explained that even before the brigade fired its first shot, 1,700
servicemen left without permission. The State Bureau of Investigation
later began investigating the incident. According to Butusov, the 155th
brigade trained in France in October. By then, 935 men had abandoned the
unit without permission. More than 50 soldiers had subsequently
disappeared. More than 900 million euros were spent on this scandalous
formation. Less known is that on January 8, the State Bureau of
Investigation arrested a senior lieutenant of this brigade for
abandoning the unit and urged his subordinates to do the same. He was
taken from the Rivne region to Kiev and taken into custody without bail.
"A colleague of his showed up, was forced to get on a bus.[He
was]mobilized in the spring, and he escaped from the Zaporozhye front.
He said that when they started being torn to pieces with everything they
had, they decided to go home. The whole company entered SZCh along with
their commander. What's the point if they get caught? It doesn't matter.
Now he's home. "I live," someone wrote on December 18 in the local
Saltovka chat[Saltivka is a large residential area located in the
north-eastern Kharkiv region].
On November 25, some of the mechanisms used to combat the escape of
recruits were described in the public UFM Telegram group, created for
mutual assistance in crossing the border avoiding checkpoints.
"The main problem with training camps is that everyone there controls
each other, because in the formations they immediately tell you that the
SZCh is reprehensible and that for an unsuccessful SZCh you will be
severely beaten. And they immediately talk about collective
responsibility: if someone leaves your tent, then they will brutally
resort to everyone who is in the tent.
The neighboring platoon was chased all night when one of them ran away.
They were chased in the trenches all night, like a cry of alarm, woken
up with training grenades, push-ups with the whole company in full gear,
in short, they will taunt everyone to the end, so that everyone knows
that, if your comrade in arms runs away, there will be hell for you.[...]."
However, a defector from the Kiev region, who wished to remain
anonymous, has a slightly different experience:
"Of course, there is a grain of truth in all this. But not everything is
so black. Now the training camps are almost 100% staffed by people who
were forcibly mobilized. The training companies are slightly diluted
with ideological and zealous idiots and even women. The remaining 99%
are potential SZCh. And everyone knows this very well. And this is
already a basis for solidarity. In my company at the Yavoriv training
camp, when another soldier disappeared, many wished him good luck out
loud. And this happened almost every day. Of course, we were tormented
when we had to run to the trenches, when they took away our rations and
everything else. But since every day someone ran away, I really don't
know what would have happened if no one had run away.
I was captured on June 17. I escaped on June 30. I left for Romania on
September 25.[...]".
Those arrested in Kharkov are usually sent for training not in the
western part of the country, but in the Dnepropetrovsk region in the
east. This testimony from November 29 tells what awaits them:
"The day before yesterday a comrade was bundled[from the road],
yesterday he was already in training, in Dnipro, 120 km from the front.
The convoy has been significantly reinforced, it is impossible to
escape, like in a concentration camp. The young shepherd was beaten,
because he refused to enlist... The mobilization of the priests, as we
see, is more important than the mobilization of the police.
That's what's happening now... And those who refuse to act are sent to
zero[to the vanguard on the front lines]. A company of avatars[drinking
soldiers]. They disappeared without a trace... Without documents,
without registration cards. They were simply kidnapped and torn to
pieces. Brutally. They take away your phones, your documents, they don't
care where you want to go. If you're not a deputy, they don't care.
There was a guy, a shepherd, they threw him to the ground, beat him...
They took him to zero somewhere... There's a lot of surveillance, and
checkpoints in the city, and scattered everywhere.[You could only go to
the bathroom with an elder. You can go to the store - with a receipt and
only with an elder, maximum 5 people at a time...".
If all this is true, it means that the method of "bringing to zero
distance" is used in Ukrainian troops to get rid of undesirables, as is
done in Russian units on the Eastern Front.[...]
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 Kharkiv alone. In particular, a
39-year-old man, having fled the army a year and a half ago, confronted
the police officers who came to his apartment with weapons in response
to his threat to kill a patrol officer. He had an automatic rifle, a
pistol and grenades. However, he was taken into custody without firing a
shot. On November 27, in the village of Trostyanets, Vinnytsia region, a
57-year-old man showed up at 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 wounds. "Because
he wanted to send me to war," the man explained. On the night of
December 28, three border guard vehicles were set on fire in the town of
Chop on the Transcarpathian border: Mazda, Peugeot and KIA. A
22-year-old local resident, after being stopped by the police, explained
his actions during questioning by pointing to his "hostile relations"
with the owners of the vehicles.
At about 8 p.m. on January 13, people blocked the road to a "bus of
invincibility" from the district recruitment center on one of Kharkiv's
main streets. Two men and a woman got out of civilian cars, one of them
with a starter pistol (the kind used in competitions). After breaking
the van's window with the pistol, they engaged in a fight with
pixels[Ukrainian soldiers, loaded with cutting-edge equipment, are
nicknamed "cyborgs," their uniforms "pixels" because of the texture].
The police arrested the owner of the pistol and seized his car. He is
believed to be a 49-year-old businessman who came to save his nephew.[...].
On November 25, a border guard from the Khmelnytsky region was sentenced
to 12 years in prison for the premeditated murder of his immediate
superior (the head of the communications group). The 36-year-old junior
sergeant, who served as a driver-technician and was mobilized to the
State Border Service in August 2023, went on duty with a weapon on
February 6 last year and during the service met with the commander, with
whom he had an unfriendly relationship. After that, he went with him to
the canteen and shot him in the stomach with an AK-74. The colonel died
on the spot[...].
Of course, there are several similar reports from the other side of the
front. Indeed, on October 29, criminals recruited to the front from a
pre-trial detention center and who escaped from their units almost
killed a representative of the Leningrad region authorities. As the
local website 47news wrote, the next day, these were 30-year-old
Alexander Igumenov, 30-year-old Mark Frolov and 37-year-old Vladimir
Nikin. "The commander of the investigation group of the Ministry of
Defense has already outlined the circumstances in a report: they moved
towards the house in the village of Yanino, 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
people with him. Igumenov took a gun, practically pointed the barrel at
the officer's forehead and specifically outlined the possible prospects:
either they leave and let them go, or the Ministry of Defense will lose
several comrades and an officer. As the documents say, "in order to
avoid civilian casualties," the group agreed to the request and
retreated. Or rather, they pretended to retreat, calling for
reinforcements. The Defense Ministry employees themselves were stationed
around the house in case the trio jumped out, for example, from the
windows. The raid by the special forces was routine. They broke down the
door, beating them severely. All three were under the influence of
drugs. Today, interrogations began in the Military Investigative
Committee exclusively under Article 338 of the Criminal Code -
"Desertion." "Each of them has several convictions, mostly 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 naval brigade (military unit 13140 from Sevastopol), was
reportedly killed by one of his own soldiers. During a service meeting
at an observation post, the captain got into a verbal altercation with
private Alexander Ryabov. The latter shot the officer three times in the
head with an AK-74. The news was published by Ukrainian sources, without
any confirmation from the Russian side.
On the evening of November 12, ten contractors fled without weapons from
military unit 57849 stationed in the Kochenyovo labor settlement near
Novosibirsk. According to the local NGS website, "about 30 people from
all over the Central Military District were assigned to it, who had
previously left their military units arbitrarily and without
permission." Most of them were from the Krasnodar Territory. The
soldiers destroyed the unit's headquarters with the inscription "Look,
there is a riot here" and filmed it, left the village in a taxi and were
then all arrested. Before that, some of the fugitives allegedly asked
for medical assistance, 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 SOCh status
holders from this unit were nevertheless transported to Rostov-on-Don.
On the night of December 20, five servicemen died and seven were
hospitalized for smoke inhalation in a fire at the Vilyuisk Lane
detention center in Yakutsk. In this facility, soldiers detained for
being absent without leave (AWOL) were imprisoned and tortured.
According to emergency services and Russian authorities, prisoners set
fire to the building while trying to escape. In total, there were
several dozen detainees. In the spring of 2024, there were complaints
about the conditions of detention. During the inspection of the Yakutsk
Garrison Military Prosecutor's Office, numerous violations of federal
legislation were detected and service orders were issued to eliminate
these violations[...].
One way or another, 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 have already captured eight villages south of Pokrovsk, and
there are only a few kilometers to go to the border with the
Dnepropetrovsk region, where there have been no hostilities yet and
fortifications are minimal. Despite the critical situation, the
Ukrainian population has not shown any patriotic outburst. Too many
workers no longer see any particular difference who will rob them.
January 17, 2025
From libcom:
https://libcom.org/article/turn-2024-and-2025-ukraine-desertion-has-become-nationwide-mainstream
Trans. on behalf of CRINT-FAI
https://umanitanova.org/la-svolta-del-2024-e-2025-per-lucraina-la-diserzione-e-diventata-la-tendenza-dominante-a-livello-nazionale/
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