The following is from the Ukrainian anarchist group Assembly, several of
whose articles have already appeared on this website. ---- The rapidcollapse of the army of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which fell apart
between November 27 and December 8, has attracted a lot of attention in
Ukraine. For many in the country, it became the main event of the end of
2024. A paradoxical situation has arisen: Ukrainian official propaganda
is praising the successes of the 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 risking a
repetition of Assad's fate.
In the last days of November, the worldwide English-language media
confirmed what the Assembly had been reporting throughout the fall. ABC
News, citing "one lawmaker with knowledge of military affairs," wrote
that there could actually be as many as 200,000 deserters in Ukraine and
that "it's a staggeringly high number by any measure, as there were an
estimated 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers engaged in combat before the
mobilisation drive began." They also acknowledged that desertion was one
of the main reasons for the fall of Ugledar. The Financial Times added
that some of those who abandoned the 123rd Territorial Defence Brigade
due to their unwillingness to defend Ugledar have already returned to
the front, while others are in hiding and some are arrested. The same
article also reports, citing an anonymous representative of the Polish
security service, that an average of 12 Ukrainian soldiers desert from
training grounds in Poland every month. This too was revealed by us earlier.
18,984 new criminal proceedings were registered under Articles 407 and
408 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (unauthorised leaving of a unit and
desertion) in November 2024, according to the Ukraine's Office of
Prosecutor General. This is almost twice as much as in October 2024,
when 9,487 criminal cases were registered under these articles. December
2024 added 17 593 new criminal proceedings under these articles.
In January 2024, there were only 3,448 criminal proceedings. And in
total, from February 2022 to December 1 of this year, 114,280 criminal
proceedings for cases of desertion and AWOL have already been
registered. Kiev-based pro-Trump journalist Volodymyr Boiko, also
fighting in the 241st Territorial Defence Brigade, posted about this on
December 7:
"The Ukrainian army can already be spoken of as deceased. Moreover, if
19,000 reports[of escapes]were entered into the register in November
2024, this does not mean at all that this is how many servicemen
deserted. 19,000 is, in fact, the highest possible number that can be
registered under this category of crime. Because in each case, the
commander of the military unit must first appoint an official
investigation, consider and approve the results of the official
investigation, send a report on the committed criminal offense to the
State Bureau of Investigation or to a specialised defence prosecutor's
office, and there they must consider the report and type the text into
the register. Neither do military units have such a number of
specialists who could conduct official investigations in such amounts,
nor do the prosecutor's office and the State Bureau of Investigation
have sufficient employees to enter tens of thousands of reports on
desertion into the register."
Against this backdrop, Law 4087-IX was adopted on November 21 and came
into force on November 29. According to this new law, those who
committed unauthorised leaving of their unit (SZCh in Ukrainian, SOCh in
Russian) or desertion are not only allowed to voluntarily return and
serve without criminal punishment, but their military service and
contract are also continued. For this, they must have returned by
January 1, 2025. Then the parliament extended the deadline for the
return without criminal liability until March 1, 2025 - apparently,
there are not many who want to do so.
Last month, a host of the Ukrainian female military YouTube channel said
that in the Kupyansk direction of the Kharkov region, almost the entire
second company in the 152nd Battalion of the 117th Territorial Defence
Brigade went into SZCh because of their "butcher commander." Ukrainian
war correspondent Yury Butusov reported on the scandal with the 155th
Mechanised Brigade "Anna of Kyiv," which was trained in France and sent
to Pokrovsk. Several thousand people who had been forced into buses for
the draft were recruited there, and more than a thousand of them "went
home immediately upon arrival." In the post from December 31, he
explained that even before the brigade had fired its first shot, 1,700
servicemen left without permission. After that, the State Bureau of
Investigation started to work on this. From the words of Butusov, the
155th Brigade went for training in France in October. At that time the
unit already had 935 people in SZCh. Then, more than 50 servicemen fled
in France. More than 900 million euros were spent on this scandalous
formation. Less well known is that on January 8, the State Bureau of
Investigation detained a senior lieutenant from this brigade, who
himself went to SZCh and incited his subordinates to do so. He was taken
from the Rivne region to Kiev and sent to custody without bail. "A
colleague from work showed up, he had been forced into a bus.[He had
been]mobilised in the spring, got out of the Zaporozhye front. He says
that when they started to be chopped up with everything they had, they
decided to go home. The whole company went into SZCh together with their
commander. What's the point if they are being caught? Doesn't matter.
Now he is at home. Alive," messaged someone on December 18 in the
Kharkov local chat of Northern Saltovka.
On November 25, some of the mechanisms used to combat the escape of
recruits were described in the public Telegram group UFM for mutual aid
to cross the border outside checkpoints:
"The main problem with training camps is that everyone is watching each
other there, because at the formations they immediately tell you that
SZCh is bad and for an unsuccessful SZCh you will be beaten up really
hard. And they immediately talk about collective responsibility - if
someone leaves your tent, then they will cruelly chase around everyone
in the tent.
The neighbouring platoon was chased around all night when one of them
left. There they were chased to the shelter all night, like an alarm,
woken up with training grenades, push-ups with the whole company in full
gear, in short, they will mock everyone to the fullest, so that everyone
knows that if your comrade-in-arms gets out, you will be given hell. Lie
on your belly for an hour in the mud and so on.
This is done so that if you suddenly see that your companion has decided
to leave, you will immediately run to inform on him, turn him in, and so
on, so that your life does not turn into hell. Therefore, everyone is
happy to turn each other in. Therefore, any patrol, even if it is
comprised of kidnapped people, and especially[if it is comprised]of
them, because the patrol must march in circles for 24 hours with full
gear, and if they let someone go, then after a 24-hour visit, they will
not have slept, will not have eaten normally, and will run and jump with
20+ kilograms on their bodies.
So if you go into SZCh, no one must know about it, no one must see you.
Even those who are there in the forest for some reason on some stupid
duty. And all these stories about how there are no fences there, that
someone just went and left - that is bullshit. If you have decided to
leave, your main enemy is your neighbour in the tent. "
However, a deserter from the Kiev region, who wished to remain
anonymous, has a slightly different experience with this matter:
"Of course, there is a fair amount of truth to this. But not everything
is so gloomy. Now training camps are staffed almost 100 percent with
those who have been forcibly mobilised. Training companies are slightly
diluted with ideological, zealous idiots and even women. The remaining
99 percent are potential SZCh. And everyone knows this very well. And
this is already a basis for basic solidarity. In my company at the
Yavoriv training ground, when another soldier disappeared, many wished
him good luck aloud. And this happened almost every day. Naturally, we
were pestered when we had to run to dugouts, when our rations were taken
away and all that stuff. But since someone fled every single day, I
simply don't know what would have happened if no one had fled.
I was taken in on June 17. I fled on June 30. And I left for Romania on
September 25. They started looking for me somewhere in November. I
wasn't at the front. Thank God, I managed to escape before I took the
oath. If you're an SZCh and you're caught a second time, you'll most
likely be released with a written commitment to return to your unit.
That's what the guys who were caught a second time told me. I didn't
leave[the country]right away. I went back home to Brovary. I prepared
for three months and then went to Romania. Who knows if I was wanted or
not? I didn't live at my address. Now I'm definitely wanted. The cops
are calling my relatives."
Those who are put in buses in Kharkov are usually sent for training not
to the west of the country, but to the Dnepropetrovsk region in the
east. This evidence from November 29 tells about what is waiting for
them there:
"The day before yesterday, a comrade was packed[from the street],
yesterday he was already in training, in Dnipro, 120 km from the front.
The convoy was greatly reinforced, it's impossible to escape, like in a
concentration camp. The young pastor was beaten, because he had refused
to sign up... The mobilisation of priests, as we see, is more important
than the mobilisation of the police.
That's what's happening now... And those who refuse doing anything at
all are being sent to zero[to the cutting edge at the front line]. A
company of avatars[drinking soldiers]. They disappeared without a
trace... Without docs, without registration. They were simply kidnapped
and for meat. Brutally. They take away phones, docs, they don't give a
shit where you want to go. If you're not a deputy - they don't give a
shit. There was a guy, a pastor, they broke him, beat him up... They
took him to zero somewhere... Full of securities, and checkpoints in the
town, several on all sides.[He could]go to the toilet only with a
senior. To the store - with a receipt and only with a senior, only 5
people can go..."
If this is accurate, it means that the same method of "zeroing out" is
used in the Ukrainian troops to get rid of undesirables, as is the case
in Russian units on the eastern front. At the same time, another source
told us in the last days of autumn that two to three weeks ago, 50
people were brought to Dnieper and 37 of them fled.
The lucky ones manage to escape before they end up in these facilities.
"This week my workers were going to work; they took away all five of
them. When they were bringing them to training, a van broke down near
Kharkov. There were 11 men, and the other two with automatic rifles. The
men said, either you let us go to the field, or we'll kill you, there
are more of us. They let us go. Now everyone is in Kharkov, barely got
there," a Kharkov owner of a residential housing business wrote us on
December 22. On January 4, in the central united enlistment centre of
Zaporozhye, 7-8 kidnapped men barricaded the entrance with beds and
other objects in the room, and began calling for help from the only
remaining phone, demanding respect for human rights and a "legal
solution" to this issue. Tear gas was used in response. One of the
prisoners, who suffered from epilepsy, began to have an attack.
According to other besieged ones, he was taken away somewhere by the
employees in a dying state, and nothing is known about his fate. The
footage shows how other people also began to choke and ask for help. The
riot was suppressed and the barricades were dismantled the same day. No
violations of the mobilisation process were noted by the authorities. As
the head of state said a year ago, in Ukraine you can't just breathe air
because we are at war!
On the morning of January 13, the disappearance of the first company
commander with the rank of captain was discovered in the 3rd Mechanised
Battalion of the 143rd Infantry Brigade near Kupyansk. The mobilised
officer left his weapon, took his personal belongings and personal car.
On December 14, the above quoted blogger Volodymyr Boiko
posted:"Kilometres of trenches were dug near Kurakhove[a town in the
eastern Donetsk region]. I recently spoke with the deputy commander of
one of the battalions in that direction - he says that a Russian tank
mistakenly drove into our positions, drove for 10 minutes until it
realised that it had lost its way, and then turned back. Not a single
shot was fired at the tank, because there was no one in the positions.
An infantry company from near Kherson was transferred to this battalion
as reinforcement - so out of 90 people, three reached Kurakhove, the
rest ran away on the way. And this is the situation everywhere. And what
is happening in the training centres Take, for example, military unit
A1363 - a training centre located in the Samarivsky (formerly
Novomoskovsky) district of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Recently, 70
recruits "got on skis" there in one day. Before that, on November 10,
2024, four people escaped, one of whom is a relative of my acquaintance.
The escapee says that there is no military training, during the three
weeks of stay in the training unit, the recruits were only engaged in
digging toilets and doing some household chores, and the main reason for
the escape was "hazing" and bullying of the newcomers.
Therefore, on November 3, four people also escaped, and in just one
month, 30 servicemen deserted...Analysing the statistics of war crimes,
back in February-April 2024, I predicted that at the end of the summer
the front would begin to collapse, and by the spring of 2025 the army
would simply disperse."
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 Kharkov alone. In particular, a
39-year-old man, after fleeing from the army a year and a half ago, met
with weapons the cops that came to his apartment in response to his
threat to kill a patrol policeman. He had an automatic rifle, a pistol
and grenades. Still, he was detained without shooting. On November 27,
in the village of Trostyanets in Vinnytsia region, a 57-year-old man
came to the enlistment centre 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 damage. "Because he wanted to send
me to war," the visitor explained his act. On the night of December 28,
three border guard vehicles were burned down in the Transcarpathian
border town of Chop: Mazda, Peugeot, and KIA. A 22-year-old local
resident, after being detained by the police, explained his act during
the interrogation by pointing to his "hostile relations" with the
transport owners.
At about 8 pm on January 13, on one of the main streets of Kharkov,
people blocked the road to a "bus of invincibility" of the district
enlistment centre. Two men and a woman got out of civilian cars, one of
them had a starter pistol. Having smashed the van's window with the
pistol, they got into a fight with the pixels. The cops detained the
owner of the pistol and seized his car. It is alleged that he is a
49-year-old entrepreneur who came to save his nephew. He was notified of
suspicion under Part 1 of Art. 114-1 of the Criminal Code (obstruction
of the lawful activities of the Armed Forces) and Part 4 of Art. 296 of
the Criminal Code (hooliganism with especially aggravating
circumstances). Another defendant is being sought. The kidnapped nephew
worked as a driver and is already mobilised. He is a witness in the case.
On November 25, a border guard in the Khmelnytsky region was sentenced
to 12 years in prison for the premeditated murder of his immediate
superior (the chief of the communications group). The 36-year-old junior
sergeant, who served as a technician-driver and was mobilised to the
State Border Service in August 2023, went on duty with a weapon on
February 6 last year and during his duty met the commander, with whom he
had an unfriendly relationship. After that, he went with him towards the
canteen and shot him in the stomach with an AK-74. The colonel died on
the spot. At the trial, the accused claimed that he murdered had
previously beaten him and another colleague, that he had obsessive
thoughts due to the conflict, and that he fired the shot in a state of
passion. A forensic psychiatric examination refuted this claim,
revealing no signs of any severe mental disorders. Witnesses also
confirmed that the accused was calm and balanced that day.
Of course, there is a number of similar news from the other side of the
front line. Thus, on October 29, criminals recruited to the front from a
pretrial detention centre and who escaped from their units almost killed
a representative of the authorities in the Leningrad region. As the
local website 47news wrote the following day, they turned out to be
30-year-old Aleksandr Igumenov, 30-year-old Mark Frolov, and 37-year-old
Vladimir Nikin. "The commander of the search and investigation group of
the Ministry of Defence has already outlined the circumstances in a
report: they moved to the house in the village of Yanino in the
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 with him. Igumenov grabbed a pistol,
practically put the barrel to the officer's forehead and specifically
outlined the prospects for his service - either they leave and let them
go, or the Ministry of Defence will lose several warrant officers and an
officer. As stated in the documents, "in order to avoid casualties among
civilians" the search party agreed to the demand and retreated. Or
rather, pretended to retreat, calling for police reinforcements. The
Ministry of Defence employees themselves stood around the house in case
the trio began to jump out, say, through the windows. The storming of
the special forces was usual. They broke down the door, slammed
everyone. All three were on drugs. Today, dialogues began with everyone
in the Military Investigative Committee exclusively within the framework
of Article 338 of the Criminal Code - "Desertion." Each of them has
several convictions, mainly for theft."
On October 25, near the village of Kremyanoye in the Kursk region,
Dmitry Slepnyov, deputy commander of the 2nd Motorised Rifle Battalion
of the 810th Marine Brigade (military unit 13140 in Sevastopol), was
reportedly killed by his soldier. During a service meeting at an
observation post, the captain got into a verbal conflict with private
Alexander Ryabov. He shot the officer three times in the head with an
AK-74. This was published by Ukrainian sources; there was no
confirmation from the Russian side.
On the evening of November 12, ten contract servicemen escaped from
military unit 57849 in the working settlement of Kochenyovo near
Novosibirsk without weapons. According to the local website NGS, "about
30 people from all over the Central Military District, who had
previously arbitrarily left military units for various reasons unrelated
to service, were assigned to it." Most were from the Krasnodar
Territory. The soldiers smashed the unit's premises with the words
"Look, there's a riot going on here" and filmed it on camera, left the
village in a taxi, and were later all detained. Before the conflict,
some of the escapees reportedly demanded medical aid, 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 holders of SOCh status from this unit were nevertheless
flown to Rostov-on-Don.
In the night of December 20, five military servicemen died and seven
were hospitalised with smoke inhalation due to a fire at the detention
centre on Vilyuisk Lane in Yakutsk. In this facility, soldiers who went
AWOL were kept in torture conditions. According to emergency services
and Russian authorities, the prisoners set the building on fire
themselves while trying to escape. In total, there were several dozen
detainees there. In the spring of 2024, there were complaints about the
conditions of detention. During the inspection by the Military
Prosecutor's Office of the Yakutsk Garrison, numerous violations of
federal legislation were revealed, and orders were issued to the
management to eliminate these violations.
As it became known on January 15, the previous night 31-year-old Andrey
B. from the Republic of Kalmykia stole a parked car on Rokossovsky
Street in Volgograd. The owner of the car left the keys in the ignition.
Social media say that before the driving away, he was at a collection
point for soldiers who left their units without permission, and was
probably trying to escape from there. 500 meters from the scene, there
is the military commandant's office of the Volgograd Garrison. Then, the
serviceman was detained and handed over to the military police. The car
was handed over to the owners in good condition, nothing was stolen from it.
One way or other, 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 already took eight villages south of Pokrovsk, and only
several kilometres left to the border of the Dnepropetrovsk region,
where there had been no hostilities yet and fortifications are minimal.
Despite such a critical situation, there is no visible patriotic upsurge
among the population of Ukraine. Too many working people no longer see
any fundamental difference in who will rob them.
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/01/20/the-turn-of-2024-and-2025-for-ukraine-desertion-has-become-mainstream-nationwide/
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