Special thanks to our French comrades from the Solidarity Initiative
Olga Taratuta in preparing this material ---- If you want to see more
content like this, you are welcome to support its making financially. At
the end of 2024, the platform mistakenly blocked our fundraising for two
weeks, which resulted in a loss of monthly donors. We invite everyone to
subscribe again - this allows the Assembly to continue working for you
and helping our local readers in their daily struggle to survive! ----
It is already officially recognised that after the law on partial
decriminalisation of unauthorised leaving a military unit (SZCh in
Ukrainian) and desertion came into force, desertions from the army of
Ukraine have increased significantly. "I spoke with our elite units,
both with the Airborne Assault Forces and with the Marines: the number
of SZCh increased by 60%," said Roman Kostenko, secretary of the
parliamentary defence committee, at the end of January. Seeing that the
ground is slipping from under its feet, the Ukrainian state is trying to
take punitive measures.
We recently wrote about the post of war correspondent Yury Butusov on
December 31 which received a wide resonance in Ukraine. In the post,
Butusov described how 1,700 people fled from the 155th Mechanised
Brigade "Anna of Kyiv" before the first shot was fired. By the time it
was sent to France, there were already 935 fugitives. In France itself,
more than 50 fled. Less well known is that on January 8, the State
Bureau of Investigation (SBI) detained a senior lieutenant from this
brigade, who himself went into SZCh and incited his fighters to do the
same. He was taken from the Rivne region to Kiev and sent to custody
without bail. Then, the former brigade commander, Colonel Dmytro
Ryumshin, was detained with the possibility of bail for 90 million
hryvnya ($2,161 million, a very large sum of money in Ukraine).
According to the SBI, there may have been a scheme operating in the
brigade in which those wishing to leave the country were registered for
money. "If I'm not mistaken, about 12 draft dodgers were included in the
lists for training in France," said bureau spokesperson Tatyana Sapyan
on the air of the telethon.
The magazine Forbes reported on January 27 that the second brigade of
the Ukraine's Armed Forces was in the process of disintegrating within a
month during deployment at the Donetsk front. We are talking about the
157th Mechanised Brigade, which consisted of new recruits and was sent
to defend Pokrovsk. There are a total of 8 such brigades of the 150th
series,"that formed in 2023 or early 2024 and, after a lengthy period of
training, began arriving on the front starting late last year. The
brigades are big, some with roughly double the usual 2,000 manpower
billets of a Ukrainian ground combat brigade. But they're also
fragile-with inexperienced leaders, too few modern armored vehicles and
poor morale that often results in a high desertion rate. (...)There were
reports of brigade troopers taking one look at their trenches-and
promptly abandoning their positions," the publication noted. According
to it, the brigade had not received the necessary combat training and
"began falling apart before they even arrived in Pokrovsk." It was the
second such case in a month.
content like this, you are welcome to support its making financially. At
the end of 2024, the platform mistakenly blocked our fundraising for two
weeks, which resulted in a loss of monthly donors. We invite everyone to
subscribe again - this allows the Assembly to continue working for you
and helping our local readers in their daily struggle to survive! ----
It is already officially recognised that after the law on partial
decriminalisation of unauthorised leaving a military unit (SZCh in
Ukrainian) and desertion came into force, desertions from the army of
Ukraine have increased significantly. "I spoke with our elite units,
both with the Airborne Assault Forces and with the Marines: the number
of SZCh increased by 60%," said Roman Kostenko, secretary of the
parliamentary defence committee, at the end of January. Seeing that the
ground is slipping from under its feet, the Ukrainian state is trying to
take punitive measures.
We recently wrote about the post of war correspondent Yury Butusov on
December 31 which received a wide resonance in Ukraine. In the post,
Butusov described how 1,700 people fled from the 155th Mechanised
Brigade "Anna of Kyiv" before the first shot was fired. By the time it
was sent to France, there were already 935 fugitives. In France itself,
more than 50 fled. Less well known is that on January 8, the State
Bureau of Investigation (SBI) detained a senior lieutenant from this
brigade, who himself went into SZCh and incited his fighters to do the
same. He was taken from the Rivne region to Kiev and sent to custody
without bail. Then, the former brigade commander, Colonel Dmytro
Ryumshin, was detained with the possibility of bail for 90 million
hryvnya ($2,161 million, a very large sum of money in Ukraine).
According to the SBI, there may have been a scheme operating in the
brigade in which those wishing to leave the country were registered for
money. "If I'm not mistaken, about 12 draft dodgers were included in the
lists for training in France," said bureau spokesperson Tatyana Sapyan
on the air of the telethon.
The magazine Forbes reported on January 27 that the second brigade of
the Ukraine's Armed Forces was in the process of disintegrating within a
month during deployment at the Donetsk front. We are talking about the
157th Mechanised Brigade, which consisted of new recruits and was sent
to defend Pokrovsk. There are a total of 8 such brigades of the 150th
series,"that formed in 2023 or early 2024 and, after a lengthy period of
training, began arriving on the front starting late last year. The
brigades are big, some with roughly double the usual 2,000 manpower
billets of a Ukrainian ground combat brigade. But they're also
fragile-with inexperienced leaders, too few modern armored vehicles and
poor morale that often results in a high desertion rate. (...)There were
reports of brigade troopers taking one look at their trenches-and
promptly abandoning their positions," the publication noted. According
to it, the brigade had not received the necessary combat training and
"began falling apart before they even arrived in Pokrovsk." It was the
second such case in a month.
On December 25, in the public Telegram group UFM which provides
assistance in leaving Ukraine, a member wrote:
"My wife's brother escaped from training without a weapon (I won't say
the exact date), three days later the cops were already looking for him
at his registered address, and he was on the cops' criminal wanted
list..... So everything is going fast now. It was a week ago. He went to
the place of registration to surrender himself, there were familiar cops
(he wanted to negotiate), but something went wrong, and as far as I
understand, he was again shoved in the training center, but in where he
lived. Before that he was caught by TCR[Territorial Center for
Recruitment and Social Support]in Kirovograd region. Now he's in
Kharkov,[there is]no contact with him. All this he personally told, as
well as the fact that in the training schools of Vinnitsa region they
kick people with a buttstock if you f*** off, he lost a few teeth....."
Despite this intensification of the efforts to persecute deserters, the
possibilities of the repressive system are still very limited. A man
from Kharkov named Andrey reported on January 12: "As for the search.
There is one character who disappeared into the sunset in June. Recently
cops checked him for the 4th time when he was coming from work -he was
not wanted. So it's a lucky break. He works as a packer in the workshop.
Unofficially, of course. He's been on a relatively quiet sector,
northbound, so it didn't come to the meat grinder. It's more likely the
liver that needs to be repaired, not the head." Another resident of
Kharkov, who went into SZCh last summer together with his commander and
the entire company from the southern front, was mentioned by us last
month - he now lives at home and goes to the store, and no one is
looking for him. 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 Mechanised Brigade near Kupyansk.
The mobilised officer left his weapon, took his personal belongings and
personal car.
There is also new evidence of mass desertions from training camps in the
Dnipropetrovsk region, where those mobilised in Kharkov are usually
sent. We wrote a little earlier about massive desertions in this area.
One woman in Kharkov shared the following information anonymously on
January 30: "I talked to a local policeman, he says every day there are
about 100 people near Novomoskovsk who go into SZCh. The efficiency of
efforts to catch them is so-so. In my opinion, network marketing has
better recruitment rates. How many a day they catch out of these 100 he
will not, of course, say. He complained that there is a lot of paperwork".
On the same day, January 30, the above mentioned journalist Yury Butusov
posted information, according to which in some radio engineering brigade
of the Ukrainian Air Force ten radar station operators had been taken
for marine rifle positions. "Each operator has more than two years of
experience, but no one asked for their opinion. After receiving the
information, three military men made certificates of care and resigned,
three went into SCZh". It is strange that there were only three! On
February 2, the Assembly received the following information: "In our
military unit, in the summer, you could still officially go abroad on
vacation. Then two of us didn't return and the unit commander forbade us
from going abroad on vacation... and I was transferred from the Air
Force to the Land Troops at zero[front line], and it took me 7 days to
figure everything out. And I went into SZCh. And then a buddy policeman
picked me up in his car, he drove from home. If it weren't for him, I
wouldn't have left there. They would hit the brake at every checkpoint,
but the[service]certificate decides. He gave me a ride home. If only it
had been to the border... I was going from the Zaporizhzhia region, the
checkpoints there are crazy. We had many guys who went into SZCh on
their own, then they were caught at the checkpoint and sent them back to
the infantry on the move to zero[to the front line]." Since the
interlocutor is still in Ukraine, we will not give other details.
Against this background, individual rebellions receive a particularly
strong resonance in the media. According to the Rivne Regional TCR,
during the check of military registration documents on February 11,
unknown persons of mobilisation age inflicted bodily harm on their
employees and damaged transport. Despite the arrival of the police, the
attackers fled and are wanted. The next day, according to the Kharkov
Regional TCR, in some district enlistment office of Kharkov their
serviceman was sprayed with tear gas and injured with a knife. The
suspect was detained by the cops.
Two examples of workplace struggle from women convicted by local courts
of Kharkov on November 19 and on February 12. In the first case, some
controller of the Kharkov metro automatic checkpoints, according to the
investigation, messaged at least 8 times from November 2023 to April
2024 in one of the Telegram chats how the enlistment teams operated at
the subway station. The judge found the woman guilty and sentenced her
to five years in prison with a three-year probationary period. She was
released from custody and her cell phone was confiscated. Another one
from February 2022 to August 2024 supposedly stole 10 sets of earrings,
19 rings, three necklaces and two chains from the Quetzal jewelry store.
The total amount of material damage caused to the entrepreneur for whom
she worked was 2,281,581 hryvnia (about $55 000). "She disposed of the
jewelry at her own discretion. In the courtroom, the accused fully
admitted her guilt. She noted that she had drawn the appropriate
conclusions for herself and that this would not happen again," the court
verdict states. She was sentenced to five years in prison and was taken
into custody in the courtroom, she must also pay the store owner
2,281,581 hryvnia in material damages and 56,796 hryvnia in favour of
the state for conducting expertises.
The loudest story of this winter occurred in the usually quiet Lubny
district of the Poltava region. On January 31, a resident of Poltava,
Yevgen Shcherbak, was being transported to a military unit for training,
accompanied by servicemen from the district enlistment office. Intend on
evading service, he called his relative's partner, Vadym Kuzub, from
Lubny and told them the bus route. During a stop in Pyriatyn, the Lubny
resident in a grey balaclava and pixelated pants killed one of the
guards with a hunting rifle he had brought with him. Shcherbak and Kuzub
disappeared with the dead soldier's automatic rifle. However, the next
day the head of the regional police reported their arrest. The two men
were born in 1984 and 1988, respectively. Unconfirmed rumors suggest
that the shooter previously served in the territorial defence at road
checkpoints.
The murder suspect Vadym Kuzub admitted his guilt at a court hearing on
February 3, confirming that he had helped his woman's relative escape.
According to him, he wanted to scare the guards, but he failed, and then
he fired his weapon. "The ambulance arrived about 40 minutes later, and
he died quickly. I didn't know that he had died, I thought he was alive.
I didn't want to kill him, I just wanted to take Shcherbak Yevgen." The
shooter's lawyer, Valery Masyuk, said that his client is actively
collaborating with the investigation. Yevgen Shcherbak, who fled from
the enlistment agents, is now charged with obstructing the activities of
the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Both are in custody without the right to bail.
There are not as many stories from the army of the neighboring chamber
as there were in our previous piece about this. For example, the
Telegram channel "Atesh", working for Ukrainian intelligence in Crimea,
on January 2 gives the following information from its agents: "They
report that in the village of Lazurnoye in the Kherson region, Russian
occupiers are complaining about a sharp increase in the number of
breakdowns of equipment arriving at the repair base. The Russians
suspect that the growing number of breakdowns of watercraft (boats and
jet skis) is due to deliberate sabotage by the Russian military
themselves. Russian military personnel are increasingly choosing
sabotage as a way of survival, which disrupts the plans of the Russian
military team to use these watercraft to force the Dnieper." They
narrate about how the watercraft are disabled in a post on December 9:
"The number of cases of sabotage among Russian military personnel is
growing, aimed at avoiding being sent to storm the islands in the
Dnieper delta. Soldiers intentionally break engines, puncture rubber
boats and even transmit coordinates to the Ukraine's Defence Forces
about the location of boat bases and fuel reserves. It is known that
three service investigations related to sabotage have been recorded in
the 126th Separate Coastal Defence Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces.
For the Russian command, this has become a real problem." On February 1,
another channel of the Ukrainian special services, "I Want to Live",
posted photographs and data of a group of Russian convicts from the
1437th Motorised Rifle Regiment. According to the post, at least 8
stormtroopers went on the run near Pokrovsk. "In short, we have some
deserters here. They are hiding behind that they are the 300th[injured],
they want to storm something, take a car and come to Selidovo, so the
situation is quite serious. Now I will give you their call signs if they
introduce themselves (...) These are dangerous people, warn anyone
nearby if possible," says the voice on the audio recording.
On February 10, the Southern Military District Court reported on another
incident in the battles for the Dnieper delta in the Kherson region.
Corporal Nikita Posmetukhov from the 70th Motorised Rifle Division of
the RF sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of four colleagues,
including two officers. On the night of November 28, 2023, Posmetukhov
was drinking with his fellows, then took an assault rifle and went to
the command dugout, the document says. When he knocked on the door,
patrolmen called out to him. He started shooting at them and killed a
junior sergeant. Then he got into the dugout and shot a lieutenant
colonel, captain and private (they were sleeping at that moment). After
that, the shooter was detained by two privates. As noted in the
document, the attacker got angry at Captain Komarovsky, which was not
killed or wounded. He applied disciplinary punishment to Posmetukhov and
promised to send him to the assault unit.
Overall, our forecast from last year is being confirmed step by step.
The number of Russian assaults and their pace of advancement since the
start of 2025 have dropped sharply, the trend seems too long and strong
to have been caused only by the weather conditions. It appears that the
drop is due to peace talks, during which the Russian authorities hope to
achieve a deal with the new administration of US President Donald Trump.
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/02/23/war-resistance-in-ukraine-amidst-the-hype-about-peace-talks/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
assistance in leaving Ukraine, a member wrote:
"My wife's brother escaped from training without a weapon (I won't say
the exact date), three days later the cops were already looking for him
at his registered address, and he was on the cops' criminal wanted
list..... So everything is going fast now. It was a week ago. He went to
the place of registration to surrender himself, there were familiar cops
(he wanted to negotiate), but something went wrong, and as far as I
understand, he was again shoved in the training center, but in where he
lived. Before that he was caught by TCR[Territorial Center for
Recruitment and Social Support]in Kirovograd region. Now he's in
Kharkov,[there is]no contact with him. All this he personally told, as
well as the fact that in the training schools of Vinnitsa region they
kick people with a buttstock if you f*** off, he lost a few teeth....."
Despite this intensification of the efforts to persecute deserters, the
possibilities of the repressive system are still very limited. A man
from Kharkov named Andrey reported on January 12: "As for the search.
There is one character who disappeared into the sunset in June. Recently
cops checked him for the 4th time when he was coming from work -he was
not wanted. So it's a lucky break. He works as a packer in the workshop.
Unofficially, of course. He's been on a relatively quiet sector,
northbound, so it didn't come to the meat grinder. It's more likely the
liver that needs to be repaired, not the head." Another resident of
Kharkov, who went into SZCh last summer together with his commander and
the entire company from the southern front, was mentioned by us last
month - he now lives at home and goes to the store, and no one is
looking for him. 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 Mechanised Brigade near Kupyansk.
The mobilised officer left his weapon, took his personal belongings and
personal car.
There is also new evidence of mass desertions from training camps in the
Dnipropetrovsk region, where those mobilised in Kharkov are usually
sent. We wrote a little earlier about massive desertions in this area.
One woman in Kharkov shared the following information anonymously on
January 30: "I talked to a local policeman, he says every day there are
about 100 people near Novomoskovsk who go into SZCh. The efficiency of
efforts to catch them is so-so. In my opinion, network marketing has
better recruitment rates. How many a day they catch out of these 100 he
will not, of course, say. He complained that there is a lot of paperwork".
On the same day, January 30, the above mentioned journalist Yury Butusov
posted information, according to which in some radio engineering brigade
of the Ukrainian Air Force ten radar station operators had been taken
for marine rifle positions. "Each operator has more than two years of
experience, but no one asked for their opinion. After receiving the
information, three military men made certificates of care and resigned,
three went into SCZh". It is strange that there were only three! On
February 2, the Assembly received the following information: "In our
military unit, in the summer, you could still officially go abroad on
vacation. Then two of us didn't return and the unit commander forbade us
from going abroad on vacation... and I was transferred from the Air
Force to the Land Troops at zero[front line], and it took me 7 days to
figure everything out. And I went into SZCh. And then a buddy policeman
picked me up in his car, he drove from home. If it weren't for him, I
wouldn't have left there. They would hit the brake at every checkpoint,
but the[service]certificate decides. He gave me a ride home. If only it
had been to the border... I was going from the Zaporizhzhia region, the
checkpoints there are crazy. We had many guys who went into SZCh on
their own, then they were caught at the checkpoint and sent them back to
the infantry on the move to zero[to the front line]." Since the
interlocutor is still in Ukraine, we will not give other details.
Against this background, individual rebellions receive a particularly
strong resonance in the media. According to the Rivne Regional TCR,
during the check of military registration documents on February 11,
unknown persons of mobilisation age inflicted bodily harm on their
employees and damaged transport. Despite the arrival of the police, the
attackers fled and are wanted. The next day, according to the Kharkov
Regional TCR, in some district enlistment office of Kharkov their
serviceman was sprayed with tear gas and injured with a knife. The
suspect was detained by the cops.
Two examples of workplace struggle from women convicted by local courts
of Kharkov on November 19 and on February 12. In the first case, some
controller of the Kharkov metro automatic checkpoints, according to the
investigation, messaged at least 8 times from November 2023 to April
2024 in one of the Telegram chats how the enlistment teams operated at
the subway station. The judge found the woman guilty and sentenced her
to five years in prison with a three-year probationary period. She was
released from custody and her cell phone was confiscated. Another one
from February 2022 to August 2024 supposedly stole 10 sets of earrings,
19 rings, three necklaces and two chains from the Quetzal jewelry store.
The total amount of material damage caused to the entrepreneur for whom
she worked was 2,281,581 hryvnia (about $55 000). "She disposed of the
jewelry at her own discretion. In the courtroom, the accused fully
admitted her guilt. She noted that she had drawn the appropriate
conclusions for herself and that this would not happen again," the court
verdict states. She was sentenced to five years in prison and was taken
into custody in the courtroom, she must also pay the store owner
2,281,581 hryvnia in material damages and 56,796 hryvnia in favour of
the state for conducting expertises.
The loudest story of this winter occurred in the usually quiet Lubny
district of the Poltava region. On January 31, a resident of Poltava,
Yevgen Shcherbak, was being transported to a military unit for training,
accompanied by servicemen from the district enlistment office. Intend on
evading service, he called his relative's partner, Vadym Kuzub, from
Lubny and told them the bus route. During a stop in Pyriatyn, the Lubny
resident in a grey balaclava and pixelated pants killed one of the
guards with a hunting rifle he had brought with him. Shcherbak and Kuzub
disappeared with the dead soldier's automatic rifle. However, the next
day the head of the regional police reported their arrest. The two men
were born in 1984 and 1988, respectively. Unconfirmed rumors suggest
that the shooter previously served in the territorial defence at road
checkpoints.
The murder suspect Vadym Kuzub admitted his guilt at a court hearing on
February 3, confirming that he had helped his woman's relative escape.
According to him, he wanted to scare the guards, but he failed, and then
he fired his weapon. "The ambulance arrived about 40 minutes later, and
he died quickly. I didn't know that he had died, I thought he was alive.
I didn't want to kill him, I just wanted to take Shcherbak Yevgen." The
shooter's lawyer, Valery Masyuk, said that his client is actively
collaborating with the investigation. Yevgen Shcherbak, who fled from
the enlistment agents, is now charged with obstructing the activities of
the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Both are in custody without the right to bail.
There are not as many stories from the army of the neighboring chamber
as there were in our previous piece about this. For example, the
Telegram channel "Atesh", working for Ukrainian intelligence in Crimea,
on January 2 gives the following information from its agents: "They
report that in the village of Lazurnoye in the Kherson region, Russian
occupiers are complaining about a sharp increase in the number of
breakdowns of equipment arriving at the repair base. The Russians
suspect that the growing number of breakdowns of watercraft (boats and
jet skis) is due to deliberate sabotage by the Russian military
themselves. Russian military personnel are increasingly choosing
sabotage as a way of survival, which disrupts the plans of the Russian
military team to use these watercraft to force the Dnieper." They
narrate about how the watercraft are disabled in a post on December 9:
"The number of cases of sabotage among Russian military personnel is
growing, aimed at avoiding being sent to storm the islands in the
Dnieper delta. Soldiers intentionally break engines, puncture rubber
boats and even transmit coordinates to the Ukraine's Defence Forces
about the location of boat bases and fuel reserves. It is known that
three service investigations related to sabotage have been recorded in
the 126th Separate Coastal Defence Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces.
For the Russian command, this has become a real problem." On February 1,
another channel of the Ukrainian special services, "I Want to Live",
posted photographs and data of a group of Russian convicts from the
1437th Motorised Rifle Regiment. According to the post, at least 8
stormtroopers went on the run near Pokrovsk. "In short, we have some
deserters here. They are hiding behind that they are the 300th[injured],
they want to storm something, take a car and come to Selidovo, so the
situation is quite serious. Now I will give you their call signs if they
introduce themselves (...) These are dangerous people, warn anyone
nearby if possible," says the voice on the audio recording.
On February 10, the Southern Military District Court reported on another
incident in the battles for the Dnieper delta in the Kherson region.
Corporal Nikita Posmetukhov from the 70th Motorised Rifle Division of
the RF sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of four colleagues,
including two officers. On the night of November 28, 2023, Posmetukhov
was drinking with his fellows, then took an assault rifle and went to
the command dugout, the document says. When he knocked on the door,
patrolmen called out to him. He started shooting at them and killed a
junior sergeant. Then he got into the dugout and shot a lieutenant
colonel, captain and private (they were sleeping at that moment). After
that, the shooter was detained by two privates. As noted in the
document, the attacker got angry at Captain Komarovsky, which was not
killed or wounded. He applied disciplinary punishment to Posmetukhov and
promised to send him to the assault unit.
Overall, our forecast from last year is being confirmed step by step.
The number of Russian assaults and their pace of advancement since the
start of 2025 have dropped sharply, the trend seems too long and strong
to have been caused only by the weather conditions. It appears that the
drop is due to peace talks, during which the Russian authorities hope to
achieve a deal with the new administration of US President Donald Trump.
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/02/23/war-resistance-in-ukraine-amidst-the-hype-about-peace-talks/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten