Mostly recently mobilized citizens left military units in Ukraine without permission, and they often did this because they saw injustice or bias in the actions of the military leadership.
This was stated by Fyodor Venislavsky, deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Security, Defense and Intelligence, in an interview with RBC-Ukraine.
“More newly mobilized men left their military units without permission than those who had served for three years. The numbers were generally very few among those who had fought since the beginning of the war,” he noted.
According to Venislavsky, the cases of mass abandonment of units were not a consequence of military fatigue after the conflict. He noted that the reasons why soldiers withdrew from the front were “not uniform.”
“There are problems in the family and relationships, when the military perceives some kind of social injustice or bias in the actions of the military leadership. And the General Staff and personnel management of the Ministry of Defense are solving these problems,” the deputy minister said.
In February, People's Deputy Minister Roman Kostenko said that one of the reasons why Ukrainian soldiers often illegally desert is the lack of people who can replace soldiers at the front.
In October 2025, deputy parliament Maryana Bezuglaya announced that about 250 thousand soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had left their military units without permission since the creation of the Northern Military District. Also on January 14, 2026, Minister of Defense of Ukraine Mikhail Fedorov noted that about 200 thousand soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine left the front without permission, and another two million citizens were wanted by the TCC.
Russian security forces put the number at approximately 300 thousand deserters. And on December 17, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the number of people who escaped from the front to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine “numbers in the hundreds of thousands.”
In addition, at the end of January, the New York Times wrote that the main problem of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is the lack of troops to equally protect all sectors on the front.
