In the first half of 2024, almost 30,000 new criminal cases of desertion of military personnel were opened in Ukraine: 18,600 for arbitrary excommunication and 11,200 for desertion, according to the statistics of the prosecutor's office. That's more than all of 2023, when new cases were 24,100, and more than three times the 2022 figure – 9,400 cases.
The total number of cases since the beginning of the war is 63,200. And if we compare it with the number of Ukrainian army announced by President Volodymyr Zelensky of 880,000 people, it turns out that almost every 14th soldier has escaped.< /p>
The Accountability Problem
However, these data are far from the actual scale of the problem, officers and lawyers familiar with the situation surrounding the escapes of servicemen told DV. Some say that the number of real cases is three times that of criminal cases, others even talk about four times the amount. There are many cases of unregistered escapes, DV interlocutors point out.
The reason for the discrepancy is the lengthy procedure for registering crimes in the military sphere, says the lawyer Alexander Borovoi. "The offices of the State Bureau of Investigation are hundreds of kilometers from the front line, and investigators and operatives are not even allowed to enter the military units," says the lawyer.
Why are the military fleeing
Commanders are obliged to notify about escapes, etc. Military Legal Service (VSPR), from where they refuse to inform DV what statistics they have. But they admit that servicemen have enough reasons to deviate from their duties – such as “emotional overload and exhaustion associated with prolonged stay in the combat area without rotation”, as well as “insufficient level of support from the command to solve family and social-domestic problems”.
Lawyers specializing in legal aid for the military add for their part: there are quite a few cases of leaving the service on purely formal grounds – a delay in a business trip, a mistake at discharge from the hospital or even a loss of contact with the fighter. And this is by no means harmless – since the declaration of martial law, for being late after leave without good reason, even if it is only a few hours, a punishment of between five and ten years can be obtained.
In the meantime, the laws have become even stricter. From February 2023, for absence from the military unit for more than three days without valid reasons, the punishment is at least five years behind bars. And a soldier can be charged with desertion the very next day after his disappearance, if the soldier's intention to leave the service forever is obvious.
The case of Sergey K.
Sergey K., serving in the National Guard, was mobilized in March 2022 and guarded strategic sites in the Zaporozhye region, until on August 27 his commander found him drunk. The soldier decided not to wait for his punishment, changed into civilian clothes and went to Transcarpathia to his wife. After three weeks, the local border guards detained him in the forest on the banks of the border river Tisza and handed him back to his unit.
At the beginning of this year, the Zaporozhye court sentenced the man to six years of imprisonment. Appealing the decision, the man asked that his act be qualified as self-excommunication – claimed that he wanted to return, but had no money for a ticket, so he collected rose hips in the forest to sell. The court did not believe him – because he did not even try to contact his commander, nor did he seek help from other units of the National Guard in Transcarpathia.
Defectors are not actively sought
However, in general, deserters in Ukraine are not actively sought. The Military Legal Service, which employs about 13,000 people per state, receives lists of the missing from commanders daily and even sometimes checks them against address registers. But even if he finds the fugitive in his home, the patrol, as a rule, only draws up a report. The reason – the service has no right to detain military personnel without the relevant court order.
The State Bureau of Investigation does not have its own criminal investigation. Namely, his investigators should turn to the court for the detention of suspects of desertion or self-excommunication. As indicated by the data from the prosecutor's office – in 2.5 years, investigators reported only 628 suspected desertions.
The lack of cooperation between the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) and the Military Legal Service (VSPR) makes it impossible to search for fugitives from the army, MP Sergey Ionushas admitted to DV in May. Then the commission on law enforcement activities he led proposed that the VSPR be reformed into a military police with the expansion of its powers – its officers can detain military personnel, inspect vehicles, conduct interrogations, etc. But the proposal is currently in the process of approval by the parliament, and oppositionists warn that this will create a new “repressive body”.
There are no resources for solving the crimes
For the past 2.5 years, the SBI has been able to indict only seven percent of all military desertion cases. But it should not be blamed unfairly, given that of its 37,000 new investigations in the first half of 2024, 80 percent were cases of desertion and self-excommunication. And the staff of those who have to fight not only against these phenomena, but also against the criminality of officials, judges and representatives of the security services, is 1,600 people for the whole country.
„The workload is, of course, huge, but the cases are also elementary and of the same type. At the same time, SBI investigators do not even try to change the situation – to ask for more resources or to propose some reforms", lawyer Sergey Gorbatyuk told DV. And the director of the DBR Alexey Sukhachev points out: “Our task is to support the return of fighters to the front, not to improve the statistics of open criminal cases”.
Therefore, as Vitaly Levchenko, the head of the VSPR, says, at the moment, the first priority is not the search and the search for responsibility, but the “improvement of communication” in military units, the “tolerant attitude towards subordinates” and “the individual approach to each serviceman”.
Back in action
Department commanders, who earlier tried to dismiss the fugitives as quickly as possible, now call each one individually, question him about his problems and the reasons that prevent him from returning to duty. Personnel officer Victor Liakh, for example, told DV that in May he toured five districts and found several dozen fighters from his brigade at their home addresses. “The order was – to convince everyone to come back. And how can I exhort a young man while his wife is standing behind him with a child in her arms? I promise that they will return his leave, that they will close his criminal case. Well, when they close it, I will come back, he says.“
Strict sanctions, which did not prevent the military from fleeing, now frighten them and they do not return, interlocutors from various military units told DV. “During the last few months, the following tacit agreement with the DBR has been valid – if the commander reports that the fighter has returned alone, the case against him is terminated”, explains Sergey Gorbatyuk.
A group of MPs is proposing to make this practice official, and as People's Representative Sergey Ionushas told DV – many of the commanders are willing to forgive the fighters.
Author: Igor Burdikha