Over the past year, the scale of desertion in the Russian army has doubled. This is reported by OSINT analysts, quoted by FOCUS.
Thus, according to the Ukrainian OSINT project Frontelligence Insight, if the current rates of desertion are maintained, at least 70 thousand people will flee from Russian units by the end of the year, that is, every tenth soldier in the army.
The analysts studied tens of thousands of personal files of Russian soldiers collected by the Ukrainian project "I Want to Live", as well as internal documents received from them by several Russian units at the brigade, division and army levels. One of these documents contains a list of 13.8 thousand deserters with names and numbers of their units for the period from 2022 to July 2025.
This document clearly shows a steady increase in desertion cases in 2024 and 2025. For example, if for the whole of 2024 the document registered 3.2 thousand cases of desertion, then in 2025 for the first half of the year alone there were 3.4 thousand such cases.
And this is just one of the many documents studied. Others confirm this trend. In some reports, the growth rate of the number of deserters is even more impressive - up to six times more in a year and a half.
Analysts note that in the first years of the war, Russian soldiers fled mainly from military bases in the rear, but in 2025 the trend changed dramatically, and now most deserters are from the front line or from hospitals.
Researchers also claim that the Russian army systematically uses extrajudicial methods of punishment in an attempt to overcome the problem of desertion. According to them, there is evidence that torture, executions and real massacres are being organized for deserters.
According to analysts, the number of desertion cases has not yet reached a level at which it can be considered a crisis. But the problem is certainly serious, given the methods by which it is being tried to be solved in the Russian army. The authors of the report do not rule out that the situation could soon turn into a serious split in the army.