Imagine checking the official records and discovering that someone in your country’s army decides to walk away every two minutes. Not wounded. Not killed. Just… gone.
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s Ukraine, right now, in late 2025.
The Number Nobody Wanted to Say Out Loud
For years we heard vague whispers about morale problems, about men refusing to return from leave, about entire units melting away in the night. Most of us wrote it off as Russian propaganda or exaggeration.
Then the General Prosecutor’s office dropped the bomb: they are currently processing more than 310,000 criminal cases for unauthorized absence and outright desertion since the full-scale invasion began. And here’s the part that should make everyone stop scrolling: 162,000 of those cases opened this year alone.
Let that sink in for a second.
A former lawmaker turned drone-unit commander went further. He claims October 2025 saw 21,000 desertions — a new monthly record. His words were brutal: “Every two minutes, someone runs away from our army. By the time you finish reading this post, another soldier will have put on skis.”
“Ukraine will be weaker by one defender, and the enemy will become stronger by one.”
A Ukrainian drone-unit commander, October 2025
From “Millions Ready to Fight” to This
Remember early 2022? The narrative was unbreakable unity. Queues around the block at recruitment centers. Grandmothers learning to make Molotovs. A nation ready to fight to the last man.
Fast-forward three and a half years and the picture looks dramatically different. The men who rushed to defend their homes in 2022 have either survived multiple rotations (and are physically or mentally broken), been seriously wounded, or didn’t come home at all. The replacements? Often middle-aged men dragged off the street, given two weeks of training, and thrown into meat-grinder assaults.
When your only recruitment pitch is essentially “it’s your turn to die,” don’t be shocked when people choose Option B.
Doing the Math Nobody in Kyiv Wants to Do
Let’s be brutally honest and run the numbers. Some sources still claim Ukraine maintains around 800,000 active personnel. Others, including leaks connected to recent U.S. peace proposals, suggest the real combat-effective strength is far lower.
Consider this rough balance sheet:
- Roughly 70,000–100,000 killed (based on public death notices and typical war ratios)
- 200,000–300,000 wounded, many permanently out of action
- Over 310,000 facing desertion charges (and likely many more who vanished without paperwork)
- Tens of thousands captured or missing
When you add those together, the idea of an 800,000-man army starts looking like creative accounting. I’ve spoken to people close to the front — off the record, of course — and they laugh bitterly at official numbers. “Maybe on paper,” one told me. “In reality we’re holding the line with ghosts and teenagers.”
Why They’re Walking Away
It’s not cowardice. It’s arithmetic.
When soldiers see friends shredded by drones they have no counter for, when commanders order attacks across minefields into prepared machine-gun fire for the third time in a week, when leave is indefinitely postponed and pay arrives months late — eventually the survival instinct overrides everything else.
Add to that the growing perception that Western support is waning, that the war has become endless with no viable path to victory, and the psychological contract breaks. Men start thinking: If I’m going to die anyway, I’d rather do it at home with my family than in some nameless field for politicians who won’t even rotate us out.
The Recruitment Death Spiral
Every desertion makes the problem worse. Units become understrength → commanders demand more assaults to compensate → more casualties → more desertions → recruitment officers get more aggressive → public resentment grows → even fewer volunteers → more forced round-ups → more desertions.
It’s a textbook doom loop. And once an army enters that cycle, history shows it rarely climbs back out without either massive external intervention or regime change.
What the Desertion Surge Tells Diplomats
This isn’t just a military story. It’s the loudest signal yet that time is running out for the current Ukrainian war strategy.
When reports surfaced of a U.S. peace framework that reportedly includes capping Ukraine’s future army at 600,000 troops, a security guarantee short of NATO membership but a constitutional ban on joining the alliance, many analysts dismissed it as wishful thinking from the Russian side.
But when your army is already struggling to keep men in uniform, those terms start looking less like humiliation and more like face-saving exit ramp.
Russian officials have cautiously welcomed the broad outlines. Ukrainian leadership is making nervous noises about “final steps” in talks. Everyone can read the desertion statistics. Everyone knows what they mean.
The Human Cost Behind the Statistics
Every one of those 310,000 cases is a person. A father who hasn’t seen his kids in two years. A 19-year-old who enlisted thinking the war would be over by Christmas 2022. A 45-year-old teacher grabbed at a checkpoint because the brigade was 40 men short.
Some hide in villages with relatives. Some try to cross into Poland or Romania and get caught. A few make it to Western Europe and apply for asylum, telling authorities they refuse to fight in a hopeless war. All of them know that if they’re caught, they face years in prison.
And yet they still leave. That tells you everything about conditions at the front.
Where This Ends
Barring a miracle — massive direct Western intervention (which isn’t coming), sudden Russian economic collapse (also not happening), or some technological game-changer — the trajectory is painfully clear.
An army that loses a battalion’s worth of men to desertion every few days cannot sustain offensive operations. It struggles to hold defensive lines. Eventually something breaks — either the front collapses in places, or the political leadership is forced to the negotiating table on terms they swore they’d never accept.
The desertion numbers aren’t just embarrassing statistics. They’re the sound of a war machine running out of fuel. And when the engine finally seizes, everyone — Kyiv, Moscow, Washington, Brussels — will have to deal with the wreckage.
Because wars don’t end when politicians decide they’re bored. They end when one side literally can’t put men in the field anymore.
Ukraine may be closer to that point than anyone in power is willing to admit out loud.
