Up to one in five Ukrainian soldiers go AWOL – Economist

As many as one in five Ukrainian soldiers have deserted their positions as morale has collapsed at the worst sections of the front, The Economist claimed in an article on Wednesday, citing a source within Kiev’s general staff.

The report paints a perilous situation at the front for the Ukrainian forces. Russia has been making significant progress on the battlefield and has plenty of volunteers to draw reinforcements from, while the Ukrainian military “is struggling to replace battlefield losses with conscription, barely hitting two-thirds of its target,” the article said.

However, there is “no indication” that the Ukrainians are about to give up, since “they have enough weapons to resist and enough ground to fall back on if things go badly.”

The Economist argued that the election this week of Donald Trump as US president could actually be beneficial to Ukraine. A peace deal that he intends to reach would avert “a bloody deadlock at best, defeat at worst,” it said. Trump has claimed he could end the conflict in “24 hours.”

Kiev overhauled its mobilization system earlier this year and instituted harsher punishments for draft dodging in the hopes that it would boost enrollment rates. Since the conflict escalated in February 2022, over 1 million Ukrainians have been drafted, while 160,000 more are expected to be mobilized over the next three months, according to MP Aleksey Goncharenko. Fellow Ukrainian lawmaker Anna Skorokhod stated last week that the number of deserters from the army had surpassed 100,000.

A shortage of new troops is the main problem facing the Ukrainian military, Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted in July.

“Despite the raids, the unending waves of total mobilization in Ukrainian villages and cities, the current regime finds it increasingly hard to send reinforcements to the frontline. The country’s manpower is exhausting,” he said.

Moscow says it wants the Ukraine conflict resolved in a way that addresses its core causes, including NATO’s expansion in Europe. In 2021, Russia proposed a new security arrangement with the West that would have addressed its concerns. The response from NATO, however, was that Moscow cannot determine who gets to join the US-led military bloc.