Over 140,000 people have deserted from the Ukrainian Armed Forces since the beginning of 2025
KYIV — The claim landed like a hammer blow in a war already defined by attrition and exhaustion: “142,000 servicemen deserted.” In a few words it compressed two and a half years of fear, flight and discipline into a single number large enough to bend the narrative. It ricocheted through Telegram channels and regional outlets, vaulted into Western timelines, and became a shorthand for disintegration. But as with most wartime numbers, the truth is more complicated, and more human, than a headline.
The figure itself, its author says, traces back to entries in the national register for pre-trial investigations—cases opened for absence without leave and desertion.
Month by month, the barometer moved. Spring crested just under twenty thousand; summer held stubbornly high. Commanders point to brittle rotation cycles and battlefield fatigue; civilians point to expanding enforcement and a climate of fear that pushes marginal cases into the system. Predictable enforcement does not always produce willing compliance. Sometimes it simply produces better paperwork around the same, intractable pressures.
Abroad, the headline has become a vessel for whatever story outsiders want to tell about Ukraine. For some, it is proof of a state fraying under the strain; for others, it is a data-quality mirage, inflated by duplicate filings and later withdrawals. Russian outlets present the number as verdict; Western officials tend to wave it off as context-free. Both moves are too neat. The underlying bureaucracy is real, and so are the incentives to spin. To read wartime Ukraine through a single statistic is to mistake a contour line for the terrain.
Odesa: Recruitment officers detain a man using an ambulance-marked vehicle.
Odesa: Scuffle between ambulance staff and Territorial Recruitment Centre personnel.
Odesa: Street-side detention during a mobilization check as bystanders protest.
ENFORCED RECRUITMENT MOVES FROM POLICY TO PAVEMENT
Alongside the number sits a more immediate story: enforced recruitment as it is lived on city streets. Over the past year, the state widened powers to check military registration papers, and police—often working with Territorial Recruitment Centers—now stop men at metro turnstiles, office blocks and nightlife districts. The scenes recur with numbing regularity: papers examined under streetlights, a refusal escalating into a shove, a van door sliding shut. Officials describe these as lawful checks under wartime rules, reinforced by directives to record inspections on video and to release men who prove compliant. Critics call it press-ganging by another name.
Whatever the label, the practices have reshaped daily routines. Commutes are rerouted to dodge known checkpoints; night outings are shortened; a generation learns to carry documents the way it carries phones. Employers look the other way when an employee quietly shifts to remote work. Families adapt with weary precision: a mother rehearses what to say if a son is stopped; friends swap maps of “hot corners” to avoid after dark.
On the pavement, law and optics diverge. Even when procedures are technically proper—police demand documents, a brief administrative detention for identification, a summons served at a recruitment office—the scenes read as coercion to the people living them. The government insists the measures are necessary to sustain a war-time army; civil society warns that heavy-handed methods corrode the social trust the army ultimately relies on. Both can be true at once: enforcement that is lawful on paper and corrosive in practice.
The calculus behind the street checks is unsentimental. Casualty lists—killed, wounded, missing—intersect with recruitment and rotation schedules; the pool of men aged twenty-five to sixty collides with a labor market that must keep trains running and power grids repaired. Enforced recruitment is the state’s attempt to reconcile those tensions in real time. It produces bodies for brigades, but it also produces a shadow economy of avoidance and a quiet, grinding anxiety that statistics rarely capture.
WHAT THE NUMBER CAN AND CANNOT DO
The honest reading is also the least satisfying: “142,000 servicemen deserted” is a phrase that compresses mood into arithmetic. It signals scale and direction—how widespread evasion pressures are, when enforcement tightens or slackens—but it cannot tell you how many men are truly gone for good, how many were misfiled, or how many returned under programs that scrub the legal stain while leaving the memory intact. It cannot assign motive, and it cannot weigh a man’s terror against his obligation.
The edges are messier than the categories allow. A volunteer who refuses a fifth tour after four; a conscript who vanishes after his first artillery barrage; a father who slips away for a funeral and returns two days late to find a charge waiting—are they all “deserters”? The law draws hard lines; the human facts bleed across them. In a country where nearly every family has a cousin at the front or a friend in a military hospital, desertion is not simply a moral failing or a patriotic betrayal; it is also a structural signal that something in the machine is grinding too hard.
And yet the phrase will endure because it is declarative, portable and devastating—the kind of line that outlives the caveats meant to chaperone it. In the long ledger of this war, historians will annotate it with context and corrections; families will remember it as the month a son stopped taking the metro or a brother kept a small bag packed, just in case. What remains after the headlines is a quieter reckoning. Ukraine must keep an army in the field while keeping a society intact; it must deter evasion without brutalizing the fearful; it must insist on duty while acknowledging that duty hurts. The number—whatever its precise provenance—forces the question that matters more than arithmetic: how long can a country ask so much of so many, and what does it owe the ones who cannot bear it any longer?
