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A Ukrainian MP recently made an unsubstantiated claim that there were 400,000 open and ongoing cases of desertion from the Ukrainian military since the invasion by the Russian Federation in 2022. It may have been hyperbole, or they may have had a source in the judiciary.
However, the General Prosecutor’s office wrote to the New Voice of Ukraine in early November that 310,000 criminal cases related to unauthorized absence from a military unit or place of service (AWOL) and desertion are currently registered, 162,000 of which came just this year. There have been over 21,000 desertions in October 2025 alone, claims journalist and former lawmaker Ihor Lutsenko—now commander of a Ukrainian drone unit.
“This is a record. A very bad record. 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,” he wrote, according to the New Voice. He stressed that these are just official figures, and that the real number is only likely to be higher.
Suddenly, the widely dismissed total of 400,000 doesn’t seem impossible, and if a Ukrainian soldier downs his tools every 2 minutes, it leaves quite a lot of time for 400,000 to be reached by the end of the year.
The news comes as a 28-point plan for a lasting peace in Ukraine was recently proposed by the Trump Administration in an effort to capitalize on talks with Vladimir Putin held during a summit in Alaska, and to bring the Ukrainians back to the table. Both Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have admitted that within the 28 points lies the framework discussed between the leaders in Anchorage without actually endorsing it. Both also acknowledged the “long pause” between the summit and the completion of this new document.
On the other hand, Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev told Axios, that published a full version of the agreement last Thursday, that he was “optimistic” and that “we feel the Russian position is really being heard”.
Military analysts skeptical of the Ukrainian army’s ability to withstand Russia for much longer have said that Russia will never agree to the 28-points; they apparently include existing deal-breakers, and new demands including that Russia and Ukraine must implement tolerance and anti-racism education programs towards other nations and ethnic groups. The plan would give Ukraine a security guarantee akin to NATO membership, while also barring through constitutional amendment an attempt by Ukraine to join NATO.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could visit Trump at the White House in the next few days “to complete final steps and make a deal,” according to Ukraine’s national security chief. Meanwhile, US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is planning to meet Russian officials in Abu Dhabi.
On the battlefield, Russia has claimed less than 1% of Ukraine’s total land area in its assaults this year. A piece in the Washington Post today continued the paper’s coverage of the war which WaL has found to be overly-positive and potentially delusional. The piece claims that despite manpower and weapon superiority, the Russian military has lost some 200,000 causalities to claim around 1,000 square miles of territory this year. It claims the Russians are not inside Kupiansk, another large town in the middle of the fighting, and reports that analysts don’t believe Russian forces are anywhere near a breakthrough.
The Post cited the always-bullish Finnish open-source intelligence outfit Black Bird Group, as well as the Royal United Services Institute of London, both of which found that Russia was losing men at an extraordinary rate and gaining very little as a result, all while sourcing every claim that might denigrate the Russians, and leaving unsourced anything that might reveal the true plight of Ukraine’s army.
Claims that the Russian army has been using “meat grinder” or “human wave” tactics, that their casualty rates far exceed those suffered by Ukraine, and that the country’s dead and wounded number in the thousands, just don’t reflect the basic fundamentals of the battlefield. Perhaps at certain times their casualty ratios have been this high, but confirmed limitations on the Ukrainian army just don’t back this up.
Another interpretation
In a 2023 interview article and paired essay published in The Economist by former Ukrainian supreme commander Valery Zaluzhny, and in another published in Time as a collection of insights from President Zelenskyy’s “closest aides,” the writers make it brutally apparent that Ukraine had lost the war.
It was brutally apparent because of the reasons given by Zaluzhny: that even if partner nations gave them every weapon and shell they needed the armed forces of Ukraine “don’t have the men to use them”. Put in other words, it means that Ukraine lost after hundreds of thousands of young men were killed and injured.
That same year, El Pais reported in their coverage of the war that certain parts of the front line saw Russian artillery pieces outnumbering Ukrainian guns 5 to 1 and even 10 to 1 in some cases. WaL reported that certain Ukrainian artillery positions were at the time receiving single numbers of shells per day to use. Ukraine has largely conducted its defense without conventional air support, and with the difference in artillery, there’s simply no reason to believe that Russian casualty ratios could be so high compared to Ukraine’s.
According to a researcher at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden, regarding Russian military losses, Ukraine engaged in a misinformation campaign to boost morale, and “Western media were generally happy to accept its claims,” while Russian estimates of Ukrainian dead and wounded were roundly dismissed.
Similarly, The Post seems happy to mention “Kyiv’s acute difficulties with stemming desertions and recruiting soldiers are leaving gaps in Ukrainian defenses that Russia has been able to exploit,” without elaborating the true scope of that challenge.
Russia managed to take only minimal land this year, but with the massive advantage in firepower and the knowledge that their opponents are suffering from mass desertions, they don’t need to move quickly. They can, in fact, minimize their casualties by advancing slowly into a sometimes toothless, degraded enemy, and slowly destroying it until it loses the will to fight.
The invaders have faced no threat of a meaningful counterattack in over two years, and apart from the doomed punch into Russian territory by Ukraine in 2024, nothing has interrupted them from concentrating all their forces and materials into the Donbas, Zaporizhia, and Kherson.
In WaL’s latest conflict update, Russian forces were taking Pokrovsk, even while advancing to within 25 miles of the provincial capital of Zaporizhzhia, a city with 700,000 inhabitants.
“There has been no diminution in the country’s determination to resist aggression, however tough and exhausting the situation appears at this time,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London in the Post’s coverage. “Nor do they accept the Russian narrative that they are being pushed to defeat”.
Time will tell if this narrative holds up as well as those from earlier in the war—that Putin can’t win and had, in fact, already lost. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Soldiers of the motorized infantry battalion of the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade Kholodnyi Yar training under the cover of fog. PC: 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade Kholodnyi Yar via Telegram.
