Ukrainian army rocked by AWOL debate

Ukrainian article of the week published in the 49th edition of the "What about Ukraine" newsletter on October 10th, 2024. The article was written by Kateryna Amelina for LB.ua and was translated for n-ost by Tetiana Evloeva.

On 21 September 2024, Serhii Hnezdilov, a soldier serving in the 56th Separate Motorised Brigade of Mariupol, announced he was leaving his unit and going absent without official leave (AWOL). Calling this measure a ‘voluntary demobilisation,’ he went on to explain that it was meant to raise awareness of the lack of defined terms of enlistment for the Ukrainian military.

Hnezdilov’s act stirred a variety of reactions among his fellow military personnel. While some supported him, arguing the urgency of the problem and his AWOL status put the issue in the spotlight, others denounced his method as unfair towards those continuing to serve, and that he normalised going AWOL in the Ukrainian army, which is a crime.

This article won’t cover these reactions in detail, nor will it comment on his act.

Instead, it will try to dissect if AWOL is really a problem in the Defence Forces, and how the issue of demobilisation is being addressed.

Talk the talk, walk the walk

Serhii Hnezdilov’s stunt initiated a public discussion on AWOL. However, according to Artem Chekh, a writer and serviceman who volunteered to join the army in the early days of the full-scale war, it has been the talk of the military for a while. He insists that the issue came to the fore in the context of just mobilisation and the defined terms of service of military personnel — or their lack thereof.

“It was being talked about back then [in 2023],” Chekh writes in a post online. “I’ve heard that from a lot of people. Not from everybody. What started as half-hearted remarks, grew into discontent expressed loud and clear. In my social circle, someone first mentioned openly going AWOL about a year ago. People were fucking exhausted, and couldn’t take it any more. All the while [the higher-ups] kept telling us that bullshit about ‘people used to fight in the Great Patriotic War until the end, armed with nothing but a stick, and even that was available to one person in three’. However, it wasn’t until the autumn of 2023 that people started talking about openly going AWOL.”

Still, many servicemen don’t talk about it or mention it anywhere — they just act on their urge. For instance, they fail to return from their leave.

An acquaintance of mine serving as an air reconnaissance officer is ambivalent about the situation. “On the one hand, that’s totally understandable, because people are tired and want to be with their families,” he tells me. “On the other hand, it’s your unit that takes the blow, every single time.”

He has a recent example from his life. One of his brothers-in-arms failed to return from his leave the day after my friend left for his, and his unit was short of soldiers.

“The very day I returned from my leave,” he shares, “I went to the frontline to relieve my fellow serviceman from his duty. He was supposed to have been on a ten-day deployment, but this was extended to a total of 40 days. He knew that I was supposed to come and relieve him, and he was waiting for me. Can you imagine what it would be like for him if I went AWOL, too?”

Still, some people are thinking of going AWOL out of desperation, and this debate is becoming more and more common.

“My partner and I have been calling each other less and less lately,” shares a woman whose partner has been in the military since the early days of the full-scale invasion, and is now deployed in the Sumy region. “He won’t talk to anybody. He’s becoming more and more depressed, as apart from sheer exhaustion, there are numerous unsolved issues that have mounted over the past two and a half years, like fixing his paperwork, problems with his higher-ups, insufficient supplies and all sorts. And there’s no way he can transfer elsewhere. He’s been voicing his thoughts of going AWOL every now and then, but I don’t know if he really means it… I guess the fact that he is approaching his official leave made things a bit easier for him.”

Hardly anyone knows the exact number of the military who went AWOL so far. Over the past week, estimates of 80,000 to 100,000 were voiced, however, the military believe that that number is definitely higher.

“These are just the cases where an official report was properly submitted by their senior officer,” explains Andrii Pysarenko, a defence attorney in civilian life and mortar battery commander in the Wolves of DaVinci Battalion. “I know a number of understanding commanders who don’t report their ‘temporarily lost’ servicemen, unwilling for them to end up in prison. However, when a report is filed, its data also has to be entered into the Unified Register of Criminal Proceedings, which lately requires an articulate adjudication by a judge. Which, in the reality of a frontline, means wasting precious time, so the real numbers of people going AWOL are several-fold.”

There are situations where a commander is even afraid to file a report fearing punishment for themselves, as teambuilding is their responsibility.

“The country is already facing mass desertion, and it will only get worse,” shares Diana Makarova, who has been helping the military as a volunteer since 2014. “If there are more deserters, there is less real opportunity for their punishment, so the number of such cases will only increase progressively. You are scared, aren’t you? Imagine how scared those servicemen and servicewomen who remain on duty must be. They have the most to fear, as there are no reinforcements, not now, and not in the future.”

At the same time, netizens share cases where soldiers who went AWOL try to return, but others in their brigade don’t want to see them again.

As explained by someone in the military: “It’s just that this person is unreliable. What if you appoint them to some position today, and they run off again tomorrow? That would be a total pain in the ass.”

“The system lacks resources to deal with outright deserters”

By definition, any act of deserting constitutes AWOL, however, not any act of AWOL is deserting, insists Andrii Pysarenko in his comment for LB.ua.

“The main difference here is that a deserter makes a conscious decision to abandon their military service, the army, and their area of responsibility on the frontline for good, while AWOL doesn’t necessarily imply leaving the military forever,” he says. “Perhaps they were unhappy about something or didn’t have enough time to return from their leave, or there was a family emergency. Or someone might disagree with the orders from their higher-ups that they find unprofessional, and thus they abandon their unit until they can be transferred, or their commander is replaced.”

He mentions that in every case of AWOL, he came across, the person in question had a solid underlying reason.

Pysarenko goes on to explain that since martial law is in effect in the country, it makes no difference whether a military personnel leaves their unit when on the front line while carrying out the combat orders, or in the hinterland.

“Of course, AWOLs can occur on the front line, in a combat situation,” he explains. “If someone’s goal is to abandon the military altogether, they are considered a deserter. If they have no such intention, it’s just AWOL.”

However, in both cases, the guilty party can be sentenced to a minimum of five years in prison, and this is what Pysarenko can’t stress enough in his post titled ‘AWOL Reference Card’: nobody cares to understand their motives and their situation. That happens because the State consistently fails to hear the military out and look for ways to solve their issues, and opts for intimidation and punishment.

“In late 2022,” explains Pysarenko in his post, “members of the Parliament made amendments to the Criminal Code without any prior discussion whatsoever, and passed an inquisitional Law No.8271 in just one day, highlighting, increasing and cementing the culpability of the military compared to the rest of the society. From a legal point of view, that Law was very primitive: they increased the terms of incarceration, and only did that for military personnel.”

The lawyer stresses that memos detailing terms in prison are often handed out as a means of ‘motivating’ the military — instead of giving them proper quality training and building trust within the unit, both peer-to-peer and in their higher-in-command, which is very similar to the ‘methods of motivation’ used by the Russians.

The defence attorney believes that the system is unlikely to deal with such a workload, even if we just consider the official number of registered cases of AWOL.

Another problem is that this number includes both the AWOLs and the deserters, which means none of these two cases is being properly investigated. Which, in turn, means that some people from that pool have already returned to active duty.

“The system lacks resources to deal with outright deserters,” says Pysarenko. “The cases are so many, that oftentimes, they aren’t even investigated properly. The investigators just don’t have enough time, they are short-staffed, and the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) is overwhelmed. Someone is considered in hiding even while they may be sitting at home, at their official address. Those are thousands of people throughout the country,” notes Pysarenko.

In August 2024, the Parliament decided to decriminalise the AWOLs for first-time offenders, if they return to their (or any other) military unit.

Pysarenko believes “in the autumn of 2022, amateurs ruined the clear structure of the Criminal legislation just to stipulate prison terms for all the military servicepeople, regardless of their circumstances (Law No.8271). That was a very lame way to motivate the military. When they finally realised that the system had failed, they decided to drop the culpability for AWOL for first-time offenders. I mean, it’s like trying to put out burning gasoline with water.”

“I don’t see anyone who can replace my current personnel”

What the military personnel most want is a guarantee that they will be able to return to their civilian lives, sooner or later.

Legislation on demobilisation was due to be adopted in May 2024, by amending the law with a clarification for the real terms of service. The standard term of deployment was supposed to be 12, 24 or 36 months.

However, on the day of voting, that provision was removed from the text at the request of the commander-in-chief and the minister of defence.

“Politicians stopped mentioning demobilisation in their speeches about half a year ago,” muses serviceman and journalist Pavlo Karazin in his recent post. “Instead, everyone just reduced the entire discussion to talk on how to give the civilians means to buy themselves out of drafting, basically paying for their right not to wear military uniforms. At the same time, of course, nobody is planning to put a price on the right of the military to take those uniforms off.”

Kyrylo Veres, the commander of the K2 Battalion currently defending the Siverskyi frontier, also expresses his bewilderment when asked about the opt-out prices in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda: how come some are given the girth to buy themselves out, while others aren’t?

“I can afford to pay my way out,” he says. “I would gladly pay 100K for a chance to spend the next three months home. I mean, let each serviceperson pay 35,000 to the State Budget and get a month off from the active warzone.”

Speaking about demobilisation, the commander says he can’t imagine how that is possible under the current circumstances:

“Somehow, I don’t see anyone who can replace my current personnel. Demobilisation is supposed to be about one person leaving the service, and someone else filling their position. What if you only have that first person, with nobody to replace them? I don’t see how that is possible. As a commander, I would rather keep my unit without having to replace 60 percent of the personnel, as these are the people who have been in combat and are experienced soldiers. As a human being, I would rather have them get some rest. I know for a fact that many of them will eventually return.”

“We need to make more effort to keep the soldiers we do have”

Ihor Lutsenko, a military serviceman and commander of the volunteer unit of combat UAVs Order of Santiago, also doubts that a demobilisation of such scale is possible during wartime.

“Let’s be honest and admit that there will be no mass demobilisation after 36 months of active duty, because to do that, they need to be training new soldiers as we speak, which isn’t happening. Current mobilisation rates hardly allow us to fill in for those killed in action. Therefore, apart from other things, we need to make more effort to keep the soldiers we do have and who are currently in the combat alive and well,” notes Lutsenko in his post.

His proposal is that a tour of duty in the military should last six years, which he believes will have a positive effect on the military (read the critical analysis of Ihor Lutsenko’s proposals by our military columnist Viktor Kevliuk here).

According to him, we need to first and foremost enforce the legal order in the army, so that the service people can dispute arbitrary decisions of their higher-in-command and actually stand a chance to win those disputes.

The second thing is a clear-cut and easy-to-understand rotation system.

“We can apply the ‘three months at war — 1.5 months as a civilian’ model and so on. Such a rotation model would allow the military to recover while staying in touch with their families and saving their marriages. It even allows the military to partially retain their usual civilian lifestyles. Yes, we need more draftees to allow for that, however, that’s still less than under full demobilisation,” suggests Lutsenko.

His third recommendation is to abandon the rank requirements as prerequisites for being appointed to certain positions until the war is over.

“80 percent of our army are yesterday’s civilians. If they are good in combat, we should give them a chance to build an army better fitted to their needs, with its own rules and procedures,” stresses Lutsenko.

The fourth recommendation is to introduce a merit rating for commanders, to purge the ineffective individuals from leadership and decision-making positions.

Another offer is to introduce a special status to the high-tech branches of the military, so they can be more flexible in organising their operations, and in their cooperation with the civilians.

Another condition is establishing a clear procedure for transfers so that after a certain period of service, a military personnel can choose to transfer to the unit where their skillset will be the best fit.

This offer is widely supported by other military servicepersons, who say that transfers could improve the current situation, as there are cases when a soldier would like to stay on active duty, but in another role, for a variety of reasons. However, despite a significant demand for transfers, this is not happening.

Official response — or the lack of it

There has been no official response to Hnezdilov’s stunt, neither from the supreme commander-in-chief Volodymyr Zelenskyi, nor from the commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, nor even from the General Staff.

The officials also failed to breathe a word on the new draft law that the Ministry of Defence and the General Staff are expected to propose in the near future, to finally do something about demobilisation by the end of this year. The General Staff was supposed to undertake research on the reinforcement drafting rates and dynamics, and finally come up with specific suggestions.

Yet, according to BBC Ukraine, quoting their own sources, no such documents have been introduced in the Parliament.

Iryna Friz, an MP from the European Solidarity Party, believes that this issue will not be resolved by the end of this year.

“Most likely, the General Staff will offer to track this dynamic of mobilisation in September, October and November, to determine whether we have sufficient human resources to form a [military] reserve, to relieve all those service people who will be eligible for a discharge,” the MP tells BBC Ukraine.

To get a general idea about the current situation of the draft law and whether this issue has even been discussed, LB.ua approached several members of the Parliament’s Committee on National Security, Defence and Intelligence. However, we weren’t given any answers. We will update this piece should we get some updates.

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Every military serviceperson who spoke up regarding the issues of AWOLs and demobilisation emphasises that they expect some form of reaction from the Government and the Higher Command, which include introducing effective solutions.

Military serviceman Anton Chekh notes in his post on the current situation:

“To the State’s outright denial of the possibility of demobilisation, we have an answer that is simple in its naivety: draft more people, then, you fuckerballs! What, corruption is in your way? Too bad, but why am I the one to take the rap for your fuckups? I’ve been defending this country for long enough, and in the meanwhile, the State was supposed to beat the shit out of anyone who was standing in my way while I’ve been defending it. They were supposed to beat the shit out of those fuckers from the Physical Evaluation Boards who established a price to recruits to condemn them as unfit for service, and beat the shit out of those lawyers who fix paperwork for fictional marriages and divorces, and even funerals, and so forth; beat the shit out of those dickheads always clustering near recruitment centres holding their little man-purses and ‘making settlements for certain persons’ [to evade recruitment]. This is a simple request for justice. Is it naïve? Perhaps it is. Naïve as it may be, it is at least honest.”