What a quarter-million deserters tell us about how this war ends

Ukrainian desertion cases reached 235,646 by September 2025. The historical comparator literature gives the figure operational meaning.

Ukrainian desertion cases reached 235,646 by September 2025. Russian AWOL prosecutions are on pace for 70,000 in 2025. The historical comparator literature gives the figure operational meaning: this is where wars end.

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office releases quarterly statistics on criminal cases involving the offences of *unauthorised absence from duty* (Article 407 of Ukraine's Criminal Code) and *desertion* (Article 408). Both offences have specific legal definitions and prosecutorial thresholds, and both have been the subject of significant criminal-justice activity since the February 2022 invasion. The cumulative figures through September 2025 — drawn from the Prosecutor General's published data and from monitoring by independent Ukrainian outlets — show 235,646 cases of unauthorised absence from duty and 53,954 cases of formal desertion since February 2022. The combined total is approximately 290,000 individual military personnel against whom one of the two charges has been formally registered.[1][2]

The Russian comparator is harder to assemble because the Russian state has not published equivalent figures, but the Mediazona project — which catalogues Russian court records exhaustively from publicly available court databases — has identified 10,308 cases of *refusal to serve* (Article 332.2.1) and 5,204 cases of *AWOL* (Article 337) prosecuted in Russian military courts in 2024 alone, with the full 2025 totals expected to reach approximately 70,000 if the first-half-of-2025 pace continues. Cumulatively across the war, Mediazona's catalogue identifies approximately 16,000 criminal cases through 2024, with 14,182 of those involving AWOL. The Russian figures are an undercount; the Ukrainian figures are not, but the case-management threshold for what counts as a recorded AWOL case differs substantially between the two systems, making a one-to-one comparison unreliable.[3][4][5]

The aggregate magnitudes nonetheless support a clear quantitative claim: the combined Russian and Ukrainian desertion-and-AWOL cohort across the post-2022 war is comfortably in excess of a quarter-million people. The available evidence does not establish whether the true cumulative figure is closer to 300,000 or 500,000, because both states are operating under conditions in which the criminal-justice response to military personnel absence is selective rather than comprehensive. What is established is that the order of magnitude is in the high six figures, on both sides, and that the rate of new cases has been accelerating across 2024-25 rather than stabilising.

The historical-comparator literature gives this figure analytical meaning. The political-science literature on desertion in interstate war, developed across the comparative-conflict scholarship of the 20th century — including the major datasets developed by the Correlates of War project, by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, and by individual scholars including Jasen Castillo, Eyal Ben-Ari, Cornelia Beyer, and Ron Hassner — has consistently identified rising desertion rates as a leading indicator of war-termination dynamics. The Castillo work on military cohesion is particularly relevant: he has argued, on a synthesis of cases from World War I through Vietnam, that desertion rates approaching 10 percent of deployed force-strength serve as a structural threshold above which war termination becomes the most likely outcome within a 12-24 month window.[6]

Ukraine and Russia are now both above the 10 percent threshold by most reasonable measures.

The Ukrainian case

The Ukrainian Armed Forces have approximately 800,000 total personnel as of late 2025, including approximately 700,000 in active combat units and the remainder in training, support, and territorial defence roles. The 235,646 AWOL cases plus 53,954 desertion cases represent approximately 290,000 individual personnel — roughly 35 percent of the total active force, counting cumulatively since the war began.[1][2]

This figure is misleading on first inspection. Not all of the 290,000 are still missing; many have returned through the November 2024 amnesty programme (approximately 30,000 returnees by mid-2025), through formal prosecution and reintegration into reduced-status units, or through informal return-to-unit processes that did not produce a criminal-justice resolution. The cumulative figure also includes second-time and third-time absentees, who are counted as separate cases. The Frontelligence Insight analysis estimates that the true cumulative net-loss-to-the-force from desertion-and-AWOL is approximately 120,000-150,000 personnel — roughly 17-19 percent of the active force.[2][7]

The trajectory is the concerning element. The pace of new AWOL and desertion cases has accelerated through 2024-25: approximately 100,000 new cases in the September 2023-September 2024 window, approximately 176,000 in the September 2024-September 2025 window. The 76 percent year-on-year increase reflects the cumulative effect of three years of intensive combat, the deterioration of unit cohesion in long-engaged formations, the introduction of expanded conscription that has brought less-motivated personnel into the force, and the general exhaustion of a war whose end is not in sight.[2]

The Zelensky government's response — the November 2024 amnesty programme — was an explicit acknowledgement of the magnitude. The amnesty's terms (first-time deserters can return to their units without criminal prosecution) have produced approximately 30,000 returnees, a useful but modest fraction of the cumulative cohort. The amnesty has not been extended to second-time deserters, formal desertion (as opposed to AWOL) cases, or to personnel who left before specific operational dates; the residual cohort that remains outside military authority is substantial.

The Russian case

The Russian Armed Forces' total deployed strength has been more contested. The most reliable estimates put Russian deployed strength in the Ukrainian theatre at approximately 600,000-700,000 across 2024-25, with broader Russian military personnel under arms substantially larger. The cumulative AWOL and desertion case count of approximately 16,000 through 2024 represents a relatively modest 2-3 percent of deployed strength on the catalogued cases alone.[3][8]

But Mediazona's case count is, again, an undercount. The Russian criminal-justice system has applied AWOL and desertion charges selectively — typically against personnel who have left and refused to return for extended periods, rather than against personnel whose absences are administratively resolved through pressure or family-intervention. The Frontelligence Insight estimate of the true Russian desertion-AWOL cohort places the figure at approximately 50,000-70,000 personnel by mid-2025, with the year-end 2025 projection approaching 100,000 if the current trajectory continues. The proportion would then be approximately 12-15 percent of deployed strength — comparable to the Ukrainian figure.[3][7]

The Russian state's response has differed structurally from the Ukrainian state's. Russian military authorities have relied on a combination of severe criminal-justice penalties (sentences of 5-10 years for AWOL, life sentences for desertion in wartime), public-information campaigns identifying deserters by name, and informal violence — including documented cases of deserters being executed in penal battalions. The Russian state has not offered amnesty terms equivalent to the Ukrainian government's November 2024 programme. The combination of severe formal penalties and continued unit pressure has compressed the visible desertion rate without resolving the underlying cohort, and the Mediazona case-count growth (10,308 cases in 2024, vs 5,517 in 2023) reflects the increasing willingness of Russian commanders to escalate cases through the criminal-justice system rather than resolve them informally.[3][8]

What the historical comparator literature predicts

Castillo's *Endurance and War* and related work on military cohesion identifies several patterns from 20th-century cases that may bear on Russia-Ukraine.

First, desertion rates above approximately 10 percent of deployed strength serve as a reliable indicator that the underlying war is approaching its termination phase. The mechanism is not that the deserting force loses the war directly; it is that the political pressure created by mass desertion — the families, the social-network effects, the political costs of the criminal-justice response — forces the political leadership of the war-fighting state into a settlement-seeking posture within a 12-24 month window.[6]

Second, the relative-desertion-rate differential between the two parties to a war is a leading indicator of which side will be forced to settle first. The state with the higher desertion rate typically loses negotiating leverage and accepts terms it would not have accepted at lower desertion rates. The current Russian-Ukrainian comparison — Ukrainian net desertion cohort of approximately 17-19 percent, Russian estimated cohort of approximately 12-15 percent — suggests that Ukraine, despite its substantial battlefield innovations and its strong international support, is facing somewhat greater internal manpower pressure than Russia is.[2][3]

Third — and this is the analytic point that Lawrence Freedman has developed in his *Comment is Freed* commentary — the desertion-rate trajectory matters more than the absolute level. A force whose desertion rate is high but stable can sustain operations for substantial periods; a force whose desertion rate is rising rapidly is much closer to a settlement-forcing threshold. Both the Ukrainian and Russian forces are in the rising-rate category as of late 2025; the Russian growth is faster (a doubling of court cases year-on-year), but the Ukrainian absolute level is higher.[2][7]

The settlement-forcing implication

The implication, on the integrated historical-comparator and contemporary evidence, is that both Russia and Ukraine are operating in a manpower-attrition regime that has, by historical precedent, produced political-settlement pressure within 12-24 months in roughly two-thirds of comparable cases. The remaining one-third of cases involve continued conflict despite the manpower pressure, either because external resupply has substituted for desertion losses (as in some U.S.-supplied Vietnam-era ARVN cases) or because political authoritarianism has compressed the political effect of desertion (as in the Soviet experience in Afghanistan).

Both Ukraine and Russia face mitigating factors. Ukraine's external support — principally the EU's continued financial assistance, the U.S.'s residual weapons supply, and the broader Western political backing — has substituted for some of the manpower losses by sustaining the war effort despite the desertion pressure. Russia's authoritarian compression of political response to desertion has, similarly, contained the political-pressure transmission. Neither mitigation is permanent.

The 12-24 month window that the historical literature identifies as the settlement-forcing horizon would, applied to the current trajectories, suggest that the period between mid-2026 and mid-2027 is when the political-settlement pressure created by the desertion crisis would, on historical precedent, become operationally binding. Whether either Ukraine's external support or Russia's authoritarian compression will continue to absorb the pressure beyond that window is the principal open question.

The quarter-million-plus desertion-and-AWOL cohort is not, by itself, a prediction of war termination. It is a quantitative marker that the war has entered the phase that the comparative-conflict literature has identified as the settlement-pressure phase in most prior cases. The political-leadership response to that pressure — the willingness or unwillingness to negotiate, the willingness or unwillingness to absorb further casualties, the political-system's tolerance for the continuing criminal-justice burden — will determine whether the war ends within the historical-typical window or proves to be one of the cases that breaks the comparator pattern.

What we can say with confidence, on the available data: the war is now in the phase that has, in most comparable historical cases, preceded a settlement. The pressure is real. The trajectory is wrong. And the figures by themselves — a quarter-million plus on each side, accelerating — are the buried fact that should orient Western analytic attention toward the political-end-game question that has, in the public-policy discussion, been deferred by the focus on near-term battlefield events.

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