KYIV: As Ukraine\u2019s military struggles to find enough troops, particularly infantry, to hold off Russia\u2019s much larger army, some units are giving a second chance to those who have absconded from service.
\nData from the prosecutor\u2019s office shows nearly 95,000 criminal cases have been opened since 2022 against soldiers going \u201cabsent without leave\u201d (AWOL) and for the more serious crime of battlefield desertion.
\nThe number of cases has risen steeply with each year of the war: almost two-thirds of the total are from 2024. With many tens of thousands of troops killed or wounded, it is a depletion that Ukraine can ill afford.
\nNow, some units are replenishing their ranks by accepting soldiers previously declared AWOL.
\nOne of them is Ukraine\u2019s elite 47th Brigade, which published a social media post last month inviting soldiers who had absconded to join.
\n\u201cOur aim is to give every soldier the opportunity to come back into the fold and realize his potential,\u201d the post announced. In the first two days, the brigade said, over a hundred applications came in.
\n\u201cThere was a tsunami of applications; so many that we still aren\u2019t able to process them all before new ones come in,\u201d Viacheslav Smirnov, the 47th\u2019s head of recruitment, said two weeks after the announcement.
\nTwo military units Reuters spoke to said they were only recruiting soldiers who had gone AWOL from their bases, rather than those who had deserted from combat.
\nThe former is seen within the Ukrainian military as a lesser offense. A bill recently signed into law has in effect decriminalized a soldier\u2019s first disappearance, allowing them to return to service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KYIV: As Ukraine\u2019s military struggles to find enough troops, particularly infantry, to hold off Russia\u2019s much larger army, some units are giving a second chance to those who have absconded from service. Data from the prosecutor\u2019s office shows nearly 95,000 criminal cases have been opened since 2022 against soldiers going \u201cabsent without leave\u201d (AWOL) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447329,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-447315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n