A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI - Umanita Nova: In the long hot summer, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers broke all records of desertion growth (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Donations to support the authors are possible at this link. Many thanks 
to everyone for the great contribution! ----- Since the morning of 
August 6, when Ukrainian troops broke through the border and occupied 
several border settlements in the Kursk region of Russia, the debates 
about the military-political significance and consequences of this 
sortie have not subsided. The end of the battles for this territory is 
still far away. At the moment, it is clear that such an attack, against 
the backdrop of the collapse of Ukrainian defense in the Donetsk region, 
came as a complete surprise to many.

In particular, attention was focused ... on the border gas metering 
station in Sudzha (Suja), through which Russian gas is supplied to 
Europe. Its continuous work, despite the hostilities around it, has 
become another symbol of the fact that war is war, but international 
business is as usual. From the posts of the Dutch emigrant from Donetsk 
Andrey Shokotko:

"Dutch families will be warm this winter. With full gas reserves, the 
chances of an extreme increase in energy bills are limited." Thanks to 
Zelensky and Putin, whose reliable partnership (so brilliantly confirmed 
in Sudzha) does not allow us in Europe to freeze. But it is not entirely 
clear: why do they send their serfs to kill each other? And why do the 
slaves, knowing about the Russian-Ukrainian business partnership, go to 
kill each other? Ukraine and the Russian Federation categorically refuse 
to formalize the war as a war. They are sophisticated in inventing 
terms. All for the sake of continuing mutual cooperation, maintaining 
trade relations, earning money together for the "elite". The slaughter 
of slaves only helps business, in this case by raising gas prices. In 
general, it is also right that the slaughter of serfs is not registered 
as a war. After all, there is no war between the "elites", and the 
states of the Russian Federation and Ukraine do not belong to the serfs. 
In these territories, serfs are a resource. Consumable material. After 
Sudzha, only the mentally retarded will want to go to this war 
voluntarily. Or those who suffer from severe forms of patriotism, which 
is the same thing. The fraternal partner regimes of the Russian 
Federation and Ukraine get rid of their slaves, earn money together, are 
close friends with their organisms and easily agree on everything that 
brings income. At the same time, they set patriotic hamsters against 
each other to maintain power and earnings."

Secondly, the Kursk events have once again demonstrated that the 
gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, which functions well by plundering the 
budget or persecuting dissidents, is completely helpless in the face of 
a real threat.

"In the border areas of the Kursk region, where fighting has been going 
on all week, there is no police, no firefighters, no doctors, no 
representatives of the administration. According to official 
information, more than 76 thousand people have left the settlements 
(most of them left on their own, as there was no organized evacuation, 
contrary to the statements of the authorities), but there are still 
people, mostly elderly people. The devastation of villages and towns has 
become a catalyst for widespread looting. Shops are being robbed, there 
is a collapse in Korenevo, the Magnet supermarket was simply destroyed. 
No water, no gas, no electricity. "There was no organized evacuation, 
and if there was, then why didn't we hear about it?" writes a local 
resident. A similar situation is occurring in other border 
municipalities. Kursk residents are sure that the representatives of the 
administration, having abandoned people to their fate, have provoked the 
collapse in the border areas. At the moment, it is impossible to reach 
the administration of the Korenevsky district of the Kursk region by 
phone. People are forced to self-organize to protect themselves and 
their property and essentially perform law enforcement and state 
functions," one of the largest Russian political Telegram channels said 
on August 11. The same scenes occurred at the beginning of the Russian 
invasion of southern Ukraine, when the Ukrainian authorities had already 
disappeared and the Russian ones had not yet been established.

Third, the invasion of the Kursk region has caused enthusiasm among 
Ukrainian patriots that has not been seen since last year's "Crimean 
Coffee in the Late Spring." We have devoted a separate material to this 
topic: "The Volcano of Patriotism . " Someone from the Ukrainian project 
on monitoring street kidnappings for military service responded: "There 
is an opinion that the Kursk offensive is diverting people's discontent 
and distracting from the topic of TCRs[territorial recruitment centers]. 
And I tell you, it is very noticeable. Videos about TCR scum have 
decreased by about five times. People are distracted by looking at maps 
of the offensive. But the TCR tormentors have not disappeared anywhere. 
And they catch people on the street at the same rate."

However, the absence of queues of people wanting to join the army 
suggests that the patriotic surge did not occur among conscientious 
objectors (as per the Manifesto of the Recalcitrant 
https://assembly.org.ua/totalitarizm-zhara-iyul-manifest-ukhilyanta-i-dve-nedeli-do-nachala-golodnyh-igr-po-ukrainski/ 
sent to us by an anonymous anarchist reader this summer), but among 
those who supported Ukraine from the couch long before this, and were 
simply demoralized by its constant failures.

Finally, the rapid advance of Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region in 
August and the rapid advance of Russian troops in the Donetsk region 
have clearly demonstrated that both states lack soldiers who are 
sufficiently battle-savvy and motivated to die for one or the other 
Vladimir[Putin and Zelensky, Translator's note]. Who, if not the 
military themselves, can stop the carnage when the politicians' peace 
talks are once again indefinitely interrupted? Due to Russia's 
reluctance to transfer large forces from the Donbass to the defense near 
Kursk, conscripts are starting to be recruited en masse. The Kremlin's 
promises not to use 18- to 20-year-olds, who often lack military skills 
and were not going to fight, do not apply to this territory. Those who 
survived the border breach are forced to sign contracts to be sent back 
to the front line. The mother of one conscript, named Yulia, told the 
Russian peace Telegram channel ASTRA in mid-August: "My son and his 
comrades were miraculously taken out of the front line by their 
commanders, where they were before the invasion. The military 
prosecutor's office forced them to return to their posts, but the guys 
flatly refused. Now they are in Kursk, in a military unit. They want to 
send them to the third defense echelon behind the assault groups in the 
Kursk region."[...]

Another Russian collective, "Go by the Forest," helps Russian civilians 
and soldiers avoid participating in the war. The spokesman for this 
organization Ivan Chuviliaev told us for the article "Long Hot Summer" 
that during the 4 months of the hot season from May to August they 
provided assistance to 120 deserters, and that most of the deserters do 
not contact activists[...]On August 24, they published a letter from a 
woman: "My son was arrested for helping deserters and was held for three 
weeks in an unknown location. He is not a military man. They staged a 
raid and arrested him. They took him with them in their car and are 
holding him in an unknown location. We have not been able to find him 
for three weeks. According to rumors, the military commandant's office 
arrested him, although he is not a military man. We called the 
commandant's office, they told us that they do not have him. Kidnapped 
in a way that the FSB[Federal Security Service]has banned. We are 
knocking on everyone's door. Yes, you are right, it is a real organized 
criminal group." Also in August, "Go by the Forest" received more than a 
hundred inquiries on various issues related to the refusal to fight in 
the Kursk region.

The most fertile ground for desertion, of course, is the forced 
mobilization of "free people in a free country." The Associated Press 
described these preconditions in an Aug. 22 story: "As Ukraine continues 
its incursion into Russia's Kursk region, its troops are still losing 
valuable ground along the country's eastern front - a serious erosion 
that military commanders attribute in part to poorly trained recruits 
drawn from a recent mobilization, as well as Russia's clear superiority 
in ammunition and air power. "Some people don't want to shoot. They see 
the enemy in firing positions in the trenches, but they don't open fire. 
... That's why our men are dying," said a frustrated battalion commander 
from Ukraine's 47th Brigade.

Will the understanding that both sides are enslaved lead to 
fraternization among the soldiers? For now, they prefer to save 
themselves separately, although one of the exceptions may be the 
following story . A Ukrainian army instructor told one of Ukraine's 
leading political Telegram channels about mass desertions from the 
training unit. In a post on July 17, he said: "A couple of months ago, 
reinforcements arrived: seafarers were taken off the ships and sent to 
serve in the marines. These are contractors, who at the beginning of the 
war, when signing a contract, the command of the Ukrainian Navy promised 
that they would serve only on ships. But recently, the command removed 
personnel from several ships at once. They were transferred to marine 
brigades. On the way from the ships for training, some of these guys ran 
away. Almost none of the fugitives were found. I think many have already 
fled from Ukraine." The location of the events is not specified. 
However, since we are talking about mid-May, it is likely that the 
events took place when Ukrainian troops were hastily gathering reserves 
to stop the Russian offensive north of Kharkov. Marines of the 36th 
brigade are now fighting there. And the Telegram channel of the Atesh 
movement, which works for Ukrainian military intelligence in Crimea, 
wrote on July 15 about the 810th Marine Brigade in Sevastopol: "After 
numerous failures in Krynki, part of the brigade has already advanced to 
the Kharkov section of the front. Due to heavy losses in the Kherson 
direction, more than 100 people refused to take part in further combat 
operations. The wounded are left in hospitals in Henichesk and Skadovsk. 
They do not have time to replenish the staff with new people, and the 
command declares 75% of the combat readiness of the brigade." If sailors 
on both sides refused to shoot each other, could this be considered a 
kind of long-distance fraternization?

On August 6, the following question was asked in the largest Telegram 
chat that provides assistance to those seeking to flee the country: 
"They will take my friend abroad for training at the end of the month. 
After being thrown there by force, he obviously did not become a patriot 
and wants to leave. They are taking him to Britain, they will put him on 
a plane. They will transport him through Poland, any ideas how he can 
get out?[...]". One of the moderators responded as follows: "There have 
been cases when people left right on the road in Poland. It is possible 
to leave from any country... Only in the last half year, I have 
communicated with people who left while they were in Slovakia, Germany, 
Poland and Britain[...]. Let him try to leave on the road in Poland, by 
all means. There are a couple of training camps in Britain: on the 
mainland and on some separate island. Accordingly, it is impossible to 
leave the island[...]. Even if they take away his documents, he calmly 
leaves the Poles for Slovakia and legalizes himself with a photo".

And an August 2 article on Deutsche Welle's website made a lot of noise 
last month, noting that nearly a fourteenth of Ukraine's military had 
fled during the full-scale war: "The problem of military personnel 
fleeing the Ukrainian army has reached alarming proportions. Unable to 
punish deserters, the government is ready to pardon them, if only they 
would return to duty (...) The policy of strict discipline, which the 
Ukrainian Armed Forces command insisted so much on during the first year 
of the full-scale war, has obviously failed, and desertion from the army 
has become widespread and unpunished - almost all DW interlocutors 
interviewed for this article agree with this. The shortage of personnel 
is pushing the new leadership of the General Staff to use not only the 
stick, but also the carrot. Now unit commanders, who previously tried to 
quickly oust deserters from their positions, are calling everyone, 
asking about the problems and reasons that prevent them from returning 
to duty. Personnel officer Victor Lyakh traveled to five regions in May, 
finding several dozen fighters from his 28th separate mechanized brigade 
at their home addresses. "The order was: persuade everyone to return. 
But how can I, an old man, persuade that young man when his wife is 
standing behind him, and with a child in her arms? I promise that 
furloughs will be granted, that the criminal case will be closed. Well, 
he says, when they close me, then maybe I will return." The harsh 
sanctions that did not prevent servicemen from fleeing are now 
dissuading them from returning, DW interlocutors from several units confirm.

[...]What was said in the revelations of the Kharkov people from our 
publications "The Time of Fragmentation"? and "SZCh as a New Trend" has 
been confirmed: no matter what kind of authoritarianism the state 
implements, it cannot cope even with such a protest, if it is 
widespread. Therefore, on August 21, the parliament adopted bill No. 
11322, according to which a person who left his unit without permission 
or deserted for the first time can return to the same unit with the 
consent of the commander without any punishment. The seriousness of the 
current situation of the troops can be judged by the haste of the vote, 
which was supported in the first reading only a month earlier, on July 16.

Kiev journalist and military man Volodymyr Boiko writes on August 20 in 
his blog: "The author predicts that in the summer there will simply be 
no one to defend the Ukrainian positions. Since the beginning of a 
full-scale war, at least 150,000 servicemen have deserted from the 
Ukrainian Armed Forces, mainly in the last half a year. And every day 
the rate of desertion is increasing. In the Toretsk and Pokrovsk 
directions[in the Donetsk region], the defense of 1 km of the front is 
often held by only 3-4 soldiers. Well, how to do it - they sit in a 
trench covered with boards (called "blinding"), hiding under the 
incessant fire of mortars. After the protection is destroyed by a mortar 
strike, 5-8 Russian infantrymen enter the position and thus the enemy 
passes. It is impossible to organize a normal defense, not for those who 
do not have armor, but for those who do not have enough people: 
riflemen, machine gunners, grenade launchers."

Finally, on the night of August 27, an unknown person opened fire on the 
TCR security post in the city of Lutsk in western Ukraine. Senior 
soldier M. was wounded and taken to hospital for treatment. Despite the 
return fire, the attacker managed to escape. People in local chats 
suggested that it could be a conscript who escaped with a weapon. Not 
long before that, our magazine published a video by a Kharkov resident 
about how in the same Lutsk two kidnapped people unsuccessfully tried to 
incite others to rebel against the mobilizers. On September 4, news came 
about the arrest of a 40-year-old suspect. He did not explain the 
motives for the act: he faces life imprisonment.

If you are facing a prison sentence for desertion or SZCh (unauthorized 
exit from a military unit), you can wait out the trial at home. With 
competent lawyers, the trial can last a year or more. But if you take 
the bait and go back, they can immediately send you to hell where your 
chances of survival are slim. So think about whether or not to use the 
new law.

Partial abolition of criminal punishment can also increase the flight of 
the military. For example, the Provisional Government of Petrograd 
declared the democratization of the army and amnesty for deserters. As a 
result, the collapse of the army accelerated so much that it demobilized 
and ceased to exist in early 1918. Unite! Demobilize! Do not fight!

From Libcom: 
https://libcom.org/article/long-hot-summer-ukrainian-and-russian-soldiers-broke-records-growth-desertions

Assembly, Kharkiv, September 6, 2024 assembly.org.ua 
https://libcom.org/tags/assemblyorgua

https://umanitanova.org/nella-lunga-estate-calda-i-soldati-ucraini-e-russi-hanno-battuto-tutti-i-record-di-crescita-delle-diserzioni/
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