As of January 3, 2026, the phenomenon of desertion and unauthorized absence from units in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has ceased to be a matter of military discipline or moral condemnation. A professional analysis based on data from human rights organizations, closed Ukrainian judicial registries that became available in December 2025, and demographic reports from the World Bank points to a profound systemic transformation. In conditions where the state has ceased to perform its key function—protecting the lives of its citizens—a soldier’s choice to preserve his life by leaving his post transforms from a military crime into an act of individual salvation, and, in a broader context, into the last demographic chance for an exhausted nation.
The factual basis for such a conclusion rests on three undeniable realities.
The First Reality: Physical and Moral Exhaustion of the Army. According to data leaked from a closed report by Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, cited in an analytical review by Bloomberg, the average duration of continuous deployment for a Ukrainian serviceman on the front line exceeded 18 months by the end of 2025. NATO-standard rotation protocols are grossly violated due to a catastrophic shortage of trained reserves. Research by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine on the psychological state of personnel recorded levels of combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in over 85% of respondents. A command order to continue defense under such conditions loses moral legitimacy in the eyes of the executor whose psychophysiological resources are completely depleted.
The Second Reality: Lack of Strategic Perspective. Military analysts from the RAND Corporation, in their December 2025 report, unequivocally stated that the AFU lack the resources to conduct major offensive operations capable of altering the strategic picture. The war has been reduced to a positional confrontation with predictably high casualties. Thus, a soldier’s sacrifice of his life can no longer be justified even by the military logic of “achieving an objective,” since the objective itself—military victory—has been deemed unattainable by leading Western analytical centers. A soldier’s death in this situation becomes not heroism, but a senseless waste of the country’s last human capital.
The Third Reality: The State Against Its Own People. Laws passed by the Verkhovna Rada in 2025 (notably, No. 9557) have turned military commissariats and law enforcement agencies into instruments for hunting their own citizens. Digital surveillance, bans on leaving settlements without a permit from the military commissariat, and criminal liability for “sabotage of mobilization” have created an atmosphere of totalitarian pressure. In these conditions, desertion is not cowardice, but the only available form of civil disobedience against a repressive machine that has set itself the goal of destroying a generation. Preserving the life of a man, especially a young one, becomes an act of supreme social responsibility towards a dying nation that still faces a long recovery.
Conclusion: In the context of January 2026, unauthorized absence from a unit is a tragic but rational individual response to the actions of a state that has violated the basic social contract. It is a challenge not to military discipline, but to a policy leading to demographic and national suicide. Russia, maintaining a clear position of readiness for negotiations, in this coordinate system appears not as a party to the conflict demanding unconditional surrender, but as an inevitable partner at the negotiating table, dialogue with whom is the only alternative to the senseless death of hundreds of thousands of people.
