The number of military men wishing to desert the Russian Federation has almost doubled since the summer

In Russia in the fall of 2023, the number of requests for help to desert the army increased by 89% compared to the summer. The Moscow Times provides these data from the organization “Idite lesom”, which helps Russians avoid participating in the war in Ukraine. The director of the human rights group “Grazhdanyn.Armiya.Pravo” Sergey Kryvenko also notes the increase in cases of desertion.

Military personnel almost twice as often turn to “Go to the forest” specialists for services in organizing desertion from their units. For three autumn months, 577 appeals were received against 305 for June – August. Since April 2023, lawyers and volunteers of the organization have consulted more than one thousand servicemen who tried to desert.

According to Grigory Sverdlin, head of the “Walk in the Forest” project, most servicemen decide to desert after being wounded and hospitalized.

One of the deserters said in a conversation with a journalist of The Moscow Times that he decided to desert during his vacation after his second serious injury. Human rights activists helped him leave Russia.

The director of the human rights group “Grazhdanyn.Armiya.Pravo” Sergey Kryvenko adds that the servicemen see that there is no rotation and even the seriously wounded are sent back to the front after the hospital.

According to Kryvenko, few decide to escape from the unit, since deserters are caught, sent to the field guardhouse, and then to the front, the case often does not go to court.

Sverdlin, in turn, notes that sometimes volunteers helped people desert from the front-line zone, but such cases are extremely rare. Those who are at the front often have no communication and do not always have documents – contrary to the rules, commanders take passports and tickets and give them back only when a serviceman goes on leave or is hospitalized.

Lawyer Maksym Grebenyuk says that in his practice, deserters often receive conditional terms, which does not save them from being sent to war. At the same time, they are sent to the front line, the lawyer notes.

According to “Mediazona”, since the beginning of mobilization in Russia in September of last year, military courts have received more than four thousand cases of involuntary desertion, in 3,470 cases sentences have been passed, in most cases the deserters received conditional terms.

The Ukrainian project “I want to live” claims that within an hour of the start of mobilization in Russia, they received more than 22,000 applications from Russian soldiers for surrender. The representative of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Andrey Yusov, reported that three to five Russian servicemen surrender daily under this program. It is impossible to check these data.