December 1, 2025: Ukrainian government and military believe victory over Russia within their grasp. Since 2022 Ukrainian forces have retaken half the territory the Russians occupied in 2022. While the Ukrainian leadership is in a victorious mood, the troops are not. The Ukrainian leadership knows there is a problem with recruiting/conscripting soldiers and then retaining them in service. The growing number of desertions and AWOLS are caused by soldiers not knowing when their military service will end. Soldiers feel that if they will be in uniform indefinitely, they will probably die. New programs being developed will avoid this. Each soldier will have his current service contract amended to include a date the soldier is free to go home or simply take an extended leave of several months or more and then return to service. It is hoped that these new plans will reduce the number of desertions and even encourage deserters to return to service under more survivable conditions.

To deal with the problem the government is revising service contracts so new and existing soldiers will know when their service is over and they can go home. It is known that soldiers who take a break from combat, either to recover from wounds or accept an amnesty for deserters, are often willing to go back into service, especially if it is a non-combat job. Most of the jobs in the military are non-combat and the military is considering rotating people into and out of combat jobs. This will avoid having troops burn out after years in combat. Since

The current number of troops in the Ukrainian military is about 900,000, with about 97 percent of them in the ground forces. Since 2022 Ukraine has lost about 44,000 dead and 76,000 due to disabling wounds. Losses due to desertion and AWOL/Absent WithOut Leave have been about 250,000 plus about 14,000 soldiers captured by the Russians. The rate at which desertions and AWOL has occurred has been more than doubling each year since 2022. In 2022 it was 9,300 deserters, in 2023 it was over 24,000 while in 2024 there were over 60,000 deserters and AWOLs. The number of deserters and AWOLs so far this year are about 100,000.

Desertions were low early in the war but increased the longer the war went. Currently over 500 Ukrainian soldiers desert each day, which is ten times the rate in the Russian army. About half the total desertions have occurred in the last year. Nearly four years of losses to all causes and made it more difficult to recruit Ukrainian men to serve in the army.