200,000 deserters and 118,000 fatalities

No demobilization, ministry of defense eliminates anti-corruption organs, Syrsky/Umerov under attack from Yermak/Bezuhla. Azovite: send the LGBT NATO defense ministers to the trenches

Next week, I’ll be taking a deep dive into the complicated power struggles inside the Zelensky elite itself - the name Yermak is probably familiar to my readers, but get ready to also get Tatarov-pilled. Battles among Zelensky’s own court elite may be translating themselves into more visible conflicts and events. This post’s selection of telegram commentary should hopefully get the reader acquainted with the crises wracking the army.

Volodymyr Boiko, a journalist and lawyer currently serving at the frontlines, September 7:

People's Deputy Ruslan Horbenko, a former deputy of the Luhansk City Council from the "Party of Regions" and now a servant of an unknown people [a joke about the name of Zelensky’s party - Servant of the People], claimed that allegedly 80,000 servicemen have deserted from the Ukrainian army during the war. This, to put it mildly, is a lie: the people's representative is simply unaware of the real situation at the front. In reality, 80,000 (to be exact, 78,330) is only the number of criminal cases entered into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations under Articles 407 and 408 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The actual number of deserters is approaching 200,000.

In just August 2024 alone, 6,808 criminal cases were registered under Articles 407 and 408 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, and no more than a third of the cases are registered, as the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) deliberately conceals crimes against the established military service procedure (because the SBI only investigates cases that can be lucratively "sold"). Military unit commanders even have to go to court to compel investigators to enter reports of unauthorized leave by servicemen into the register.

Since February 2024, I have repeatedly written that the front would collapse in the summer due to mass desertions, explaining the reasons and naming those responsible—Defense Minister Umerov, General Tourist Kostin, and SBI Director Sukhachov (https://t.me/volodymyrboyko/4942). However, instead of immediately correcting the situation by replacing Kostin, Umerov, and Sukhachov with competent leaders, restoring military justice, creating a system of disciplinary battalions, and assigning criminal investigations under Articles 407 and 408 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine to the national police (transferring the necessary resources from the SBI to the police), the parliament decided to decriminalize desertion. They even declared that deserters would no longer be held accountable, even if they happened to come to the attention of law enforcement.

The consequences for the front will be catastrophic.

Back in May, Boiko counted 55,000 criminal cases registered regarding desertion, and estimated there were over 130,000 deserters. I wrote about that estimate of his here.

Oleksiy Honcharenko, high-publicity parliamentarian from Petro Poroshenko’s party European Solidarity. Honcharenko and ES represents the liberal-nationalist, western-connected opposition to Zelensky, who they criticize as an incompetent figure surrounded by corrupt obscure figures connected to Russia or the Yanukovych elite (such as Yermak and Tatarov). This post also cites an article from Ukrainska Pravda on the topic of demobilization, showing as usual the cohesion between publications like UP and the anti-Zelensky opposition. Post from September 17:

The saga of the demobilization bill has been going on for over a year and a half.

I first submitted this bill back in March 2023. Then there was a similar petition to the President and long months of fighting for basic justice, which would ultimately provide a motivated military and people who know what to expect from the future.

We were promised a lot, but nothing was done. The mobilization law was supposed to resolve everything, but here again, people were simply abandoned. The "Servants of the People" party simply ruined this law and removed all bonuses for the military, including demobilization.

After that, we were promised that at some point, somewhere, a separate bill would be made. But over time, we stopped hearing about demobilization altogether.

There's complete chaos in the Ministry of Defense. Umerov is just sitting idle.

And for them, everything is fine. A separate caste.

Meanwhile, the people defending our country are abandoned and have no idea what to expect.

Maryana Bezuhla, who I wrote about at length in this recent article. In short, Bezuhla publicly criticizes top generals, which serves two functions: in a generous reading, it is Zelensky’s way of putting pressure on incompetent officers, and in a less generous reading, it’s a PR tactic of diverting public anger away from the government and onto the ‘corrupt Soviet generals’.

Anyway, as you can see in the way this September 18 post ends by calling on the president to do something, there’s clearly a ‘good Tsar, bad boyars’ dynamic going on here. Also, she’s now writing her posts in English - she has finally moved out of the parliamentary security/defense committee into the parliamentary foreign relations committee (Poroshenkites and the like have been trying to push her out to no avail for months). Another interesting development - probably Zelensky’s attempt to show the western partners that ‘there are principled anti-corruption figures on my side too, they aren’t only oppositional Poroshenkites’: