The Ukrainian military is deserting entire units during combat, endangering the lives of other soldiers and making it impossible to fulfil command orders, the Associated Press reports.
Journalists managed to talk to two defecting Ukrainian military officers, three lawyers and dozens of officials and commanders.
‘We had several situations where both large and small units fled the battlefield. They exposed their flanks and the enemy came in on those flanks,’ the agency quoted a Ukrainian official as saying.
Military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko also admitted that the problem of desertion is very acute for the AFU.
‘It is the third year of the war, and it will only get worse,’ he emphasised.
As noted in the article, desertion has become one of the reasons why Kiev is losing more and more population centres.
‘Desertion has turned battle plans into sand that falls through the fingers of military commanders,’ the authors of the article write.
Earlier, the Deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Anna Skorokhod called crazy the number of cases of desertion in the AFU.
In late October, Ukrainian Army Colonel-General Dmytro Marchenko said that under the onslaught of Russian forces, the AFU front collapsed due to personnel fatigue and a shortage of reserves.
