Kyiv, Ukraine – Tymofey’s palms and fingers are still dotted with lilac, half-healed scars left by the razor-sharp barbed wire on the walls around the military training centre he busted out from six months ago.
The lanky 36-year-old office worker in Kyiv told Al Jazeera he has done it twice after being forcibly conscripted in April.
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He said he chose to desert after realising how perfunctory and ineffective his training was for real combat, and that he would inevitably become a front-line stormtrooper with no chances of survival.
“There’s zero training. They don’t care that I won’t survive the very first attack,” Tymofey said, referring to the drill sergeants who were training him in April after police rounded him up in central Kyiv.
He claimed that his trainers were mostly preoccupied with preventing desertions from the centre, which was surrounded by a 3-metre (9.8 ft) high concrete wall covered with barbed wire.
“They don’t care whether a soldier learns to shoot. They gave me a gun, I shot a round in the direction of a target, and they ticked a box next to my name,” he said.
Tymofey asked to withhold his last name and personal details because he is hiding from the authorities.
He claimed he has not been officially charged with desertion or going AWOL (absent without leave), charges that can be seen in the online and publicly-accessible registry of pretrial investigations.
His explanation is simple: “Half the country is on the run”, while military and civilian authorities do not have the capacity to track down and apprehend each deserter.
Prosecutors said in October that some 235,000 servicemen went AWOL, and almost 54,000 have deserted since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Those numbers began to snowball last year. Some 176,000 AWOL cases and 25,000 desertions were registered between September 2024 and September 2025.
“Even in Russia, there aren’t that many soldiers going AWOL,” Valentyn Manko, top commander of storm troops, told the Ukrainian Pravda on Saturday.
The desertion crisis exacerbates the disastrous shortage of servicemen amid the gradual, grinding loss of Ukrainian territory to Russia.
In November, Russian forces occupied some 500 square kilometres (190 sq miles), mostly in eastern Ukraine, while the Washington-mediated peace talks stalled again.
Manko said that about 30,000 men are mobilised monthly, but the preferred number is 70,000 to “restaff” all military units.
A serviceman can be accused of deserting 24 hours after leaving his military unit, and can face between five and 12 years in jail, according to wartime regulations, while going AWOL is punishable by up to 10 years in jail.
Many prefer jail.
“The number of our deserters, servicemen gone AWOL is too high,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s General Staff of Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera. “They think that from the legal standpoint, it’s easier to go to jail than to the front line.”
Romanenko has long been advocating for the introduction of stricter wartime laws and harsher punishment for deserters and corrupt officials, who he believes should be sent to the front line instead of jail.
The legal difference between desertion and going AWOL is an “intention to leave the service for good”.
But since November 2024, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government has declared an amnesty for first-time deserters, who can return to their unit without any punishment.
Some 30,000 have, counting on the lenience of military authorities and their commanding officers.
“There’s more understanding towards them,” a psychologist at a military unit in southern Ukraine told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, because he is not authorised to talk to the media.
Desertion does not always stem from fear of death, and is often caused by inattentive commanding officers who ignore their servicemen’s issues, the psychologist said.
“Some say their commander didn’t let them go on leave, didn’t let them visit their sick relatives, didn’t let them get married,” he said.
In one case, a man in his early twenties deserted after learning he would be dispatched to the front-line town of Pokrovsk, the psychologist said.
After fleeing, the deserter worked in a factory job despite the risk of being caught, the psychologist found out later.
Meanwhile, the military police force is severely understaffed and cannot detain a serviceman without a court order unless he is drunk or threatens them with a weapon – while courts are swamped with thousands of cases that cannot be processed promptly.
So, a deserter’s nightmare is the “conscription patrols” that comprise military and police officers who comb public places asking men of fighting age to show IDs and “soldier’s tickets”, QR-coded documents about their conscription status.
But many deserters know their way around such places, or even carry enough cash to pay a bribe of up to several hundred dollars.
Deserters can also be caught while driving cars registered to them, or even connected to them via traffic fines paid for from their cards.
That is how Tymofey got caught.
For months, he had been driving his brother’s car, but in April, he used his own credit card to pay a fine for running a red light.
Days later, traffic police rounded him up, saying that a conscription notice had been sent to him months earlier.
Tymofey claimed to have never received the notice.
He was sent to a training centre in the central Zhytomyr region and escaped after finding a gap in the barbed wire and securing a ride from a friend.
To reach the car, he said he walked for five hours in the rain through a forest, stumbling and scratching his face and arms.
“The friend almost drove away without me,” Tymofey said.
Once in Kyiv, he moved to his friend’s apartment, went back to work, and even started using his old SIM card.
But two months later, he was caught again while driving his brother’s car.
His second escape was an easier, fast-forwarded version of the first one, because “the training centre was in Kyiv and the fence was lower”, he said, showing his scarred palms.
Tymofey shrugged off the opinion of his friends and relatives who condemn his “cowardice” and a “lack of patriotism”.
Some have cut ties with him altogether, he said.
Many former servicemen despise draft dodgers and deserters, thinking they should face tougher punishment and have their civil rights limited.
