More than 80 men vanished from a single facility in Saxony-Anhalt since 2022. The men were mostly mobilised rather than volunteers, the newspaper reported on August 20, and used their deployment to the Altengrabow training area as the opportunity to leave. Around 29,000 Ukrainian service personnel have passed through some 60 German military facilities since February 2022, learning marksmanship, camouflage, first aid and other basic skills.

Under Ukrainian law they are deserters and face up to 12 years in prison if they go home. In Germany they have no legal footing either: Section 24 of the Residence Act, which grants protection to those "forced out of Ukraine", covers civilians and not military personnel sent by their own government. Germany's defence ministry has acknowledged that some soldiers have absconded but said there is no central system tracking the cases nationwide.

A woman kneels before an officer of a Territorial Recruitment Centre in Kamenskoe, Dnipropetrovska oblast, in a widely circulated image. Most of the soldiers who deserted in Germany had been conscripted rather than volunteered. Source: social media, @provenance unverified

The number is small against 29,000 trainees, and set against the war's overall manpower problem it is close to noise. What makes it worth reporting is where it happens. These are men who have already been mobilised, already been equipped and already been sent abroad at allied expense - the most expensive point in the pipeline to lose them, and the one place where walking away carries no immediate physical risk.

Manpower is the constraint on this war for both sides, which is the reason the arithmetic gets picked over so obsessively. Russia has a desertion problem of its own on a far larger scale, while Ukraine's is a recruitment crisis, and the question of who runs out of men first has been the war's real clock since 2024. Ukraine’s general prosecutor currently has over 300,000 cases of desertion outstanding according to local Ukrainian press reports.

This is not the first time that this has happened. Hundreds of soldiers from Ukraine’s elite foreign-trained brigade went AWOL from a training camp in France last January. One of Ukraine’s flagship military units, the 155th Mechanised Brigade, trained in France and equipped with some of the best Western weaponry, has lost over 1,700 soldiers from active duty, after they abandoned their posts without firing a single shot. French officials downplayed the incident saying that only a few dozen men had gone missing from barracks in France, as most disappeared on their way back to Ukraine’s frontlines.

Morale amongst the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) is fading away as Kyiv’s recruitment programme fails to find enough fresh recruits. Mobilisation practice is also the specific thing President Volodymyr Zelenskiy asked his new defence minister to fix. Introducing Yevhenii Khmara on August 19, he called for a more humane approach to conscription and rotation - an acknowledgement that how Ukraine takes men into the army is now a strategic problem, not an administrative one.