The armies fighting Europe's biggest land war since 1945 are both losing soldiers without firing a shot. But while Russia has a growing desertion problem, Ukraine is in the midst of a growing manpower crisis.

Russian authorities have convicted an estimated 28,000 cases of soldiers abandoning their units since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion, Meduza reports in an investigation into desertion from the Russian army. The total number of Russian deserters is unclear, but according to analysis by the military intelligence group Frontelligence that if current trends continue, up to 70,000 Russian soldiers could desert during 2026.Yet, the losses are being largely offset by a steady flow of highly paid volunteers signing military contracts every month.

Ukraine, by contrast, has opened hundreds of thousands of criminal investigations into soldiers desertions or failing to return from leave, NV reported in November.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian law enforcement has registered more than 310,000 criminal cases related to “unauthorized absence from a military unit or place of service” (AWOL) and desertion — most of them in the first 10 months of 2025, NV reported. Between January 2022 and October 2025, 255,000 cases were opened for AWOL and another 56,200 for desertion, totalling 311,327 criminal proceedings, the Prosecutor General’s Office told NV in a written response.

The stark difference reflects the contrasting recruitment models adopted by the two countries more than three years into the war.

Russia hunts deserters — and sends them back

According to Meduza, more than 28,000 Russian servicemen had been convicted of going AWOL by May 2025, with the total now believed to exceed 30,000. The report describes a military justice system that increasingly seeks not to imprison deserters but to return them to combat. Even sending them to prison means most convicts will end up back on the front line as Russia has emptied its prisons in its search for combat soldiers.

Beginning in the summer of 2022, the Wagner Group headed by the late Evgeny Prigozhin, recruited tens of thousands of convicts directly from Russian prisons, promising pardons after six months at the front. Following Prigozhin's failed mutiny and death in 2023, the Ministry of Defence took over the programme. By most estimates, well over 150,000 prisoners have been recruited since the invasion began, sharply reducing Russia's prison population. According to Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), the number of inmates has fallen from around 420,000 before the war to below 300,000, the lowest level in modern Russian history. Officials have acknowledged that many penal colonies have been left with only a fraction of their previous populations. Having largely exhausted the prison pool, the Kremlin has continued to offer enormously generous signing bonuses and high military salaries to attract civilian volunteers, but according to recent reports it is now failing to recruit enough fresh troops to cover losses at the frontline.

That has refocused the military authorities on cracking down on deserters. Soldiers who disappear from their units — known colloquially as sochintsy, after the Russian military abbreviation SOCh for unauthorised absence — face a growing nationwide manhunt. Recent cases included authorities in Russia's Belgorod region declaring 13 soldiers wanted after they fled almost simultaneously.

While going AWOL can theoretically carry prison sentences of up to 10 years, or 15 years in aggravated desertion cases, Meduza reports that the military's preferred solution is often simply to recapture soldiers and send them back to the front, increasingly into assault units where casualties are highest.

Rights organisation Peace Plea, which advises Russian soldiers seeking to avoid combat, says forced redeployment has increased significantly since 2024. Many soldiers now regard imprisonment as preferable to another deployment into some of the war's bloodiest sectors.

Ukraine's numbers are vastly larger

The scale of Ukraine's desertion problem is substantially greater. Before the figures were classified late last year, Ukrainian prosecutors had opened approximately 311,000 criminal cases for desertion and unauthorised absence since the start of the invasion, with more than half of those cases opened since the beginning of 2025.

Official court statistics indicate that well over 100,000 AWOL cases have already reached the judicial system, while Ukrainian MPs had previously disclosed that desertions had exceeded 100,000 by late 2024.

Famously, the problem was best illustrated by the collapse of Ukraine's elite 155th Mechanised Brigade, who were sent to France for advanced training and equipment, receiving some of the most advanced Western weapons supplied to Kyiv. This is an elite battalion and were used to spearhead the Kursk incursion in 2024. Embarrassingly, hundreds of them deserted as soon as they arrived in France. Up to 1,700 soldiers from the brigade eventually went AWOL before the unit had fired a shot. Around 50 disappeared during training in France, while hundreds more vanished on their way back to Ukraine, despite receiving extensive Nato instruction and modern equipment. The brigade was eventually broken up and its surviving personnel redistributed among other formations.

Volunteers versus conscripts

The contrast largely reflects how each army recruits. Russians volunteer and are well paid for their commitment. Ukrainians are violently pressganged into service against their will.

Russia offers signing bonuses that in some regions exceed the equivalent of $40,000 – multiples of the average annual salary –

alongside monthly salaries several times the national average. As IntelliNews reported, a Siberian bus driver can earn double his usual salary just driving a truck behind the lines. Western intelligence estimates Russia continues to recruit roughly 25,000 to 35,000 volunteers every month, broadly enough to replace, though not necessarily exceed, its exceptionally heavy battlefield losses.

Ukraine closed the borders to the exit of military aged men as soon as the year started and introduced compulsory service. Unable to attract sufficient volunteers, Kyiv increasingly relies on the “busification” of eligible men enforced by the much-hated Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Centres (TCKs).

Videos circulating daily on Ukrainian social media show recruitment officers forcibly detaining military-aged men in the streets before loading them into minibuses. The policy has become one of the country's most divisive wartime issues.

Last week tensions came to a head in Lviv, traditionally one of Ukraine's most patriotic cities, when an anti-mobilisation protest escalated into a riot after recruitment officers allegedly assaulted a civilian. Protesters overturned and then smashed a TCK vehicle before police restored order. Embarrassingly, it later emerged that several of the rioters were active duty servicemen that had deserted and were hiding in Lviv, as far from the frontline as it is possible to be inside Ukraine.

A shrinking pool of manpower

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) is facing a growing manpower crisis. While the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) is currently losing a reported 1,000 men a day as it tries to capture the town of Kostiantynivka and the remain parts of Donbas it doesn’t’ already control, as IntelliNews estimated, the AFU is losing somewhere between 100 and 300 men a day.

The absolute number of Ukraine’s losses is less, but proportionally Ukraine is losing more than Russia. Russia has roughly five-times more people than Ukraine, assuming a Ukrainian population of 29mn, which many experts say is on the high side.

However, this ratio is made worse by the fact that more than 5.7mn Ukrainians remain abroad after fleeing the war. According to expert estimates, of the pool of people left in Ukraine, half of them are now pensioners. Others are exempt due to health reasons and single parents or parents with more than three children are also exempt. In addition, large numbers of eligible men still in the country have gone into hiding to avoid serving. In real terms that suggests that Ukraine’s pool of possible recruits could be a tenth of Russia’s.

Russia is also facing a manpower shortage and as IntelliNews reported, tensions between the doves and the hawks in the Kremlin to end the war soon is growing. The doves want to call it a day here and freeze the conflict on the current line of contact. The hawks want Russian President Vladimir Putin to call a second general mobilisation and flood the Donbas with hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits to bring the war to a speedy end. Rumours are currently swirling that a new mobilisation will be called after this September’s parliamentary election. Previously, Putin held a partial mobilisation in September 2022, recruiting some 300,000 men to meet a manpower shortage then.

Russian forces continue making slow but persistent advances across the Donetsk region while Ukraine struggles to rotate exhausted frontline units that, in many cases, have been fighting continuously for months. Despite the recent talk of a “turning point” in the war, more sober Ukrainian reports admit that the AFR continues to make slow but consistent progress.

As the war enters its fifth year, battlefield success may depend less on who possesses the better weapons than on which country can continue persuading its citizens to keep fighting.