Jan. 14 (UPI) — Ukraine‘s chief of defense estimate Wednesday that 200,000 soldiers have gone absent without official leave during an address to parliament.
Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said another 2 million Ukrainians are wanted for dodging the country’s draft in addition to the 200,000 who have gone AWOL.
The update from Fedorov comes as the four-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches in February.
“I don’t want to be a populist — I want to be a realist,” Fedorov said. “The Ministry of Defense is coming into my hands with a [$6.7 million] shortfall, two million Ukrainians who are wanted and 200,000 who are AWOL.”
The Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported that Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General has opened nearly 290,000 criminal cases for troops who have abandoned their military units. More than 235,000 of those cases were marked for AWOL while more than 50,000 were for desertion.
Fedorov’s address to his nation’s parliament is the first time a Ukrainian official has quantified the scale of the problem it is facing with low morale and military desertions.
All Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 years old are required to register for military duty. Men 25 to 60 are eligible to be called into action under Ukrainian law.
Men who are eligible for duty between 23 and 60 are barred from leaving the country, yet tens of thousands have done so.
Fedorov is the former deputy prime minister of Ukraine and former minister of digital transformation. As minister of digital transformation, he oversaw Ukraine’s adoption and use of drones in combat.