by Kirill Velesov
[REGNUM] On October 29, Verkhovna Rada deputy Anna Skorokhod said on television that more than 100,000 cases of SZCh have already been recorded in Ukraine. Translated from Ukrainian, it means unauthorized abandonment of a military unit, i.e. desertion. At the same time, only 10-15% of military personnel, Skorokhod claims, are at the front.
“Ordinary people have a question: why should I, yesterday’s service station worker, be in the trenches when our big officers are not fighting, but are in the rear?!” the deputy said, hinting that 100 thousand is far from the final figure, and there are actually many more deserters.
The head of the Supreme Court of Ukraine, Stanislav Kravchenko, also spoke on this topic the day before. According to him, the situation with the increase in the number of cases of unauthorized abandonment of the unit, as well as refusals to follow orders from the command among Ukrainian military personnel is extremely serious.
“We haven’t analyzed it yet, I can’t give specific figures, but there is a significant trend towards increasing the SZCh,” Kravchenko confirmed in a comment to the Interfax-Ukraine publication.
The figure cited by the media, he noted, "slightly exceeds the real one," but "the situation remains threatening." The head of the Supreme Court believes that the blame for everything lies in the negative coverage of the work of the TCC (military commissars), which everyone is already calling "busification," weak patriotic education, and insufficiently stimulating salaries for the military.
As for the frightening footage of "busification", the Ukrainian authorities have long been trying to restrict the media (especially city or regional Telegram channels) from publishing these videos. But videos of passersby, men entering a store, or drivers being "packed" still leak onto the Internet.
In late October, the court sentenced an Odessa resident to a year of probation for the first time for a video of a force mobilization at the intersection of Grushevskoho and Khimicheskaya streets in the city. The prosecution asked for five years, but an agreement with the investigation and admission of guilt saved the man from a real term.
"I CAME OUT OF THE HOOKAH BAR"
The loudest story about the SZCh in Ukraine is the escape of a serviceman of the 56th separate motorized infantry Mariupol brigade, Sergei Gnezdilov. He announced his decision to leave the unit live on air on one of the state radio stations.
"I voluntarily demobilized. They can just arrest me now, but at least in prison there are clear terms," the man said.
That same day, he wrote on his social networks that the only thing five years of contract service in the Ukrainian Armed Forces convinced him of was that “no one is born for war.”
Public opinion was divided over Gnezdilov's actions. A huge number of military personnel supported him, since they too were at the front without a specific end date for their service, while public figures and "activists" predictably condemned him.
"The beautiful and public abandonment [of the military unit] did become an example. And some followed. And some stayed. Stayed so that tomorrow Russian tanks would not come to Kiev," political expert and serviceman Kirill Sazonov commented pompously on Gnezdilov's actions.
He also spoke out sharply about an article in the American newspaper The New York Times, which in those same days published a hopeless story for Kyiv about the dire situation, mortal fatigue and despair of the Ukrainian military. Journalists also took a comment from Gnezdilov, who said that he “had no choice but to leave, slamming the doors very loudly, and finally make people talk about the problem” – the problem of demobilization, which simply does not exist in Ukraine.
Before Gnezdilov, journalist Viktor Tregubov attracted a lot of public attention to his actions when he left his military unit last fall and called it "the act of a tired infantryman." Tregubov was undergoing treatment in Kiev and did not return to the front, but "left the hookah bar and went his own way."
“Heroes are not slaves” - with such posters, again and again, relatives and wives of military personnel who have not seen their loved ones since February 2022 take to the streets of Kyiv’s Khreshchatyk.
In a comment to Channel Five during one of the rallies, the wife of a serviceman, Ekaterina, said that she had participated in collecting signatures for a petition addressed to Vladimir Zelensky so that the term of service would be 36 months with combat coefficients.
"Sergey Gnezdilov, let's be honest, sacrificed himself to draw the attention of the authorities and society to the fact that the military is exhausted, they need to be replaced, because otherwise there will be mass SZCh. From systemic combat exhaustion, they lose motivation, coordination and health," explained Ekaterina.
The appeal did not produce any results.
"DIED OF PSYCHOSIS"
In an article for the newspaper Espreso, serviceman and blogger Alexey Petrov draws attention to the fact that the problem lies not only in the timing and demobilization.
The main problem is with motivation, which simply does not exist, including due to the illegal, cruel and demonstrative actions of employees of territorial assembly centers (TACs).
"For example, a guy was stopped on the street by the Tetsek workers and mobilized right in his slippers, that is, sent to the troops. They didn't even let him go home, hug his wife, children, mother and father. And the military registration and enlistment office did its job in the meantime," writes Petrov. - <…> And so, a person who is offended by everyone and everything ends up in the Training Center and at the first opportunity "gets on skis."
Despite the bans, videos of “TCK work” are becoming more numerous every day: another riot against military commissars was staged on Tuesday by women from the Volyn village of Karpilovka, who nearly overturned their car and fought off their men.
The highways of Kharkov and Khmelnitsky look frightening: the roads in the city are blocked not just by patrols, but by dozens of TCC “patrols” that stop literally every passing car and drag men out.
The day before, lawyer Serhiy Kasyanchuk stated that employees of the Zhytomyr TCC, while detaining him "for a document check," broke his collarbone, and a mobilized resident of the Lviv region died under strange circumstances two days after "busification." The official reason is "psychosis," but photos published by relatives show that he was brutally beaten.
The key reason why Ukrainians are fleeing the front is the understanding that they have only two options: to become SZh and save their lives or to die defending yet another “fortress,” which is falling in Donbas one after another. Even the authorities no longer hide the fact that they lack people to plug the holes in the defense. This means that “mobilized” men, that is, men taken from the streets, after two or three weeks of preparation and with minimal equipment, will be thrown into the hottest spots of the front. The chances of survival for former SZh workers and other Ukrainians are close to zero.