Up to 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers are feared to have vanished from the ranks while training in France.
Fifty-six troops from the 155th Mechanised Brigade are confirmed as having gone awol, but officials are investigating the whereabouts of hundreds more, said The Guardian. Ukrainian news website Censor.net has claimed that as many as 1,700 soldiers had fled the brigade without going into combat – and the French exodus is part of a much wider desertion crisis thinning Ukraine's ranks.
The number of deserters in Ukraine's army has become "unmanageable", said Svitlana Morenets in The Spectator. Officially, some 90,000 soldiers have deserted – almost half of them last year – but the unofficial number is "much higher".
Although the exact figure is a military secret, even Kyiv officials "concede the number is large", said The Guardian. Desertion is usually punishable by between 12 and 15 years in prison, but to lock up thousands of men when they are "badly needed on the front line" would be "a mistake", said Morenets. Ukraine passed a law last year "forgiving soldiers who went awol for the first time" as long as they "agreed to come back", but this has been "calamitous" for discipline – "essentially giving men permission to flee".
Meanwhile, one Ukrainian commander predicted the trend would only get worse as conscription squeezed the country's society and "there are more and more people who are forced to go", said France 24. Is there any way to stem the flood of deserters? "We just have to end the war," he said. | 
