Statistically, this is comparable to the pre-war population of Poltava or Chernigov.
Responding to a request from the editors, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine (OGP) reported that from January 2022 to September 2025, 235,646 criminal proceedings were registered for SZCh, 53,954 for desertion.
At the end of August, the UCP was informed about 200 thousand proceedings under SOC and more than 50 thousand – due to desertion.
The UP states that during martial law, soldiers can serve from 5 to 10 years in prison on charges of SOCH, and from 5 to 12 because of desertion. But as statistics of those convicted for 2023–2024 show, very few military personnel receive actual sentences.
While politicians and the military are looking for new methods to combat SOCh and desertion, those mobilized do not even reach their units after basic combined arms training, says one of the publication’s sources in the defense forces.
“We now have a lot of SOC from training centers. Often those mobilized pretend that they are sick in order to get to the hospital and run away home from there. Tens of thousands of people who escaped did not even make it to the front,” the UP source quotes.
Context
On November 28, 2024, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky signed the law on voluntary return to service those who for the first time left a military unit without permission or deserted. For military personnel who returned from the Special Operations Center by a certain date, All benefits and social guarantees were to be restored.
To avoid criminal penalties for SOCH, military personnel who took such a step had to return to service by January 1, 2025. Then parliament extended the period of possible return several more times: first until March 1, then until August 30.
How reported On August 5, the director of the State Bureau of Investigation, Alexey Sukhachev, told the Interfax-Ukraine agency that during the period this law was in effect, more than 29 thousand military personnel returned to service from the SOC. At the same time, according to estimates “BBC News Ukraine”, the number of military personnel going to the SOCH is at least twice as large as the number returning.
On September 4, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted in the first reading bill No. 13260, which returns criminal liability for unauthorized leaving of a unit during martial law. He was sharply criticized by the military.
