By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-08-11

Deserters in Russia's war on Ukraine are being marched back to the front lines so they can participate in the deadliest attacks.

Those missions are so lethal that soldiers call them "meat grinder assaults."

Faced with a shortage of troops for what it calls its "special military operation," the Russian military has largely stopped jailing deserters. Instead, commanders are forcing them to rejoin the fight, a tactic that echoes the World War II-era command to Soviet soldiers, "Not one step back."

Between early June and early July, Russia nabbed more than 1,000 deserters, according to the independent outlet Verstka.

Authorities formally arrested no more than 10 of them; they handed the rest back to commanders for deployment, often into the most dangerous assaults.

The Russian Defense Ministry has embraced the policy as a way to plug gaps in its ranks after heavy losses in Ukraine.

The criminal code

Under Article 337 of Russia's criminal code, penalties for going absent without leave depend on the length of absence and whether the country is at war or mobilized.

Under Russian law, penalties for going absent without leave range from months of detention in peacetime to up to 10 years in prison during war, with sentences growing harsher the longer a soldier is gone and the graver the national situation.

An investigation by the independent outlet iStories estimated at least 49,000 Russian soldiers and officers have deserted since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The figure is based on two leaked databases: a list of absent-without-leave (AWOL) troops from the Southern Military District between 2022 and 2024, and a list of defendants in desertion cases published in March by the Ukrainian initiative I Want To Live, which encourages Russian troops to surrender.

A separate list from the 20th Motorized Rifle Division showed that 65% of those names matched Southern Military District data. Many of the same names appeared in Russian garrison court records for AWOL convictions.

Reasons for such manhunts included fleeing front-line positions, going AWOL and refusing to return after medical treatment or official trips.

Combining the databases produced a single list of 49,001 names, nearly identical to an estimate last December of 50,554 deserters by the Ukrainian open source intelligence group Frontelligence Insight.

iStories cautioned the leaked data contain errors, while Alexei Alshansky, an analyst at Farewell to Arms, said the true number may be higher.

Violation of the law

Exiled Russian rights activist and blogger Alexander Kim said the war against Ukraine violates Russia's own laws, falling under Article 353 of the criminal code on waging an aggressive war.

"Any practices compelling men to serve as part of this war are demonstrably unlawful," he told Kontur.

The state faces fading public support for the war, forcing it to offer large payments, pressure citizens to sign contracts and hire foreigners, according to Kim.

Successful working-age Russians are unlikely to volunteer "even for money." Deserters risk arrest or even being killed during detention, Kim said, noting that even officers flee: "These aren't isolated cases."

The system of coercion and abuse in the army, he added, began on February 24, 2022, with the full-scale invasion and has only intensified.

London-based political analyst Alisher Ilkhamov said sending large numbers of troops who violate military discipline into "meat grinder assaults" shows that President Vladimir Putin's regime increasingly relies on inhumane methods to fill ranks decimated by casualties.

Kim called the tactic an extrajudicial punishment, replacing a few months in prison with what amounts to a death sentence, since these assaults generally doom their participants. The approach, he added, shows a shift from financial incentives to fear, as payments no longer yield the desired results.

"This practice ... shows how the Putin regime is heading toward completely inhumane methods of running and replenishing the army," Ilkhamov told Kontur. "The government is relying on fear because the material incentives are no longer working."

An expendable resource

Dmitry Dubrovsky, a social science lecturer at Charles University in Prague, said sending Russian troops to assault units instead of to court violates both Russian and international law. The Geneva Conventions require states to protect people under their control from violence and humiliation.

"If service members are sent into assault units without a legal procedure, that essentially amounts to using human life as an expendable resource. This sort of practice can be categorized as brutal and inhumane treatment, and in the future, the International Criminal Court could consider it a war crime," Dubrovsky told Kontur.

He said Russia has no legal mechanisms to protect service members from these actions and that prosecutions will not be possible until an international investigation of alleged war crimes begins.

Elena Koneva, an analyst with the ExtremeScan research group, told Current Time in July that surveys show Russian public opinion on the war shifting toward pessimism. Almost 60% of respondents reported feeling depressed or anxious, and only 15% to 18% were making long-term plans, a share that continues to decline.