By Ekaterina Janashia | 2026-05-19

In April 2026, 185 Russian soldiers walked away from their units in a single month, in a single city. In Mariupol, occupied since 2022, their faces now stare back from "wanted" notices plastered across bus stops, administrative buildings and market squares.

The data comes from internal records leaked from the occupation-era military enlistment office in Mariupol. The soldiers had been assigned to high-intensity assault operations, staged in training camps along the coast before being sent into grinding offensives in the Donbas and Zaporizhzhia directions. They chose to run instead.

Petro Andriushchenko, head of the Center for the Study of the Occupation (CSO), wrote on his LinkedIn page that those camps account for less than 10% of the total force being prepared for assault operations. Extrapolating the Mariupol figure across the broader theater suggests a national absent without leave (AWOL) rate of 30,000 to 40,000 cases per year -- a number he described as a "conservative floor."

A system under strain

The Mariupol numbers align with a pattern documented across Russia. UK Defense Intelligence reported that Russian courts received 20,538 cases involving service personnel who were AWOL, had deserted, or refused orders between February 2022 and late May 2025. Of those, 18,159, or 88.4%, were AWOL cases, Defense Express reported in June last year.

By April 2026, Andriushchenko said the numbers had climbed significantly. Analysts at Frontelligence Insight warn that the localized spike in Mariupol is a "dire harbinger" for the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Independent Russian-language media outlet Mediazona, which tracks court filings across 50 regions, reported in late 2025 that the government began removing case files involving soldiers listed as missing or dead from court websites.

"Case files regarding the recognition of soldiers as missing or dead — our primary tool for tracking the 'bureaucratic' death toll — have begun to disappear en masse from court websites," Mediazona said.

Ivan Chuvilyaev, a spokesperson for Idite Lesom (Get Lost), a project that assists Russian citizens in evading conscription, said the profile of those fleeing has shifted. Early in the war, conscientious objectors left the country. Now, active-duty soldiers who have reached a breaking point are driving the surge.

The recruitment trap

The pressure on personnel comes from staggering losses. Russia is estimated to have suffered 325,000 dead and roughly 1.3 million total casualties. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a March 26 interview with Le Monde, described the losses as "frightening."

"Moscow is currently losing a huge number. It's frightening -- between 30,000 and 35,000 per month!" Zelenskyy said. He added that the Russian military is beginning to "shrink," losing more men on the battlefield than it is recruiting.

To plug the gaps, the Kremlin has raised enlistment bonuses to over $40,000 and allocated the equivalent of a $22 billion budget for benefits. Those measures have failed to attract enough volunteers, deterred by the high lethality of Ukrainian drone warfare. Russia has also recruited roughly 20,000 foreign fighters from the Global South and tightened legal traps for reservists. Desertion figures, by some estimates, have reached 100,000.

The dynamic is self-reinforcing. High casualties produce high desertion rates. High desertion rates drain the recruitment pool. The "wanted" posters multiplying across Mariupol are a street-level snapshot of a military fighting on two fronts: against Ukraine's armed forces and against soldiers who have decided that a decade in prison is preferable to the next assault.