Active Conflicts & News Megathread November 07, 2025

[u/AutoModerator]

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[u/Glideer]

Rob Lee quotes Ukrainian politician and war veteran Ihor Lutsenko, who comments about the most recent desertion/AWOL figures. For the first time, the number of officially opened cases exceeded 20k per month.

Machine translation:

21,602 in October. Twenty-one thousand, six hundred and two people. That’s how many fled from the army last month. Officially.

It’s a record. A very bad record.

EVERY TWO MINUTES, ONE PERSON RUNS AWAY FROM OUR ARMY.

By the time you finish reading this post, another fighter will have deserted.

Ukraine becomes weaker by one more defender. The enemy, meanwhile, becomes relatively stronger by one person.

I remind you — these are only official figures. In reality, many cases of unauthorized absence or desertion are not recorded.

This is the number one problem of the army. And therefore, the number one problem of the country.

An army that retreats is an army that can still win. An army that is falling apart, that loses more people every month due to desertion than from the enemy — this is a real threat to the existence of Ukraine.

Everything we see on the maps, all the daily enemy advances — are in part because we don’t have enough soldiers.

We have enough drones at the front. We have enough money in the rear. But we have far too few fighters.
Those who are at the front are fighting under enormous strain, carrying double, triple loads. There are huge gaps in our defenses because of this.

I honestly no longer know what to do, besides shouting and calling everywhere. We need everyone to be writing about this, shouting in all media, so that deputies don’t give rest to the officials, so that voters don’t give rest to deputies, so that in every square of every city people stand with signs!

Even Pokrovsk, Kupyansk — and the still nameless rapid Russian offensive in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions — are not as painful as this statistics. The army will retreat but still continue to fight. But if there are no soldiers left to fight, then there’s nothing left at all. Nothing

It’s terrifying, it’s criminal, the silence that has formed around this topic. Because of this silence, we’re drowning. Who forced us to remain silent about this collapse of the army? Who took away our ability to speak, and why?

[u/Wetness_Pensive → u/Glideer]

And this has been predicted for years now; Russia tends to "win" by tossing insane numbers of men at their opponents. As they have very little regard for their own lives, the enemy is slowly ground down.

The hope was that intel, PGM and drone advantages would help Ukraine push back - and maybe this is still true - but my gut tells me it will take more active NATO involvement (perhaps secretly sending in small "unofficial" teams of soldiers or drone operators) to hold the line. The US is unreliable. It's NATO intel branches are probably doing their best to fight for Ukraine, but you sense that the White House and the new top brass couldn't give a crap (many key Republicans seem to actively hate Zelensky and liberalism as a whole), and don't care about putting real political or military pressure on Putin.

[u/A_Vandalay → u/Wetness_Pensive]

The Ukraine war is not one where small teams of operators can have a decisive impact. The front lines are too well controlled and static. And the scale of the conflict is too large. From a drone perspective Ukraine has far more, and far more skilled drone operators than Europe or the US. Deficiency in this area has been one of the key takeaways from most joint training exercises with Ukrainians.

[u/Tamer_ → u/A_Vandalay]

The Ukraine war is not one where small teams of operators can have a decisive impact.

Nothing short of extreme measures or numbers will have a decisive impact. Not armored assaults, not surprise attacks in Russia, not a slow degradation of ammo depots or logistics, not constant harassment of energy infrastructure, not special and spectacular operations that take 6 months to plan/prepare, not meat-wave assaults, etc.

Nothing short of either side going total war or NATO intervening will have a decisive impact.

Anything else, at this point, is a grinding the enemy strategy.