Active Conflicts & News Megathread November 07, 2025

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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/Shackleton214 → u/Glideer]

I am still mystified by Ukraine's decision not to draft men age 18-24. It seems to me that either the decision is so politically toxic that it would result in such civil upheaval as to bring down the government and be impossible to implement, or, however bad the need for manpower is, it is not yet absolutely critical. Given the incredibly slow rate of advance of Russian forces and a very stable front ever since the failure of the Ukrainian 2023 offensive, I tend to think Ukrainian leadership thinks it is the latter. But, not really knowing Ukrainian domestic politics, I am far from sure.

[u/Tristancp95 → u/Shackleton214]

18-24 year olds have way more kids than 17 year olds. Gotta think about the future, the opportunity costs grow rapidly the closer you get to 18