April 26, 2024: Since early 2022, when Russia unexpectedly invaded Ukraine, Russian soldiers have been seeking ways to avoid going to Ukraine. Russians quickly realized that Ukraine was a dangerous place for armed Russians. For Russian deserters, Russia was also a dangerous place to be. The penalty for desertion, if caught and convicted, is ten years in prison. After that you are considered an unreliable traitor in Russia. If deserters leave Russia for another country, they are often seen as possibly dangerous visitors and some are accused of being spies or saboteurs.

The growing number of Russian soldiers deserting the army are an obvious sign of the unpopularity of the war in Ukraine. It’s illegal in Russia to openly oppose the war. Laws that made opposition to the war are a recent development. This means the Russian media cannot mention that nearly half a million Russian soldiers have been killed, crippled by wounds, or deserted while in Ukraine because of the war. The growing number of deserters is something the government is keen to keep secret. Military age Russian men are willing to do just about anything to avoid fighting in Ukraine. So far, several hundred thousand of these men have expressed a willingness to leave the country to avoid the war in Ukraine. Getting out of Russia legally is a problem but not impossible to solve. These men believe the war will continue until Russia gets a new leader.

The current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, is a former Soviet KGB (Secret Police) officer who never lost his KGB paranoia about foreigners or his need to punish Russians suspected of misbehavior or disloyalty. With these traits, Putin began his efforts to restore the Soviet-era police state. Putin’s paranoia led to the invasion of Ukraine and an obsession with delusions that NATO was seeking to surround and cripple Russia economically and militarily. Leaving aside the fact that NATO is and always has been a defensive organization dedicated to protecting its members from Russian aggression. NATO nations provide Ukraine with military aid, not soldiers, to defeat the Russians invading Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion as part of a plan to rebuild the Soviet Union. Putin considers the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 a major tragedy that must be rectified. Putin ignores the fact that none of fourteen new nations emerging from the Soviet Union collapse wanted to have anything to do with Russia. Meanwhile the Russian Federation, the most powerful of the fifteen successor states to the Soviet Union, has other plans. The war in Ukraine is part of that plan and it is not working out as Putin expected. One asset Putin has is several hundred thousand military age Russian men who can be mobilized to fight in Ukraine. Russia has four times the population of Ukraine and Putin believes that quantity has a quality of its own. By mobilizing enough men to fight in Ukraine, the Ukrainians will be defeated. This will happen despite the weapons NATO countries are supplying or trying to supply. A faction of American politicians are blocking shipments of American weapons to Ukraine in the belief that a Russian victory in Ukraine would make Russia less dangerous for the United States. Many Americans disagree with this assessment but Putin agrees with it and needs those weapons for Ukraine to remain blocked so Russia can win.

Soldiers in the Russian army or men eligible to be mobilized into the army want the Ukraine War to stop. Putin has made it clear that he is willing to lose as many Russian soldiers as it takes to defeat Ukraine. Putin ignores the fact that a growing number of those Russian men are fleeing the country or deserting the army in Ukraine and seeking asylum in the West or Central Asia. Russia is prosecuting deserters it can capture and recently Central Asian states agreed to cooperate by allowing Russian deserters to be arrested and returned to Russia. That’s bad for the few thousand Russians arrested. Other Russian soldiers and military age men now must depend on obtaining asylum in the West. That is possible in Western Europe, while Eastern Europe is less welcoming to Russian asylum seekers. The east European countries were under Russian domination for nearly half a century and still don’t trust Russians. Europe and the United States are more accommodating, as is Israel if the Russians are Jewish.

Russia can’t win in Ukraine using soldiers who don’t want to fight. Ukraine has already adapted and makes it easy for Russian soldiers to surrender and then move to Western Europe. That region is experiencing a growing labor shortage caused by population decline. If the incoming Russians are willing to learn a new language and adapt to the European democratic culture, they are welcome. Yet there are many Europeans who believe that Russia will take advantage of the situation by planting spies and pro-Russia agents among the Russian refugees. That has not halted the movement of these refugees into Europe but has made many Europeans wary of these new arrivals. Russian efforts to discourage the defections by sending agents to murder a few prominent refugees has not had the expected impact and angered the European governments.