Ex-Minister of Kyiv acknowledges grim outlook as 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted this year, warning of potential defeat in the war if the trend persists

Ukraine’s army is registering sky-high rates of desertions as Russian forces continue to grind westward, leaving the nation’s former foreign minister to acknowledge Kyiv ‘will lose the war’ if the conflict continues along its current trajectory.

Prosecutors opened up 60,000 cases in the first 10 months of this year against soldiers found to have deserted their posts – almost double as many cases initiated across all of 2022 and 2023 combined, the Financial Times reported. 

In an effort to stem the flow, Ukraine has upped its recruitment efforts, setting a bold target of signing up another 160,000 men to support war-weary frontline units in the next three months.

But the conscription drive has also come under fire with episodes of brutal assaults on unregistered men in city streets by masked press-gangers for ‘busification’ – rounding-up of civilians to be transported to army training centres – becoming all the more frequent.

The shocking rates of desertion were revealed as Vladimir Putin’s forces move inexorably further into Ukraine, aiming to seize as much territory as possible ahead of Donald Trump‘s imminent return to the White House with both sides expecting Washington to push for ceasefire talks early next year.

Although their ranks are suffering heavy casualties, the Russian army is advancing at a rate faster than at any other time after the initial days of the 2022 invasion, taking an area half the size of London in November.

The bleak circumstances led Dmytro Kuleba to declare that Kyiv ‘will lose the war’ unless a major reversal of fortunes can be realised.

Kuleba, Ukraine’s wartime foreign minister until his resignation in September amid a cabinet reshuffle told the FT: ‘Do we today have the means and tools to turn the tables and change the trajectory of how things are happening? No, we don’t. And if it continues like this, we will lose the war.’

Putin’s troops swept through swathes of Ukraine in early 2022 and were bearing down on Kyiv in a matter of days, but they were held on the outskirts of the capital before being pushed back and retreating further east. 

After that, the 1,000 km (620-mile) front line remained largely static save for some minor offensives one way or the other – that is until Ukraine launched a lightning incursion into Russia’s Kursk region this summer. 

Now though, Ukraine’s valiant defenders are wilting under incessant pressure from Russian troops which have sustained a fearsome rate of artillery fire matched with glide bomb attacks and full-frontal assaults.

‘Russia has set new weekly and monthly records for the size of the occupied territory in Ukraine,’ independent Russian news group Agentstvo said in a report last week. 

The Russian army captured almost 235 square kilometres (91 square miles) in Ukraine over the past week – a weekly record for 2024 – and had taken roughly 600 square kilometres (232 square miles) in November, the report claimed.

Those figures were largely supported by the US-based Institute for the Study of War, which put the amount of territory gained since November 1 at 574 square kilometres (221 square miles) – an average rate of 22 square kilometres per day.

The war is now entering what some Russian and Western officials say could be its most dangerous phase weeks before Trump returns to the Oval Office amid fears he could dramatically reduce aid to Ukraine as he seeks to force a ceasefire deal.

North Korean troops are reported to be bolstering Moscow’s forces and Kyiv is now using Western-supplied missiles to strike back inside Russia – a development that prompted Putin to unleash a never-before-seen ‘Oreshnik’ hypersonic missile late last month. 

The Russian President also declared last week that Moscow could soon begin to strike ‘decision-making centres’ in Kyiv if Ukraine continues to hit targets in Russia with US and UK missiles.

The Kremlin chief’s stark warning followed hours after Russian forces pounded Ukraine with dozens of missiles and drones overnight in an attempt to degrade the energy network as a bitter winter approaches.

Thursday’s barrage, in which Ukraine downed 79 missiles and 35 drones, left over a million Ukrainians without electricity in freezing cold temperatures. 

The thrust of the Russian advance has been in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, with Moscow’s forces pushing towards the town of Pokrovsk and into the town of Kurakhove.  

Pokrovsk is widely cited as a key strategic location given that it serves as a vital logistics hub for Ukraine’s Armed Forces. 

Russian war bloggers say that if Russia can pierce the Ukrainian defences around Kurakhove, they will be able to push westwards towards the city of Zaporizhzhia while securing their rear to allow a swing towards Pokrovsk. 

Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s SVR Foreign Intelligence Service, said on Tuesday that Russia held the complete strategic initiative on the battlefield.

He also added that Russia is open to negotiations but stated that the Kremlin would ‘categorically reject’ any ‘freezing’ of the current frontline, demanding that Ukraine relinquish areas of the four Ukrainian regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – that the Kremlin has illegally annexed without fully occupying. 

The past days saw Russia launch some of the biggest drone attacks of the war so far, cutting power to much of the western region of Ternopil and damaging residential buildings in the Kyiv region.

But for all the fanfare over Putin’s latest hypersonic missile and the devastation caused by large-scale drone attacks, most analysts argue the main driver preventing Kyiv’s troops from successfully defending their territory is a lack of ammunition. 

Russia has increasingly encircled territory and then pummelled Ukrainian forces with artillery and glide bombs, according to Russian analysts, with the sheer numerical superiority of Moscow’s artillery batteries and ammunition affording Putin’s troops a significant advantage.

Russian artillery divisions can be deployed in more locations and can sustain a much higher rate of fire than their Ukrainian counterparts, helping to scupper Kyiv’s counterattacks while softening up defensive positions. 

A recent report published by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank and Open Source Centre estimated that Russian artillery attacks are responsible for some 70 per cent of Ukrainian casualties. 

Their research revealed that Russia’s rate of artillery fire has averaged roughly 10,000 rounds per day since the early months of the war which saw peaks as high as 36,000 rounds per day. 

By contrast, Ukrainian fire rarely exceeded 6,000 and dropped below 1,800 rounds per day by early 2024. 

The RUSI report also surmised that sustaining such an outsized artillery and ammunition advantage is central to Russia’s path to victory, concluding that it is essential for Western countries to provide Ukraine with considerably more ammunition to prevent Russia’s advance.

‘As of August 2024, the Russian theory of victory does not centre on major breakthroughs, but rather on the destruction of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) as a force capable of defending the breadth (of the frontline),’ the RUSI report read. 

‘The Russian leadership likely believes it can kill its way out of the war, and artillery will be key to doing that. 

‘So long as Russia maintains a substantial advantage in artillery systems, it can use tactics that will, over time, deplete the AFU of reserves – a critical vulnerability for Ukraine.’

Though satellite imagery and intelligence reports allow researchers and analysts to assess the Russian advance with relative accuracy, battlefield reports from both sides consistently contradict one another. 

Last week, Russia’s Defence Ministry reported the capture by its forces of another village, Kopanky, in Kharkiv region, another focus of Russian military activity north of the main theatre of fighting in Donetsk region.

But Ukraine’s third separate assault brigade said it had cleared the village of Russian soldiers in a post on Telegram on Monday.

Ukrainian media quoted Nazar Voloshyn, a spokesperson for the Khortytsya group of troops, as saying Kyiv’s forces had repelled a Russian advance on the logistical centre of Kupiansk, also in Kharkiv region. 

It was the second time in November that the Ukrainian military reported rebuffing an attack on Kupiansk, even after Russian commanders said they had invaded the city two weeks ago. 

Putin has repeatedly said that Russian forces are advancing much more effectively now than earlier in the war and insisted that Russia will ‘achieve all its aims’ in Ukraine without specifying exactly what those are. 

Militarily, the goals of the so-called special military operation are generally seen as securing the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and ousting Ukrainian troops from Kursk. 

Russia controls 18% of Ukraine including all of Crimea and almost all of the Luhansk region.

However, Ukraine has managed to retain roughly 30-35% of the Donetsk region, as well as the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south.

A source on Ukraine’s General Staff last weekend said that Ukraine now held around 800 of the 1,376 square kilometres of Kursk that they held initially and would hold it ‘for as long as is militarily appropriate’.

Putin is also adamant that Ukraine must remain a ‘neutral state’ that is not part of NATO. He claims that Western powers – particularly the US and UK – are fighting a war with Russia through Ukraine which he sees as a vassal state. 

Neither Russia nor Ukraine publishes accurate data on their losses, though Western intelligence estimates casualties to number hundreds of thousands killed or injured, while swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine have turned into wastelands.

Ukraine has been struggling with deepening manpower shortages and is embroiled in an unpopular debate about how to bolster the military’s ranks amid outrage over brutal incidents of civilians being press-ganged on the streets of Kyiv and other cities.

Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council Oleksandr Lytvynenko told Parliament in late October that the army planned to recruit another 160,000 people in the coming months.

But Ukrainian military officials acknowledge the situation in the east is the worst now that it has been all year.

In an interview with former Ukrainian MP Borislav Bereza in October, Col-Gen Dmytro Marchenko said: ‘I won’t be revealing a military secret if I say that our front has crumbled.’

He went on to cast doubt on Volodymyr Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’ for being too reliant on political, economic and military support from Western allies.

‘This plan lacks any points addressing Ukraine or our needs,’ Gen Marchenko added.

Zelensky has blamed the difficulties of his armed forces on several factors, including delays of up to a year in equipping brigades, partly because of the long time the US Congress took to sign off on a major Ukraine assistance package.