One of Ukraine’s flagship military units, the 155th Mechanised Brigade, trained in France and equipped with some of the best Western weaponry, has lost over 1,700 soldiers, who have abandoned their posts and gone AWOL, without firing a single shot, it was reported on January 5.

French officials downplayed the incident on January 6 saying that only a few dozen men had gone missing from barracks in France. 

French news agency AFP, citing a French army official, as reported by European Pravda, said: "There have been a certain number of desertions, but they remain very marginal given the volume of people who have undergone training… They were in French barracks, they had the right to go out," he added.

Morale amongst the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) is fading away as Kyiv’s recruitment programme fails to find enough fresh recruits. Many have fought continuously for months without a break in the gruelling showdown with Russian soldiers, who are making steady progress against their crumbling defensive positions.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the war went badly for Ukraine in 2024 as the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) re-took hundreds of square kilometres, making the fastest advances at any time since the initial 2022 invasion. Increasingly short of men, money and materiel, the AFU is on its back foot, leading to growing talk of a ceasefire when President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20.

The mass desertion of the 155^th brigade highlights the increasingly critical manpower shortage the AFU faces and is highly embarrassing for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is trying to rally support for Ukraine in the face of imminent change of regime in the White House.

The brigade, known as the "Anne of Kyiv" unit, was supposed to be amongst the best that Ukraine has in the field. Anna of Kyiv was a princess of Kyivan Rus who became Queen of France in 1051 upon marrying King Henry I. 

Created to spearhead key operations against Russian forces, it was trained in France and equipped with the best armaments Ukraine has received from the West, including the German-made Leopard 2 tanks and French-made Caesar howitzers as part of a $900bn project jointly announced by Zelenskiy and French President Emmanuel Macron in June 2024.

While the unit looked great on paper, the reality on the ground was very different. The unit's cohesion was undermined early on, with at least 50 soldiers disappearing during their training in France. Ukrainians of military age were banned from leaving the country as soon as hostilities with Russia began, but after the conscripts were sent to France to train, many of them then took the opportunity to flee and go into exile in the EU. Another 700 conscripts to the unit disappeared inside Ukraine between October and November 2024, after being called up.

By November, approximately 500 soldiers from the brigade were still unaccounted for, The Telegraph reports, casting doubt on the 155^th’s readiness to be sent into combat. The unit had been due to be deployed to Pokrovsk, a critical logistics hub in the Donetsk region, and at the epicentre of the conflict at the moment. Russia is making a big push to take Pokrovsk, which is a supply centre for much of the AFU that has been holding the line against the Russian onslaught of recent months. Just this week, Ukraine’s High Command reported over 100 attacks on Pokrovsk’s defences in a single day.

But the 155^th card seems to have been marked from the beginning. Of the original 5,800 planned recruits, only 1,924 were mobilised, with only a small share having more than one year’s military training.

They were also sent into action lacking various essentials, including a lack of drone and electronic warfare (EW) support, an essential in Ukraine’s drone war, leaving their mechanised armour vulnerable to the swarms of Russian attack drones that resulted in heavy losses and damage to their equipment.

Mounting pressure on AFU

The desertions from the 155^th are not the first reports of soldiers leaving their post in recent months. The lack of men means that Ukraine’s high command has been cobbling together units from delated brigades to make up their strength to face the Russian attackers.

At the same time, Russia continues to dominate the skies, as the Ukraine’s ten F-16 fighter jets are far too few to take on Russia’s air force made up of around 350 advanced Sukhoi fighter-bombers that have been bombarding Ukraine’s front line with the Soviet-era FAB glide bombs. Left over from the Cold War, these bombs were originally gravity bombs, but in a low-tech innovation, Russia has strapped wings to them and given them rudimentary GPS guidance systems. Carrying a payload of up to 1,000kg of explosives – about 20 times more powerful than the Ukrainian-made drones that Kyiv is now churning out in vast numbers – and launched by Russia fighter bombers some 50-100 km from the front line, the AFU’s air defences are helpless in being able to shoot them down. And because of their size, Ukraine’s defences are largely ineffective in protecting its soldiers against the bombs. Zelenskiy reported in December that Russia was dropping up to 500 of these bombs a day from its vast Soviet stockpile.

Desertions by so many members of the 155^th brigade has sparked an investigation by Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations into the formation and deployment of the brigade. As desertions mount, Kyiv has also toughened the rules surrounding abandoning positions and said in December it will start actively arresting and jailing deserters this January. In an effort to persuade those that have gone AWOL to return to duty, the government decriminalised first-time offences for soldiers that report for duty by the end of January, but intends to crack down on those that stay away.

Zelenskiy acknowledged the surge in desertion cases during 2024 last week, attributing the problem to prolonged war fatigue and insufficient troop rotation.

“A long war is a long war,” Zelenskiy said during a televised interview on Ukraine’s Telemarathon. “Our people are persevering, and people are getting tired. They are getting tired everywhere.”

Nonetheless, reports of aggressive recruitment tactics, where press gangs grab military-aged males from the street and send them to the front lines, has engendered a growing public backlash. Soldiers’ mothers, wives and girlfriends have taken to publicly demonstrating in central Kyiv, calling on Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) to at least allow their men to return home on furlough to rest after months of combat.

Fallout

The collapse of the 155th Brigade has drawn criticism from military analysts and journalists as well. One Ukrainian commentator remarked: “Desertion is a crime, but the crime of not soldiers and officers – but the crime of the leaders of the supreme commander-in-chief, the Ministry of Defence and the general staff.”

The brigade’s failure also raises concerns over the viability of Ukraine’s broader strategy to form 14 new Western-equipped brigades while facing sustained assaults from Russian forces in Donbas. As the discontent mounts, Zelenskiy’s standing in the polls has fallen. A recent survey found that if presidential elections were held on Sunday, former commander-in-chief of the AFU, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, would win twice as many votes as Zelenskiy and take his job. Zelenskiy’s presidential term ended in May last year, but the government may not hold elections as long as martial law is in effect, according to the constitution.

The brigade has now reportedly been disbanded, with surviving elements redistributed among more battle-hardened units in Pokrovsk, in what is yet another setback to Zelenskiy’s titanic effort to stave off defeat and keep the Russian invaders at bay.

This story has been updated to include French officials comments on the number of desertions.