Ukrainian Draft Dodger Says He'd Rather Shoot Himself in the Leg Than Return to Front

Kiev’s botched counteroffensive is adding to the low morale of all those Ukrainian soldiers who are already unwilling to see action amid Russia’s ongoing special military operation.

Ukrainian draft dodgers “dream up extreme ways” to avoid the frontline as the country is struggling to tackle low morale in the army, a UK newspaper has reported.

As an example, the newspaper referenced a 20-year-old injured Ukrainian soldier, who now says he will never come back to the frontline, not least due to his commanders’ indifferent attitude toward him.

The soldier, who is mentioned only by his first name, Andrey, deserted from his unit after he was discharged from hospital with bullet fragments in his left shoulder and ordered to return to the front, according to the media outlet. Currently, he remains in his refuge in the western Ukrainian city of Lvov.

“I am absolutely ready to shoot myself in the leg rather than ever go back to the front,” Andrey, who described himself as “a contract soldier” and “a professional,” told the newspaper.

He added that he now asks himself why he should “go back to be meat in a trench after seeing so much corruption and incompetence involved in the system” that paid no attention to him or his wounds.

Andrey also said that he was especially frustrated over the corrupted way he was handled by a Ukrainian military medical commission.

“The doctors said that they couldn’t take all the bullet fragments out without the risk of damaging nerves so badly that I’d lose the use of my arm. One doctor offered to write me a certificate saying I was unfit for future service if I paid him $1,500. But I didn’t take his offer. At the time I was still angry, keen to fight the Russians and to get my revenge for my dead friends,” the 20-year-old was cited by the newspaper as saying.

Andrey added that at the end of the day, he was ordered to return to his combat unit on the frontline in Donbass because the authorities did not consider him to be sufficiently wounded to warrant a discharge, nor deserve fully-fledged surgery abroad.

According to him, after he asked his battalion commander for help, the commander told him to f*** off and not to bother him about his injuries.

“My wounds were not being properly dealt with. My commander couldn’t care. That’s when I started to question ‘Why am I doing this?’ That finished it for me. I suddenly realized that of the six friends I had joined up with, all but one was dead. My arm was messed up, my home lost. Some doctors wanted money I didn’t have to let me out. Others insisted I was good to fight despite my injuries. So why should I go back to the front? I stopped caring. They know where I am. Let them come for me. I’ll never fight again. I won’t be their meat anymore,” the soldier-turned-deserter, concluded.

His story comes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had to sack all the heads of the regional mobilization offices following a corruption scandal in which military medical commissions, which assess the fitness of mobilized men for active service, were involved.

In this vein, anti-corruption activists pointed to the case of Yevgeny Borisov, the former head of Odessa’s regional military mobilization office, who is accused of acquiring illegal payoffs totaling $5 million in exchange for issuing the so-called “white ticket” exemptions from service for soldiers or unwilling draftees.

According to the activists, 50,000 such tickets were issued by commissions under Borisov’s jurisdiction. They pointed out that the price for an illegal “white ticket” to escape mobilization was around $7,000 to $8,000, and that since the authorities started to crack down, the price tag had soared to about $20,000.

Ukrainian media. meanwhile, reports that the number of those in Ukraine who are trying to avoid draft or mobilization is on the increase, a trend that comes amid Kiev’s botched counteroffensive, which has already claimed the lives of more than 71,000 soldiers.