A fortnight has already passed since Ukrainian veteran Stanislav Asseyev publicly announced his retirement from the army. It was as a "free man," in his own words, that the renowned journalist and writer sat down in a small café in Kyiv's Podil district late on Saturday afternoon, October 19. The 35-year-old, with his pale complexion and deep-set eyes, was returning to civilian life after seven months fighting in a territorial defense battalion that was inevitably disbanded in the summer due to a high number of casualties and desertions. Wounded twice in the Donbas, he would have liked to join the Ukrainian military intelligence service, the HUR. But his request, directly supported by the service's powerful head, Kyrylo Budanov, went unheeded by his former command.
Asseyev eventually preferred to apply for demobilization, a right for all former captives of Russian forces. While a journalist, he was detained and tortured between 2017 and 2019 in Isolatsia prison, overseen by the Russian security services, the FSB, in Donetsk. He does not yet know exactly what he will do but he will no doubt continue his work with Justice Initiative Fund, an organization he set up to gather information on Russian war crimes. Perhaps he will continue working on a book retracing his military experience which began in the trenches... What is certain, after less than a year of fighting and watching the situation on the front deteriorate, is that Asseyev will do his utmost to recount the daily lives of his former brothers-in-arms and raise awareness of the army's immense problems.
Referring to the men of the Territorial Defense, the units present in every region of the country that tens of thousands of civilians had courageously joined in the early days of the invasion, he said that "there's hardly any motivation left." However, in his eyes, the problem is not limited to the specific military corps but concerns the infantry as a whole. "There's a big crisis in the infantry, which can be explained by a lack of personnel, training and communication between units," he said. "It's an internal Ukrainian problem that no Western country can change. We can have as many drones and ammunition as we want, if there are no soldiers in the trenches, nothing will change."
After two and a half years of invasion, the mobilization of new recruits to replace the dead, wounded and exhausted has reached a breaking point in the country. The subject came into the spotlight on September 21, when a volunteer soldier from 2019, Serhiy Hnezdilov, publicly announced on social media his decision to "abandon without authorization" his unit of the 56th Mechanized Infantry Brigade. The young man, known for his media interviews, was eventually arrested by police on October 9 on suspicion of "voluntarily leaving a military unit with the intention of evading service under martial law," which is a crime punishable by up to 12 years imprisonment.
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