President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that cases of Absent Without Leave (AWOL, military slang) even in ‘ideal’ brigades, and there are various reasons for this.
He said this in an interview with Ukrainian Radio.
‘There are different brigades, different levels of training and morale of the military. In general, it is difficult to talk about this unequivocally,’ Zelenskiy said.
The President responded to a journalist’s remark that the military may go to the AWOL because of ‘unbearable conditions of service’.
‘Unbearable conditions? For example, there is a brigade that can be called – perhaps not entirely correctly – ideal: there is proper training, selection, and atmosphere. But even in such brigades, there are cases of AWOL. However, we cannot say that the conditions there are ‘unbearable’. The war in general is unbearable. But I would not like to make generalisations about the causes of the AWOLs, because it depends on various factors: people, attitudes, circumstances,’ the Head of State explained.
At the same time, Zelenskiy stressed that most Ukrainian defenders are ‘heroic people who understand what mobilisation is and what the war for Ukraine is.’