Here’s a number the Washington establishment doesn’t want you to think about too hard: 150,000. That’s how many Ukrainian soldiers are estimated to be missing from their units right now. Not dead. Not captured. Gone. Walked away. Deserted. One hundred and fifty thousand troops who decided they’d rather take their chances as fugitives than spend another day fighting a war that has no end in sight.
But hey, let’s send another aid package! Slava Ukraini!
PBS — not exactly a right-wing outlet — dropped this report on Wednesday, and the numbers are staggering. At the peak of the crisis, 576 soldiers per day were deserting or going AWOL. Per day. That’s an entire battalion vanishing every 72 hours. Ukraine’s own Defense Minister admitted back in January that 200,000 troops were listed as absent without leave. They’ve apparently gotten some of them back, but 150,000 are still in the wind.
The reasons aren’t complicated. Soldiers are exhausted from deployments that never end. They’re furious about orders they consider suicide missions. Many of them were conscripted — dragged off the street, pulled out of their jobs, handed a rifle, and told to go hold a trench against Russian artillery. Some of these guys never wanted to fight in the first place.
And you know what? We can have sympathy for those men. War is hell. Five years of it is something most Americans can’t even imagine. But here’s the question that nobody in Congress wants to answer: why are we still writing blank checks to a military that can’t keep its own soldiers from walking away?
We’ve sent over $175 billion in aid to Ukraine since this war started. Billion. With a B. That’s enough to fix every road, bridge, and water pipe in America twice over. That’s enough to put a dent in the national debt that keeps our grandkids awake at night. Instead, it’s going to a country whose army is hemorrhaging troops faster than they can conscript replacements.
Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi — Ukraine’s top general — said the solution is “better conditions for servicemembers” rather than harsher punishments. Okay, great. What does that look like? Better MREs? A nicer trench? A cot that doesn’t have rats in it? Because 576 guys a day aren’t deserting over the thread count in their sleeping bags. They’re deserting because they’ve been fighting for five years with no victory in sight and no one can tell them when it ends.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, the usual suspects are still strutting around cable news demanding we send more. More weapons. More money. More “support.” Senator Lindsey Graham probably has a Ukraine flag lapel pin surgically attached to his jacket at this point. These people act like questioning the aid makes you a Russian agent. No, Lindsey — questioning the aid makes us taxpayers who can read a spreadsheet.
Here’s what the foreign policy establishment will never admit: you cannot fund someone else’s will to fight. You can send Javelins, HIMARS, F-16s, and pallets of cash until the Treasury runs dry, but if the soldiers on the ground don’t believe in the mission anymore, none of it matters. A $500,000 missile system doesn’t do much good when the guy trained to operate it hopped a fence three weeks ago.
And that’s the real story here. Not that Ukraine is losing — that’s a separate debate. The story is that 150,000 human beings decided the war wasn’t worth dying for, and we’re still funding it like it’s 2022 and the whole country is unified behind Zelensky waving a flag on a tank.
It’s not 2022 anymore. The war is in its fifth year. The lines haven’t moved significantly in over a year. The Ukrainian people are exhausted, their army is bleeding out through the back door, and the only people who still think this is going swimmingly are defense contractors and senators who own stock in Raytheon.
President Trump has been saying for years that this war needs to end at the negotiating table. Every time he said it, the media called him a Putin puppet. Well, 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers just voted with their feet — and they agree with Trump.
Maybe it’s time we listened to the guys who are actually doing the fighting instead of the guys in Washington who’ve never been in a fight that didn’t involve a microphone and a campaign donation.