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00:00Oleksandr is one of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who walked away from
00:04the front line to return home. For six months, he watched his fellow servicemen die in Russian
00:10attacks.
00:12We just wanted to live. We had no combat experience. We were just ordinary working people from
00:18a village.
00:20He remembers very little from the year he spent at home in Lviv because of the concussions
00:25he suffered. He's since returned and is being trained with a different battalion.
00:30But official figures show that more than 90,000 cases have been opened into instances of soldiers
00:34deserting since Russia invaded in 2022, with a sharp increase over the past year. A number
00:41of them don't return after being granted a break or medical leave. Exhausted by the war,
00:46they're both physically and psychologically scarred.
00:52There were many cases where someone went to see their family for 10, 15 days and thought,
00:57well, screw it, I'm not going back.
01:00In an effort to address manpower shortages, Ukrainian lawmakers approved an amnesty in
01:05August for first-time offenders who voluntarily returned to their units. Prosecutors said
01:10in early December that 8,000 servicemen returned in November alone. This soldier was one of
01:15them. He explains what made him walk away.
01:20Even just staying under constant shelling results in a gradually damaged mental state.
01:29You go crazy little by little. You're constantly under stress, huge stress. And you lose control
01:36of yourself.
01:40Going against his family's advice, he decided to return. But the number of Ukrainian troops
01:45deserting is still growing and the government is struggling to find new recruits. It represents
01:50a critical challenge for Ukraine, which is losing territory to Russia at the fastest
01:55rate since the early days of the 2022 invasion.