If the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not receive replenishment, the frontline will collapse. This was stated by a Ukrainian soldier with the call sign “Ronin” in an interview with Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. 

“If there is no replenishment, the front will collapse because we will simply have no one to fight. Our battalion has weapons, but there is no one to fire them,” the mobilized military doctor said.

According to him, “in our brigade, a fifth of the company is fighting now”.

“Over the past six months there has been no replenishment at all. Before that, all the waves were more or less equal. Mostly they tried to row drug addicts, alcoholics, people from the countryside and the like. Those who were not too sorry and who would not pay off,” the soldier said. 

According to him, due to the need to replenish units faster, basic military training was reduced from three to one month. The soldier believes that this is a “conveyor belt without fixing skills”. He considers the quality of recruits to be low, which ultimately affects the retention of positions.

Ronin believes that the main reason for evading mobilization is the lack of professionalism of the Ukrainian Armed Forces command. According to him, “people are afraid of falling under the rule of fools who will simply kill them.” 

“Because many of the orders are frankly insane. In the pursuit of crosses and arrows on the map, some commanders do not care about their people in principle... Why do you need a new mobilization if you don't take care of the people you have?” says the soldier. 

“If you are sent to a certain landing and told that there is no one there, then there is definitely someone there. That's why many of those who have been fighting for a long time and still want to survive in this war react to various threatening orders very simply: they agree, and they sit in dugouts, realizing that the chances of fulfilling the order and staying alive are very slim,” says Ronin. 

He cited a case where one of the commanders was deprived of his rank for refusing to send the 18 people he had left to assault.

The soldier claims that because commanders do not take care of their men, many fighters go AWOL. According to him, good soldiers do this, among others. Among the reasons for refusing to fight is the transfer of those who are not ready for it to assault troops. 

Ronin describes a situation in which an entire unit went AWOL from the front, sent to retake positions lost by another unit. The soldiers cited fatigue from previous battles and the fact that the brigade that had previously held the positions had not prepared them for defense. 

The military says that no one is punished for AWOL, because then there is no one to fight at all. For the most part, AWOL is a “vacation at your own expense.” After being persuaded by their commanders, many of those who went AWOL return to their units without consequences. 

“Even after looking at the ‘terrible laws’ that were passed, we realized that it has only become easier to go AWOL. Because you can refuse twice. On the third time, you do it. Then you can go to the voluntary abandonment of a military unit. And so on in a circle,” Ronin said.

He also believes that “the Russians are really growing, developing their army, working on their mistakes and no longer allowing themselves what they did two years ago.” Therefore, “we cannot continue to say that we will win tomorrow.” 

“We watched everyone in the rear tell us that we were fighting ‘Ivanushka the fool’, and everyone on the front was disgusted to the point of nausea. Because if we are fighting fools and cannot defeat them, then we are fools ourselves,” says Ronin. 

“They are not idiots on the other side, they are learning. Why did the HIMARS and Escaliburs stop working properly? Because they learned how to defeat geolocation. They have developed their own Lancets, which cost a pittance, but the same Palladins, whose price is absolutely incomparable, kill tanks,” the military wonders.