Ukraine is trying to win back the soldiers who walked away by giving them the choice of where to fight. The voluntary return program for service members who went absent without leave is expanding, and those who qualify can now choose from more than 70 units in the Armed Forces, the National Guard, or the State Special Transport Service, the Defense Ministry announces.
The expansion widens a program that answers Ukraine's deepest manpower problem. Soldiers can file a report to return through 20 September 2026, and the simplified program is open to service members whose unauthorized absence, known in Ukraine as SZCh, was recorded on or before 12 June 2026.
The program is a response to a desertion crisis that has grown throughout the war. Some 51,000 Ukrainian soldiers left their units without leave in 2024, more than double the year before, with fatigue cited as a primary cause, bringing the cumulative total to more than 100,000. The root is a service without an end date: soldiers mobilized in 2022 have had no legal pathway home, and exhausted men have left anyway, chaotically, when the state would not release them on a schedule it managed.
What the expanded program offers
The Defense Ministry has widened the list of units to give returning soldiers more say in where and how they serve. The expansion lets them serve in a preferred direction, choose a desired position and commander, and apply their previous experience, the ministry said.
"Drivers, UAV operators, clerks, rifle troops: the army needs everyone," said Deputy Defense Minister Mstyslav Banik.
The list includes mechanized, assault, airborne, drone, artillery, and other units, each requiring soldiers with different experience and specialties, and is viewable on the program's official site and in the Army+ app when filing the report.
The return program is one half of Ukraine's manpower squeeze
The effort to coax back soldiers who left runs alongside a harder push to find and mobilize more, two sides of the same shortage. The return program is part of the reform package the ousted Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov launched in June 2026, which also created fixed-term contracts with a guaranteed end date to replace open-ended service.
The army's new leadership is working on the same problem from the other end. Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi has launched a force-wide manning audit to identify soldiers who have been kept away from the front lines, and investigators have swept through recruitment offices nationwide. The return program's logic is the gentler side of that drive: rather than only hunting for manpower through mobilization, the state is trying to make it easy and dignified for the soldiers it has already trained to return on their own terms.
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