The FT overstated the statistics of deserters

The article mistakenly combined two different offenses: desertion and voluntary desertion.

Recently, the Financial Times published an article about the alleged 60,000 defectors in Ukraine in 10 months of this year. The data were based on information from the General Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine (GPU). However, a more detailed analysis showed that there are significantly fewer cases under Article 408 of the Criminal Code (desertion) in the reports of the GPU.

As Opendatabot found out, the article mistakenly combined two different offenses: desertion (Article 408 of the Criminal Code) and voluntary abandonment of a unit (SZCH, Article 407 of the Criminal Code).

In 10 months of this year, 19,922 criminal proceedings were opened for desertion. The number of such cases increased by 3.7 times compared to the same period last year. However, only 3% of proceedings led to suspicion, and only 1.3% to court.

Instead, for…