SIMFEROPOL, August 22. /TASS/. More and more soldiers are deserting the Ukrainian army because they refuse to fight for the country's President Vladimir Zelensky, a Crimean senator told TASS.

Earlier, Verkhovna Rada lawmaker Alexander Fediyenko said that there is widespread desertion in the Ukrainian armed forces, with fighters leaving their positions unauthorized by the thousands.

"They do not want to fight because they don’t see a clear cause worth fighting for: they are beginning to realize that they are not fighting for Ukraine; at best, they’re fighting for Zelensky and his circle, who are profiting tremendously from this Ukrainian tragedy. They realize that they are fighting for Europe and for the Americans, and that neither Zelensky, nor the Europeans, nor the Americans care about Ukrainian lives. Besides, there are people who in principle view Russia in a positive light - they realize that we are one people, that Ukrainians are as Russian as we are," Sergey Tsekov, a member of the Committee on International Affairs, said. The senator emphasized that attempts to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has true believers in Ukraine in an uproar, also play a significant role.

Dmitry Belik, a State Duma deputy from Sevastopol and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, added to TASS that the mass desertion in the Ukrainian army is not surprising: "The people of Ukraine do not want to fight for the Kiev regime and the dubious values imposed by the West, but they are being pushed into the crucible of the conflict.".