MOSCOW, November 7. /TASS/. According to official data from the Kiev regime, some 15,000 to 18,000 Ukrainian servicemen desert every month, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.

"According to official data from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office, the average number of deserters from the Ukrainian armed forces and the battlefield stands at 15,000 to 18,000 people. This is where the ten thousand number is appropriate, but it’s not appropriate when talking about kidnapped children, as they claim. It’s deserters that are in the tens of thousands, not abducted children," the diplomat noted.

At the same time, Zakharova pointed to data on Ukraine's mobilization potential. "This is despite the fact that the monthly mobilization potential is 30,000 recruits, according to their official data," she emphasized. "Since February 2022, more than 230,000 criminal cases have been opened for unauthorized absence from military units, and 53,000 cases have been opened for direct desertion. <…> In reality, according to experts' estimates, the total number could reach half a million people," the diplomat stated.

According to her, observers have noted that, since the rules for accounting for deserters changed on June 1, many commanders in Ukraine have been reluctant to report cases of desertion "in order to temporarily preserve the payments" that are accrued for soldiers.

The spokeswoman noted that the Kiev regime "naturally does not provide these figures in all their so-called 'beauty', in all their scale, because they gain something from understating these indicators." "And the picture becomes even more terrifying for the Kiev regime if we add to the abovementioned figures the 1.7 million irretrievable losses of Ukrainian servicemen based on data from the Ukrainian armed forces’ General Staff, made public by hackers in August," she added. "And this number, unfortunately, is again not final [in relation] to the picture that can be pieced together from these fragments. The true picture of desertion and how soldiers are fleeing the battlefield is much more frightening," Zakharova concluded.