Mariana Katzarova. Photo: Vot Tak
Over 50,000 soldiers have deserted the Russian army since the start of the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a new United Nations report has revealed.
The report, which was presented to the UN Human Rights Council on Monday by the organisation’s Special Rapporteur for the Russian Federation Mariana Katzarova, said desertion had become “one of the main avenues for those seeking to avoid participating in the war”, and that the 50,000 deserters represented almost 10% of Russian troops deployed to Ukraine since 2022.
Of those 50,000, some 16,000 have been prosecuted for offences linked to desertion, the report noted, with 13,500 conscripts and professional soldiers convicted in 2024 alone. Those who refuse to fight are subjected to forms of torture including “beatings, starvation and death threats”, it said.
Katzarova pointed to the Kremlin’s “alarming escalation in repression” against human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and those who oppose Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, something she called “not incidental but coordinated and central to state policy”, leading to what the report described as a “seismic decline” in the human rights situation in Russia.
As of summer 2025, some 1,040 individuals and organisations had been designated as “foreign agents” and had their incomes frozen, while 245 organisations had been outright banned as “undesirable”, the report added.
Between 2024 and mid-2025, at least 912 people faced prosecution on politically motivated grounds — many of them for “peacefully dissenting against the war in Ukraine” — while in the first half of 2025, as many as 20-30% of individuals in pretrial detention were political prisoners, with many facing charges such as “espionage, treason, extremism and terrorism”, the report said.
Katzarova concluded that torture remained “systematic and widespread” in Russia’s prison system, with 258 cases of torture of both Russian and Ukrainian prisoners by law enforcement officials and prison staff documented in 2024–25.
Compulsory psychiatric treatment is increasingly being used as a “tool of repression”, the report noted, with some 51 people subjected to coercive psychiatric measures between 2022 and 2025. Many former Ukrainian detainees interviewed by Katzarova also testified to having been tortured by medical personnel while in Russian captivity.
Since 2022, some 200,000 prisoners have been recruited to fight for the Russian military in Ukraine, the report said. It also cited an investigation by independent news outlet Verstka which estimated that over 750 people had been killed or subjected to “life-threatening injuries” by former combatants returning to civilian life in Russia after fighting in Ukraine.
