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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The state's defense block is entering the fall with a new management configuration. 21 July the president announced the appointment of Mykhailo Drapaty as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The duties of the minister of defense have been performed by Yevhenii Khmara since 20 July, and consideration of the permanent minister of defense nominee is expected after 18 August, when the Verkhovna Rada returns to plenary sessions.
Right now the ministry's and the General Staff’s work plans for the coming months are being formed, and those plans must include a separate item on unauthorized departure from a unit. Read more in an exclusive column for 24 Channel.
Unauthorized departure from a unit long ago ceased to be purely a disciplinary issue and became a procedural problem. The state has already built a mechanism for voluntary return of people to the military, whose window closes on 20 September. What the state has not built is the capacity to process the avalanche of criminal cases that has accumulated over four years.
Investigating all unauthorized-departure cases is impossible, and amnestying everyone is unacceptable
According to estimates made before the official statistics were closed, as of November 2025 there were more than 306 thousand recorded cases of leaving the military, of which about 250 thousand were for unauthorized departure from a unit and almost 56 thousand for desertion. Since December 2025 the Office of the Prosecutor General has restricted public access to detailed statistics on military offenses, citing martial law conditions.
Closing off the numbers did not change the substance. In July 2026 the director of the State Bureau of Investigations, Oleksii Sukhachov, confirmed that incidents of unauthorized departure are not decreasing, and at the same time clarified a key detail. Only about a third of those who appear in this statistic are in hiding, while the rest remain under the state's observation.
Both obvious scenarios fail. Investigating every episode through the general procedure is physically impossible because there are neither enough investigators, prosecutors, nor judicial resources. Military justice specialists describe situations where a simple soldier’s case goes through instances for years, and the principle of inevitability of punishment is eroded by this.
Amnestying everyone is also unacceptable because it destroys the very idea of military discipline and is a plain injustice toward those who stayed at their positions. Thus, the issue is not reduced to choosing between punish and forgive. The question is who manages this mass of cases and how quickly they can process it.
The Military Law Enforcement Service should be granted powers of a pretrial investigation body
This idea is not external to the law-enforcement system, and that is its main advantage. It is publicly voiced by the SBI itself. Oleksii Sukhachov proposes granting the Military Law Enforcement Service the right to conduct pretrial investigations of certain military crimes, including unauthorized departure from a unit, desertion, and insubordination.
He emphasizes that this can be done within the existing staffing levels of the Armed Forces and without increased funding. The corresponding bill is already under review by the committee on law enforcement activities.
Legally, this concerns two provisions:
the VLE or Military Police should be explicitly included in the list of pretrial investigation bodies;
it is necessary to define exhaustive jurisdiction that combines a list of crime elements, categories of military ranks, and exceptions for complex proceedings.
Limitations by rank are of principled importance. This concerns servicemembers who do not hold officer ranks, i.e., soldiers and sergeants, and therefore typical, mass, and procedurally uncomplicated cases that form the main bulk. Proceedings concerning senior officers, organized groups, and episodes involving weapons or violence should remain with the bureau.
This reform does not exist separately from the current agenda. The state has already built both the entry into the system and the exit from it.
Relief from criminal liability works for those who committed an offense for the first time and voluntarily return, and the voluntary return program operates until 20 September 2026.
At the same time, a bill on reforming the Territorial Recruitment and Coordination Centers (TRCC) with transfer of mobilization procedures to an electronic cabinet and video recording is sitting in parliament.
What is lacking is the middle link — an authority that carries a case from report to court within an achievable timeframe. Therefore, strengthening the Military Law Enforcement Service is embedded in the mobilization reform and the TRCC reform, not in competition with them for the parliament’s attention.
This decision will unload the SBI and should become the real substance of the reform
The scale of the Bureau’s workload is measured by a figure that should be kept in mind during any discussion about its future.
The SBI investigators are handling more than 372 thousand criminal proceedings, and a significant portion of that mass consists of military cases. Transferring typical proceedings related to unauthorized departure from a unit to the Military Law Enforcement Service would allow the bureau to concentrate its resources on what it was created for: corruption in defense procurement, torture, crimes by law enforcement officers, and high-ranking officials.
This is the direct answer to the debate on SBI reform that has been ongoing since December 2025. One of the options currently being discussed foresees a complete re-certification of the Bureau’s employees.
SBI leadership warns that such a re-certification would simultaneously halt all 372 thousand investigations and leave suspects who have already been notified in limbo. The Accounting Chamber, based on an audit, confirmed the bureau’s capacity to perform the tasks assigned to it.
Reforming a law-enforcement body during wartime should be measured by how many cases it enables to bring to court, not by how many positions it frees. Redistributing jurisdiction is a concrete, expert-prepared decision with a measurable effect. Replacing a head with a political appointee and personnel purges under the guise of perpetual re-certifications do not and cannot achieve that effect.
By the start of the autumn session, deputies should be required to take four steps
Bill 6569-d on the Military Police and its accompanying bill 6570-d on amendments to the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses, the Criminal Code, and the Criminal Procedure Code were adopted in principle by the Verkhovna Rada as early as 19 June 2024, and at that time it was supported by 247 deputies.
Two years have passed since then. Assessments of the work of the relevant committee on law enforcement activities remain positive, but revisions cannot continue indefinitely.
Deputies must take the following steps:
publish the revised texts of bills 6569-d and 6570-d together with comparative tables so that the professional community can see exactly what changed after the first reading;
explicitly include the Military Law Enforcement Service or Military Police in the list of pretrial investigation bodies, without referential formulations that would have to be interpreted for years;
define exhaustive jurisdiction by combining the list of crimes, military ranks, and exceptions for complex cases;
schedule a second reading and approve a phased plan for launch, personnel selection, and transfer of proceedings with specific deadlines and responsible parties.
The autumn session begins at a moment when the defense block is forming a new management configuration and the voluntary return window closes on 20 September. This is a rare coincidence when the political moment and the substance of the reform work in the same direction.
The question of what to do about unauthorized departure from a unit will not disappear on its own. It will either receive a procedural answer this fall, or it will turn into a several-hundred-thousand-case debt to the judicial system that will later have to be written off purely for political reasons.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Що робити з СЗЧ: відповідь парламенту потрібна вже восени". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.
