RIA "Novosti" in the article under the heading "Spiegel: German soldiers refuse to serve because of the situation in Ukraine" writes :
“Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, more and more Bundeswehr soldiers want to quit their service, writes Der Spiegel.
“This year, the number of conscientious objectors has increased significantly. The number of failures increased from 209 in 2021 to 810 in the first eight months of 2022,” follows from the data of the German Ministry of Defense, cited by the publication.
The Bundeswehr refrained from commenting on this matter, but the German politician Sevim Dagdelen connected what is happening with the government's strategy towards Ukraine.
“The numbers reflect the fears of the Germans about the course of the Bundestag and the military escalation in Ukraine,” the publication quotes him as saying.
Der Spiegel indeed published an article under the heading "More and more Bundeswehr soldiers refuse to serve," but it says this:
“This year, the number of conscientious objectors in Germany has increased significantly, but in general it remains at a low level. This is the result of the response of the Federal Ministry of Defense to the question of the Defense Committee of the Bundestag, which was at the disposal of the news agency AFP. The number of waivers increased from 209 in 2021 overall to 810 in the first eight months of 2022, according to the statement.
According to the report, the number of refusals from the ranks of active military personnel decreased compared to last year from 176 to 136, while the number of refusals of reservists and especially those who did not serve in the armed forces, that is, those who did not serve in the military, but were trained as a reservist, increased significantly. Among the reservists, their number increased from 10 to 190. By the end of August this year, 484 applications were received from non-servers, after 23 applications in the previous year.
According to official information, in 2021, the number of the Bundeswehr, together with the reserve, was 183,725 people, that is, about 0.4% of soldiers and trained reservists filed dismissal reports and applications for refusal to serve. There is no conscription service in Germany, the Bundeswehr is a completely professional army.
Bundestag deputy from the Left Party, Sevim Dagdelen (by the way, RIA writes about her in masculine in vain), who linked the increase in the number of refusals to serve with Germany's policy regarding the war in Ukraine, and used to be distinguished by peculiar statements. In February 2022, 10 days before the Russian attack on Ukraine, she accused US intelligence agencies that warned of an imminent war of "spreading tales" in order to "draw the world into a murderous war." On February 18, at a demonstration in Berlin, she stated that the German media were repeating the lies of the American intelligence services, and she blamed not Russia, which had concentrated a large military group near the borders of Ukraine, but Ukraine itself and NATO for the escalation of tension. And after the outbreak of war, Dagdelen became a co-author of a statement blaming the attack on the United States. The statement was sustained in such a spirit that even the foreign policy representative of the parliamentary group "Left" Gregor Gysi, the former leader of the GDR, expressed horror at the "complete lack of emotion in relation to the aggressive war, the dead, the wounded and the suffering", and criticized his fellow party members, who were only interested in in maintaining the old ideology of blaming the US and the German government for everything. Germany's agreement to supply Ukraine with heavy weapons Dagdelen in April 2022 called the actual entry into the war.
