SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING - As war rages and Ukrainian leaders plead for military aid from the West, the country isn’t just running low on weapons. It’s running low on soldiers, too.
While Russia pours new recruits into the fight - drafting men from Russian jails and offering generous pay to new recruits - Ukraine allows many of its most able-bodied men to stay on the sidelines. Under Ukrainian law, men under the age of 27 cannot be conscripted, the thinking being that society must protect its youngest adults so that they can pursue their education, get jobs and start families.
As Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, put it, it’s a bet on the nation’s future. “It’s historical,” he told The Cipher Brief. “There is sense in this, to give chances to these young men to create families and to have kids.”
But Goncharenko now supports legislation to lower the draft age to 25, and other Ukrainians are questioning why so many young adults are on the sidelines of a national war for survival.
“It should not be that someone is leading a nice life in Kyiv and Dnipro, and the military must fight,” Yehor Firsov, deputy commander of a strike force in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, told a Kyiv conference on February 24, the two-year anniversary of the war.
While young Ukrainians can, and do, volunteer for military service, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in the 18-26 age range - perhaps more than one million - are still civilians. That has not only infuriated some soldiers and commanders, as well as their families; it is making a tough moment for the Ukrainian resistance that much more challenging.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former top commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe and a staunch supporter of robust aid for Ukraine, told The Cipher Brief that the policy “does run the risk of undermining some support for Ukraine.” While Hodges believes Ukrainian complaints of inadequate Western support are justified, he said the argument “starts to wear a little bit thin when you see Ukraine is not willing to do everything necessary to have everyone in the fight who is needed.”
The manpower issue has taken on greater urgency since last month’s Russian victory at Avdiivka, a small but hotly contested city in eastern Ukraine. Both sides suffered staggering losses in that battle; estimates of Russian combat deaths at Avdiivka ranged from 16,000 (a prominent Russian military blogger) to 47,000 (an official Ukrainian assessment), while Ukrainian losses were believed to be lower but still significant.
As the Kremlin dispatches more men to the battlefields, Ukraine has thus far held fast to the policy of letting its under-27 men stay home. For now, the average age of its soldiers is 43.
Fury on the frontlines
Ukraine’s frontline troops complain regularly that they have been fighting without a break since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, and that they have been given no end date to their service. Some Ukrainians have been fighting even longer - since Russian forces took Crimea in 2014 and attacked the Donbas region in the east. And they are well aware of the fact that their younger compatriots are effectively off the hook.
Firsov, the strike force deputy commander, described his soldiers’ mood as “anger against everything.”
“We get tired, and we get smaller in numbers,” Firsov said, speaking to the Kyiv conference from his Donbas deployment. “We need support and mobilization of all the country.” Even if the U.S. and the West were to come through and deliver the much-needed weaponry, Firsov said, “It can happen that there is nobody to use that Western equipment.”
Another soldier, age 45 and serving near the front, painted a stark picture in a written message to The Cipher Brief.
“I am still in the military since Feb. 25, 2022. I am sick and tired of war and the military. I am just a civilian forced to become a military slave,” said the soldier, who said he feared retribution if his name were published. “Besides morale, money is a problem. It is hard to support my family for just 20,000 hryvnia ($522) per month.”
Relatives of soldiers have staged small-scale protests over the conditions and the fact that their family members cannot get a respite from the war.
The BBC quoted Yaroslava Mukha, whose husband is deployed in the east, as saying that he and his fellow soldiers deserve a rest.
“He’s been serving for almost two years and according to the current law, they have to keep fighting until the end of the war…We all understand it will be a very long war.” She said Ukraine cannot defeat Russia “with harmed, tired and exhausted soldiers.”
A sensitive political issue
As the manpower shortage becomes more critical, there is no consensus on a solution. Ukrainian politicians are moving cautiously – perhaps fearful of a public backlash against any push to lower the conscription age.
On January 30, the government proposed legislation that would lower the age of conscription to 25, a move that would increase the potential pool of draftable soldiers by as many as 400,000. The measure has yet to come to a vote. Goncharenko has also proposed amendments calling for mandatory two-month breaks after six months of frontline service and an overall limit of 18 months in combat positions. “If such a system would work, I think fewer people will try to avoid mobilization,” he said.
Defense Minister Rustem Umerov has said that Ukraine will also seek to mobilize men between the ages of 25 and 60 who are currently living abroad - a group estimated at more than half a million - but for that to have an impact, those men would have to be convinced to return or forced by their host nations to do so.
Another member of the Ukrainian parliament, Solomiia Bobrovska, who serves on the parliament’s national security, defense and intelligence committee, told The Cipher Brief that while shortages of ammunition and other military equipment remain the “biggest problem” for Ukraine, “the need for manpower is critical for our armed forces.”
Bobrovska says she supports lowering the conscription age to 25 but added that “unfortunately, it is not possible to find an ideal solution to questions regarding conscription. There will always be some categories of people who are against the adoption of this law.”
The dispute over conscription contributed to a falling out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and General Valery Zaluzhnyi, whom the president fired as commander-in-chief of the Armed Services on February 8.
Zelensky balked at Zaluzhnyi’s request for as many as 500,000 more soldiers. The president questioned the affordability of adding that many troops, and instead ordered Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Zaluzhnyi’s replacement, to conduct an audit of the Armed Services. A presidential aide said that of the 1 million personnel currently mobilized, the number engaged in active combat may be as low as 300,000. The president will decide after the audit “how many additional soldiers are needed,” according to Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser in the Office of the President.
The view from outside Ukraine
The geopolitics of the issue were thrown into public view last week, when Russia leaked a 38-minute recording of top German military officials discussing the possible impact of sending Germany’s Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal reported that German Air Force Chief Gen. Ingo Gerhartz was heard on the recording saying that even if Ukraine used the Taurus missiles to great effect, it “will not change the course of the war” because Ukraine likely lacks enough ground troops for a follow-up offensive.
Also last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said NATO could not rule out the possibility that Western troops would be needed for the battles in Ukraine. That’s likely a non-starter for many reasons (on Tuesday the Biden Administration repeated its opposition to deploying any American troops to Ukraine), not least because of the difficulty in arguing that foreign fighters should deploy to the war when Ukraine is not conscripting its own young adults.
Other countries approach the conscription issue in different ways, depending on national values, finances and need. Many have compulsory service - which generally begins at 18 or 21. Others, including the United States, scrapped conscription long ago and recruit a professional army whose members enlist voluntarily. Some countries, including newly minted NATO member Sweden, employ a concept of “total defense,” meaning every citizen between from 18 and to 70 must participate somehow in protecting the country, in times of war and peace alike. Even lowering the age of conscription to 25 would keep Ukraine’s fighting age several years higher than in many nations, including Russia, where the eligible age for the military draft is 18.
While Zelensky said soon after the 2022 invasion that his nation needed to become a “big Israel” to counter the Russian threat, Israel mandates military conscription for all citizens at age 18.
General Hodges said that to become a “big Israel,” Ukraine would have to change its society as well.
“The Israeli model…it is about total defense: everyone knows the survival of the country depends on everyone having a role to play,” Hodges said. “That requires leadership to build that culture. I am not sure that culture exists yet as a society-wide culture in Ukraine.”
Russia will always win the game of numbers
If Ukraine’s population has sunk to 30 million in the 82 percent of the nation that it currently controls, as some people fear, then Russia holds a better than 4-to-1 advantage from which to recruit into the military.
Beyond that fundamental edge, Russia also has the advantage a dictatorship brings; the Kremlin can do as it pleases without worrying much about politics or dissent. As The Cipher Brief reported last month, Russia has used a mix of payments and draconian methods to recruit and ensure compliance with drafts. Since September 2022 – a low point for the Russian invasion – Moscow has managed to bring at least 300,000 more men to the fight.
Goncharenko conceded that Ukraine cannot triumph by matching Russia soldier for soldier. “We need to think about how to win the war, but with fewer casualties,’’ he said, a view which brings the issue back to weaponry.
These realities, combined with Russia’s massive increase in military spending – to an estimated $140 billion in 2024, more than three times that of Ukraine’s – will likely force hard choices on Kyiv before long.
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