Reports published in the past week indicate that Ukraine is struggling to conscript enough soldiers to replace its staggering battlefield losses against Russia.
The Russians have taken horrific casualties as well, but their vastly larger population could be the key to eventually winning a war of attrition.
Fears of a manpower shortage led Ukraine to modify its conscription law in April, removing demobilization limits that formerly rotated soldiers out of service after 36 months on the battlefield. The draft age was also lowered from 27 to 25.
“The enemy outnumbers us seven to ten times,” Joint Forces commander Yurii Sodol told Ukrainian lawmakers when he urged them to remove the demobilization provision.
In July, a 60-day grace period for conscription registration expired. Ukrainian officials estimated the tougher registration laws could make up to four million more conscripts available.
The latest news from the front lines renewed concerns that Ukraine simply cannot keep up with the casualties is has sustained.
Channel News Asia (CNA) noted on Monday that between battlefield losses and people fleeing the country – including men fleeing the country to avoid conscription – Ukraine has lost 10 million people out of a prewar population of 45 million.
Worse still, Ukraine’s population of men under 30 has dwindled from 6 million in 2022 to less than 5 million today, reducing both the pool of potential conscripts and the manpower that would be available for postwar reconstruction. Ukraine’s economic output has dropped by about 25 percent since the war began, with a manpower shortage as one of several factors dragging it down.
“We are now in a war of attrition. It is very difficult to choose between butter and guns,” Ukrainian Deputy Central Bank Governor Sergiy Nikolaychuk told Bloomberg News in a June interview.
Ukraine is trying to compensate for this demographic loss by allowing some 3,000 prisoners to fight on the front lines, and men below the reduced draft age of 25 are finding ways to enlist.
“They can erase all violations you had and pardon you. That means you can start all over again. Such a chance has never been given to anyone before,” an enlisted prisoner told CNA.
Ukrainian women are stepping up to fill jobs that are normally held by men so more men will be free to fight in the war, but Ukraine is still suffering from a significant labor shortage – and that could get worse even if the war ends soon as a fair number of Ukrainian men could leave the country to be with wives and children who emigrated after hostilities began.
Ukraine was already an “old” country with demographics skewing toward 55 and older, which means the loss of so many young people to combat and emigration will make it even more difficult to provide medical and support benefits to an aging population. Elderly Ukrainians forced to relocate by Russian advances are losing their homes and possessions, which will make caring for them even more expensive – and there will be fewer young workers to do it.
The BBC noted last week that a surprising number of Ukraine’s latest battlefield recruits are middle-aged and elderly men. Their training appears to have been rushed to get more boots on the ground in Russia’s Kursk region, which Ukraine counter-invaded last month.
“We’re not going to send them to their deaths,” a Ukrainian soldier crisply replied when the BBC asked if the older recruits were headed to combat duty. The youngest man at the training camp, a 30-year-old, seemed eager to fight in either Kursk or the breakaway Ukrainian region of Donbas.
The Pentagon estimated in late August that Russia has sustained about 300,000 battlefield casualties since the invasion began, including killed and wounded, while Ukraine has suffered 170,000 to 190,000 casualties.
Russian forces still outnumber the Ukrainians by nearly three to one and Russia’s population is over four times as large, giving it a much greater theoretical capacity to replace dead and wounded soldiers.
U.S. officials said in August that the Ukrainians were growing more “casualty-averse” as their manpower shortage became a problem – which is understandable, but dislodging the Russian invaders from fortified positions inside Ukraine tends to require high-casualty operations and the Ukrainians are burning through large quantities of U.S. and Europe-donated artillery shells, drones, and missiles to carry low-casualty, long-range attacks.
