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Ukraine's manpower crisis

April, the intelligence wing of Ukraine's Defence Ministry noted a trend emerging on Ukrainian social media platforms — videos apparently filmed overseas of Ukrainian men holidaying on beaches, enthusiastically telling each other how they had gone abroad to avoid being drafted into the military to fight.

Ukrainian officials swiftly concluded that the videos — disseminated primarily on the social media platform TikTok — were part of a mounting Russian campaign to undercut Ukrainian military recruitment.

As well as the holiday videos celebrating the freedom of "evaders", the officials said they noted an uptick in newly written "folksongs" celebrating avoidance of military service, as well as videos in which Ukrainian women encouraged men to avoid being pulled into the military.

Almost 2½ years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the battle for sufficient human resources to keep on fighting is now as important to both Moscow and Kyiv as the competition for supplies of weaponry.

In both nations, the prospect of conscripting ever-larger numbers of personnel is hugely contentious, particularly as the conflict shows no signs of ending.

In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree lowering the conscription age from 27 to 25.

Whereas other countries fighting existential wars have usually fallen back on recruiting vast numbers of young men as soon as they reach 18 years of age, Ukraine was already facing a demographic crisis before the war began, and remains desperate to shield its younger adults.

Russia faces not so dissimilar demographic problems— this war is the first in history between ageing states with declining populations.

But, Ukraine's demographics put it at a disadvantage. While Russia's population was already predicted to shrink by 25 per cent over the next two generations, Ukraine's was set to fall by almost half.

Long-term studies of Ukraine's population suggest its birth rate began to fall as long ago as the 1960s — well before much of the rest of what was then the Soviet Union.

But it plunged particularly fast after independence in the 1990s and the start of the new millennium, leaving a particular shortage of young people now in their late teens or early 20s.

The result is a war increasingly fought by older men, supplemented by handfuls of young male and female volunteers.

According to a US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in June, the average Ukrainian frontline soldier is now 40 years of age, while those who watch the conflict closely say that even the growing numbers of increasingly vital drone operators are often in their thirties.

Even without those demographics, simple population numbers would disadvantage Ukraine — its population of 38 million is only just over a third of Russia's 144 million, giving the Kremlin an inevitably much larger pool of personnel to draw from.

At the start of the full-blown war in February 2022, Ukraine immediately banned all men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

From July 16 this year, every man in that age group is required to have updated an online or in-person form detailing their location, fitness and other details.

How effective that programme has been is not yet clear. Recent Ukrainian rounds of conscription have been messy and unpopular, with plenty of talk of corruption, faked medicals signed off by well-remunerated doctors, and some men fleeing the country or taking whatever steps they can to keep out of military service.

According to a recent report from United States-funded Radio Free Europe, more than 30,000 Ukrainian men have crossed into Romania and Moldova since the invasion started in 2022.

Ukrainian officials have talked of encouraging European nations to forcibly return such individuals, but few countries have expressed any willingness to do so.

Even more striking are the numbers who appear to have applied for postgraduate university programmes in the hope of deferring or avoiding military service.

In the first six months of 2024, Ukraine's Ministry of Education and Science reported an astounding 246,000 individuals applying for postgraduate or master's-level courses, compared with only 7,000-9,000 doing such courses before the war.

Of those applicants, at least 90,000 were fighting-age men, said Ukrainian officials, who added that they would tighten academic application rules.

Exactly how many service personnel Ukraine still needs is hard to tell. The Kyiv government is understandably cagey on numbers with its forces already spread along 1,945km of front.


The writer is from Reuters
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