Ukraine faces mounting recruitment challenges as war with Russia nears 2-year mark

When Antonina Danylevych's husband enlisted in the Ukrainian army in March 2022, he had to line up at the draft office alongside crowds of patriotic countrymen.

There are no crowds now, she says.

Danylevych, a 43-year-old HR manager, gave her blessing when Oleksandr joined up with tens of thousands of other Ukrainian citizens to defy the Russian invasion.

Now she's finding it hard to cope, with no end in sight to the war. Her husband has only had about 25 days' home leave since he enlisted.

"We want Ukraine to win, but not through the efforts of the same people," she said in an interview at her home in Kyiv. "I can see they need to be replaced and that they also need to rest, but for some reason other people don't understand."

Her husband a university lecturer with no prior combat experience who's now a platoon commander watched his son get married this year, viavideo call, from the ruined city of Bakhmut. His 14-year-old daughter misses her dad.

Almost two years into the grinding war, this family and others around Ukraineare coming to terms with the prospect of a much longer and costlier conflict than they'd hoped for, and one that some now acknowledge they're not guaranteed to win.

Pushback from families

This autumn, Danylevych was one of 25,000 people to sign a petition to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying that military service cannot remain open-ended and calling for troops to be given a clear timeline for when they will be discharged.

The campaign, which has included two protests by 50 to 100 people in Kyiv's main square in recent weeks, illustrates a growing level of exhaustion among Ukrainian troops and the mounting toll that is taking on families back home.

Ukraine's vaunted summer counteroffensive has so far failed to deliver a decisive breakthrough, both sides are dug in along largely static front lines and questions are being asked over whether foreign military aid will be as forthcoming as it was.

The country has relied on tens of billions of dollars in arms from Western allies to sustain its war effort, but stockpiles of artillery shells are emptying and governments are cooler on sustaining previous levels of support.

Such protests would have been unthinkable a year ago when national morale soared as Ukraine beat Russian forces back from Kyiv and retook swaths of the northeast and south. Martial law, declared at the war's start, prohibits public demonstrations.

WATCH | Fleeinginvolvement in Russian invasion:

These people fled Russia to avoid conscription in the Ukraine war

9 months ago

Duration 3:08

Last September, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists, which saw a disproportionate number of men from Russia's ethnic minorities called up to the front. Many fled to neighbouring countries, resulting in one of the largest exoduses from Russia.

Danylevych's campaign points to difficult choices war planners face as they try to maintain the flow of recruits to defeat a much larger army amid steady losses, while retaining a big enough workforce to sustain the shattered economy.

Only Ukrainian men aged between 27 and 60 can be mobilized by draft officers. Men aged between 18 and 26 can't be drafted, but can enlist voluntarily.

Ukraine, which has said it has about onemillion people under arms, has barred military-age men from going abroad. Its constantly running mobilization programis a state secret.

The Ukrainian Defence Ministry referred questions for this article to the military, which declined to comment, citing wartime secrecy.

Tactics to evade draft

In November, Ukraine's military chief said one of his priorities was to build up the army's reserves as he laid out a plan to prevent the war settling into a stalemate of attritional warfare that he warned would suit Russia. The plan focuses on boosting Ukraine's aerial, electronic warfare, drone, anti-artillery and mine-clearance capabilities.

Gen.Valery Zaluzhnyi added that Ukraine, like Russia, had limited capacity to train troops and alluded to gaps in legislation that he said allowed citizens to shirk mobilization.

"We are trying to fix these problems. We are introducing a unified register of draftees, and we must expand the category of citizens who can be called up for training or mobilization," he wrote in comments published by The Economist.

The recruitment process largely takes place out of the public eye. Draft officers stop men in the street, at the metro or at checkpoints and hand out call-up papers to them, instructing to report to recruitment centres.

Over the last year, social media videos occasionally surface showing draft officers dragging away or threatening men they want to mobilize causing public outcry.

Many Ukrainians have also been angered by a string of corruption cases at draft offices that have allowed people to avoid the call-up, prompting Zelenskyy to sack all the heads of the regional recruitment offices this summer.

Seldom does a week go by without a law enforcement agency announcing criminal cases against people including draft officials accused of taking bribes to provide fake documents for people to shirk mobilization or travel abroad.

At the River Tisa, which acts as the border from southwestern Ukraine to Romania, guard patrols used to focus on catching tobacco smugglers but now collar fleeing draft dodgers.

About 6,000 people have been detained trying to leave across that stretch, the border guards told Reuters. One of them, Dyma Cherevychenko, said at least 19 people had drowned trying to flee the country during the conflict.

The Ukrainian parliament has meanwhile been debating legislation that would stop people over the age of 30 using higher education as a legal way around mobilization.

The number of men aged over 25 who booked places at universities in the first year of the invasion shot up by 55,000 compared with the year before, Education Minister Oksen Lisovyi wrote on Facebook in September.

David Arakhamia, a senior lawmaker and Zelenskyy ally, said Thursday that parliament planned to draw up legislation to improve the mobilization and demobilization procedure by year's end.

The bill, he said on TV, would cover what to do with people who have been fighting for two years without rotation, how to demobilize soldiers who have returned after being prisoners of war, and also address "issues related to the conscription age."