There may be a battle looming, not just between the United States and Ukraine over the conscription of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, but also within the Donald Trump administration.
The call for Ukraine to cast a wider conscription net predates the Trump administration. Facing imminent loss on the battlefield after NATO had bankrupted its supply of weapons, demanding that Ukraine throw more men into battle emerged as the last grasp solution during the Joe Biden administration.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So, we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary. Right now, 18 to 25-year olds are not in the fight.”
That call was picked up by Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, who said “one of the things we’ll be asking of the Ukrainians is, they have real manpower issues. Their draft age right now is 26 years old, not 18. I don’t think a lot of people realise that they could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers…[I]f the Ukrainians have asked the entire world to be all in for democracy, we need them to be all in for democracy.”
But Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, seemed to take the opposing view to Waltz, recognizing that throwing more Ukrainians into the battle compounds Ukraine’s problems rather than solving them. “The problem with Ukraine is not that they’re running out of money,” Rubio said at his January 22 confirmation hearing, “but that they’re running out of Ukrainians.”
And they are running out of Ukrainians. According to Florence Bauer, the Regional Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the United Nations Population Fund, Ukraine’s population has declined by over ten million since the conflict began in 2014, with eight million of those occurring since Russia’s invasion in 2022. Even before the war, Ukraine ranked sixth in the world for losing citizens to emigration. According to a report by the CIA, Ukraine has the lowest birth rate and the highest death rate in the world. By 2023, the birth rate had dropped by nearly half compared to the year before the war. The Ukrainian armed forces has suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths or injuries and at least 100,000 desertions.
Though the battle may exist within the Trump administration, it will be much more heated if they wage it with the Zelensky administration. President Volodymyr Zelensky has consistently resisted lowering the draft age below the current cut off of twenty-five. In April 2024, Ukraine lowered the age of people who were eligible to be drafted from twenty-seven to twenty-five and tightened laws around exemptions. But it wasn’t enough. The changes fell far short of making up for battlefield losses. But Zelensky has resisted American pressure to go further. There are several reasons, including military, political, and sociological, for why Zelensky has been unyielding.
Asking Ukrainians to throw more soldiers into a lost war is asking a lot. But asking them to send their eighteen to twenty-five year olds is especially asking a lot.
Ukraine is in a precarious position that it does not have enough of that generation. When the Soviet Union collapsed, economic hardship led to plummeting birth rates in the newly independent Ukraine. Birth rates dropped from 1.9 per woman to 1.1 in the first year. The small number of children born then are the eighteen to twenty-five year old cohort now. And many of them are either serving already, have been killed or injured, have left Ukraine or are exempt, making the small pool even smaller.
The small cohort leads to three problems. The first is economic. Losing large numbers of the already anemic upcoming generation will leave a void in the workplace. The second is demographic. It will create a challenge to the future population of the already shrinking nation. As The New York Times put it, “Ukraine must balance the need to counter a relentless Russian offensive by adding more troops against the risk of hollowing out an entire generation.”
The third is military. The pool of eighteen to twenty-five year olds is not sufficient to make a difference in the war. A poll conducted in the summer of 2024, cited by Peter Korotaev and Volodymyr Ishchenko, found that only 32% of Ukrainians disagree with the statement “mobilization will have no effect other than increased deaths.” Ukraine is being pressed to throw more of its young people into the teeth of the Russian advance to win a war that they have come to know cannot be won.
But in addition to the economic, demographic, and military reasons why mobilization is failing and lowering the draft age would be unpopular, there is a fourth, more endemic and, potentially, more corrosive reason identified by Korotaev and Ishchenko. Polling suggests that Ukrainians are increasingly unwilling to fight for Ukraine because they increasingly feel abandoned and betrayed by their country.
The abandonment takes the form of the state asking Ukrainians to give to the state when the state has given little to Ukrainians. Richard Sakwa says in his new book, The Culture of the Second Cold War, that Zelensky has pursued a policy of “radical neoliberal policies, including the privatization of land and state property, the weakening of labor and welfare legislation, and steep increases in the price of utilities.” Minimum wage and social security have remained flat while inflation rapidly rises. Ishchenko and Korotaev say “[a]ll of a sudden, a state that had hardly been present in Ukrainians’ lives demanded that they sacrifice themselves for its survival.”
By the third year of the war, public enthusiasm to sacrifice and volunteer was waning. Polling in June 2024 found that only 32% “fully or partly supported” the new mobilization law. And that mobilization only lowered draft eligibility to twenty-five. The United States is pushing for eighteen.
The betrayal takes the form of anger at the unequal application of the draft. While the poor are being nabbed off the street and deposited on the front line, those who can afford it find ways to work the corrupt system and pay their way out of service. The taking of bribes by draft officials has become an industry. Ishchenko and Korotaev cite a parliamentarian who, upon returning form the front near Pokrovsk, said that the soldiers manning the front lines “were mainly those who could not ‘decide things’ with a bribe.”
The unequal distribution of the demand to serve has changed the definition of patriotism. Polling now shows that only 29% of Ukrainians consider it shameful to dodge the draft. And Ukrainians are not only voting for dodging the draft, they’re dodging it. The new mobilization law required all eligible males to submit their papers by July 17, 2024. Six million out of ten million have not. Ishchenko and Korotaev add that of the 40% who did file their papers, at least half of them had “medical or other reasons allowing them to legally avoid mobilization.” Mobilization officials in Ukraine are investigating half a million men for draft evasion.
Both Democrats and Republicans have pushed for a plunging age eligibility for conscription in Ukraine. And while there may be some disagreement between security and state in the Trump administration, there seems to be less disagreement among Ukrainians. And there is shaping up to be even greater disagreement between the United States and Ukraine if the Trump administration pressures Ukraine to lower the draft age or conditions support on that decision.
