The Ukraine Running Out of People to Keep Doomed War Effort Going

Elvis Dunderhoff November 28, 2023


Well.

This is what we said from the beginning.

Daily Stormer is basically a “Spoiler Alert” website, no?

We said: “it doesn’t matter how many American weapons systems they have, they cannot win a war without soldiers.”

Reuters:

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. Her husband has only had about 25 days’ home leave since he enlisted and their two children are growing up without a father.

“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.”

Oleksandr Danylevych

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

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

They’re discharged when a Russian discharges a weapon on them.

Otherwise, they must fight forever, because there aren’t any more soldiers.

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.

Antonina Danylevych

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

Ukraine did not beat Russian forces back from Kiev. Russian forces voluntarily withdrew as a sign of good faith after Ukraine signed a draft peace agreement.

Come on.

This is known now.

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 mobilised by draft officers. Men aged between 18 and 26 can’t be drafted, though they can enlist voluntarily.

Ukraine, which has said it has about 1 million people under arms, has barred military-age men from going abroad. Its constantly running mobilisation programme, which was declared at the start of the war, is a state secret. So are battlefield losses, which U.S. estimates put in the tens of thousands.

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

This month, 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.

He added that Ukraine, like Russia, had limited capacity to train troops and alluded to gaps in legislation that he said allowed citizens to shirk mobilisation.

“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 mobilisation,” he wrote in rare comments published as an article by The Economist.

Well, you’ve already drafted kids and old people.

So, you’re going to draft women? That’s really the final option.

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 mobilise causing public outcry.

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.

They use drones to look for people trying to escape to Romania

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 mobilisation.

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.

Yeah, just kill everyone, I guess.

I don’t know.

Cadets of Military Institute of Taras Shevchenko National University

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