As thousands fled Kyiv in the first days of Russia’s 2022 invasion, one 57-year-old grandmother hurried in the opposite direction. Liudmyla Menyuk was going to sign up for the army to avenge her son who’d been killed fighting the Russians almost a decade before.
Many Ukrainians of Menyuk’s age have volunteered, sometimes motivated — like she was — by the explicit wish to stand in for a youth who might otherwise die in their place. “I performed my duties well,” she told Bloomberg in an interview, “so I could save the life of a young Ukrainian.”
But the enthusiasm of Ukraine’s elder citizens compared with their younger counterparts has turned into a weakness for the country’s army, as the onslaught against it drags into a third year and it struggles to repel Russia’s advances. With his country outgunned and outmanned, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been vocal about the country’s need for weapons — and recently reaped the reward of his appeals. He is quieter on the much more sensitive matter of the need for men.
Front-line soldiers interviewed by Bloomberg said the aid package approved by US Congress last month has started to ease pressure on equipment, which had been heavily rationed so long as the bill’s passage remained uncertain. Yet, despite a new mobilization law lowering the age of the draft, manpower remains a problem.
“Most of the people I talk to are about 40-45 years old,” said Pavlo Narozhnyi, who raises funds for artillerymen, adding that “younger people — especially younger than 30 — are relatively rare.” A senior military official speaking on condition of anonymity echoed that assessment, citing an average fighting age of 43-45.
As much as the war’s recently stepped up in new theaters — drone strikes on energy installations, missile barrages, attacks on ships in the Baltic — the dispute is fundamentally over territory, and so depends on Ukraine’s ability to replenish its soldiers. And that poses a problem for a country with a third of its adversary’s population.
Until sustaining a major injury last year, Menyuk fought despite her poor hearing and eyesight, while others interviewed for this story complained of heart problems and even ailments that had yet to be properly investigated because of limited access to medical care on the front line.
“It was a problem yesterday. And it is only getting worse,” said Oleksiy Melnyk, who works at Kyiv’s Razumkov Centre think tank, speaking of the aging in Ukraine’s ranks.
Russian troops have unleased their firepower all along the front line and made incremental advances this year, capturing the eastern city of Adviivka in the process.
Last year Vladimir Putin’s former defense minister outlined detailed plans to expand Russia’s armed forces even further: to 1.5 million people from 1.15 million now. So far, its military has been attracting soldiers with the promise of generous pay and a new law making it easier for young conscripts to serve at the front line.
In Ukraine, recruitment remains a struggle.
The ethos that the young should avoid the battlefield has been enshrined into law with conscription aimed, until very recently, only at those aged over 27 years old. Recently that was lowered to 25 but the situation is made worse by the ineffective call-up of those who do fall into the target range. In a population displaced by fighting, many young people can’t be found. Only half of the 4.5 million displaced have re-registered at a new address, according to official statistics.
Another factor is that mothers who fled their country with teenage sons aren’t sending them back now they’re of age to volunteer, so there are fewer men signing up at the lowest end of eligibility — youths of 18, 19 or 20.
Add to that a demographic backdrop that means there are twice as many Ukrainians in their late thirties, owing to a 1980s baby boom, as in their early twenties, when families grappling with the uncertainties of post-Soviet Ukraine weren’t rushing to have kids.
Aside from the unpopular politics of sending Ukraine’s youth off to die, the exemption for men aged between 18 and 25 from front-line combat is motivated by a belief that they will be key to rebuilding Ukraine in the future, said lawmaker Serhiy Rakhmanin, a member of the parliamentary committee for security and defense.
“We don’t know how long the war will go on for, and what resources we will need, and for how long,” he told Bloomberg in an interview. But that same uncertainty means many older soldiers now suffer from neglected illnesses and traumas that are the costs of fighting a war with no end in sight.
At the beginning of the invasion Vitaliy Pryvrotskyi, who is 52, signed up along with other friends who like him were veterans of the Soviet Afghan war — one advantage of experience some elder Ukrainians have over the younger generation.
“When I was signing up the medical commission didn’t check anything,” Pryvrotskyi, who serves near Kharkiv, said by phone during a moment’s rest from the job he’s been assigned taking care of military vehicles. “They said, look, you’re volunteering for perhaps a few days. The war will be over soon!”
His wife, he says, worried so much about his being killed but he told her: “We worked hard to earn enough to make our life comfortable. I don’t want the Russians to come and take it all.”
In the end, it was his wife who died. She succumbed to a stroke while he was away fighting, which he attributes to the pain of his absence.
Now, Pryvrotskyi struggles to walk in protective gear for more than 100 feet without feeling constriction in his heart. He is in no position to heed the doctor’s advice that he should avoid stress. Like many, he’s served without interruption since the war’s start without respite.
One of its goals is to introduce obligatory basic military training for men aged between 18 to 25, lawmaker Rakhmanin said. “A large number of young people do not get any military skills.”
Weighed down by over 4,000 amendments, the legislation — which came into effect on May 18 — also narrows exemptions from military service and makes it harder to dodge the draft. It was meant to contain a provision limiting the time conscripts serve to three years, in order to appease their families, but that was spiked at the behest of military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi.
The language around the war is offputting both to young people and to family members who might otherwise let them fight, according to Melnyk, the analyst. The language of death for the sake of Ukraine is the “wrong approach”, he said. “Nobody wants to send the gene pool to destruction.”
That is a prospect that torments 52-year-old servicewoman Yulia Razumenko. She signed up for military service herself in 2022. Years before she had convinced her son to enroll at a military academy, telling him: “Look, if the war breaks out — and it will break out — you are going to have the skills and knowledge to help you fight your fears.”
“On the other hand, I am a mother. Am I really convincing my son to go to war?”
