Ukraine Cannot Replace the Soldiers It Loses. Kyiv Lowers the Draft Age Anyway.

Ukraine's parliament voted in February 2025 to lower the minimum conscription age from 27 to 25, a move that could theoretically add 450,000 men to the draft pool. Six weeks later, mobilisation centres across the country are meeting less than 60 percent of their monthly quotas, according to data compiled by the Ukrainian Institute for the Future and reviewed by three Western defence ministries.

For Volodymyr Hrytsenko, a 26-year-old software developer in Lviv, the new law meant abandoning a plan to marry in May. He left for Poland on March 14, joining an estimated 180,000 Ukrainian men who have crossed into EU countries since the age change took effect. "They say we negotiate from strength," he said by phone from Kraków. "But if the army cannot fill its ranks, what strength is there?"

The gap between President Volodymyr Zelensky's public negotiating position and Ukraine's mobilisation reality has widened into a strategic contradiction. Zelensky told the Munich Security Conference in February that Ukraine would negotiate "only from a position of strength," citing frozen Russian assets, continued Western arms deliveries, and Ukraine's ability to sustain the fight. But internal Ukrainian Defence Ministry documents leaked to Ukrainska Pravda in April show that the armed forces require 35,000 new recruits per month to maintain current force levels. In March, the country mobilised 19,400.

The Arithmetic of Attrition

Ukraine does not publish casualty figures, but Western intelligence estimates compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies place Ukrainian killed and wounded since February 2022 at between 380,000 and 430,000. Russian losses are estimated at 520,000 to 600,000. The difference is that Russia has a population of 144 million and a mobilisation infrastructure built over decades. Ukraine has 37 million people, minus the eight million who have fled abroad and the estimated four million living under Russian occupation.

The February law was designed to address this imbalance. Lowering the draft age to 25 brought Ukraine in line with NATO standards and unlocked access to a younger, fitter cohort. But it also triggered the largest wave of draft evasion since the war began. Poland's Border Guard reported 47,000 Ukrainian men aged 25 to 30 entering the country in March alone, a 340 percent increase over February. Similar surges were recorded at the Romanian, Moldovan, and Slovak borders.

Ukrainian authorities have responded with escalating enforcement. The National Police launched Operation Mobilisation in mid-March, deploying officers to gyms, concerts, and metro stations in Kyiv, Lviv, and Odesa to check draft registration documents. Videos of men being detained and handed conscription notices went viral on Ukrainian social media, prompting backlash from civil society groups. Amnesty International Ukraine called the raids "incompatible with the rule of law." The government defended them as necessary.

Zelensky's Negotiating Paradox

Zelensky's insistence on negotiating from strength rests on three pillars: Ukraine's ability to hold territory, continued Western military aid, and the threat of using frozen Russian assets for reconstruction. The first pillar is cracking. Ukrainian forces have ceded 1,200 square kilometres in Donetsk Oblast since January, according to analysis by the Institute for the Study of War. The second pillar remains intact—the United States approved a $12 billion arms package in March—but European commitments have wavered as public support softens. The third pillar, the €300 billion in frozen Russian central bank reserves, remains legally and politically untouchable despite months of debate in Brussels.

Meanwhile, Russia has absorbed 12,000 North Korean troops into its forces in Kursk Oblast, where Ukrainian units launched a surprise incursion in August 2024 and still hold approximately 600 square kilometres of Russian territory. The North Korean contingent, drawn from the Korean People's Army's Storm Corps, has taken heavy casualties—an estimated 1,800 killed or wounded as of April, according to South Korean intelligence—but has allowed Russia to rotate exhausted units out of the line without weakening its overall posture.

Russia has also sustained its drone campaign with Iranian-supplied Shahed-136 loitering munitions, which continue to target Ukrainian energy infrastructure despite international sanctions. A February 2025 report by Conflict Armament Research documented Iranian components in 34 drones downed over Ukraine in January, including microprocessors purchased through shell companies in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Iran denies supplying the systems. The evidence is overwhelming.

The Ghost of Minsk

Zelensky's refusal to negotiate without military leverage reflects a lesson learned from the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015. Those accords, brokered by Germany and France after Russia's initial invasion of Crimea and Donbas, froze the conflict but left Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation and gave Moscow effective veto power over Ukraine's foreign policy through provisions for regional autonomy. Angela Merkel admitted in a December 2022 interview with Die Zeit that Minsk "gave Ukraine time" to build its army, an acknowledgment that the West never intended the agreements to hold. For Kyiv, the lesson was clear: freezing the war without recovering territory means permanent loss.

But the current manpower crisis makes Minsk look like a best-case scenario. Ukraine now faces the possibility of negotiating not from strength but from demographic exhaustion. The World Bank estimates Ukraine will need $486 billion for reconstruction over the next decade, a figure that assumes a stable postwar environment and functional state capacity. If the war continues, those costs rise. If Ukraine accepts a frozen conflict without Western security guarantees, Russia will rearm and attack again, as it did in 2022 after eight years of Minsk.

The Human Cost of Strategy

In Dnipro, a city 80 kilometres from the front line, the Central Mobilisation Office processed 340 conscripts in March, down from 520 in January. Lieutenant Colonel Andriy Koval, the office's deputy commander, attributes the decline to "fear and misinformation," but acknowledges the system is struggling. "We are asking men to leave their families and jobs to face an enemy with more artillery, more drones, and an endless supply of bodies," he said. "The question they ask is fair: what are we defending if there is nothing left to come home to?"

The Ukrainian government has launched a public relations campaign to counter defeatism, featuring testimonials from soldiers, appeals from celebrities, and billboards across major cities. The messaging is patriotic but strained. A March poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 62 percent of Ukrainians support continuing the fight, down from 84 percent in May 2022. Support for negotiations, even if they involve territorial concessions, has risen to 31 percent, the highest since the war began.

What Comes Next

Western officials are split on Ukraine's prospects. A senior NATO strategist, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Kyiv's position as "militarily sustainable but demographically terminal." The United States and United Kingdom continue to supply advanced weapons, including ATACMS missiles and Storm Shadow cruise missiles, but have ruled out direct intervention. European leaders, meanwhile, are quietly pressing Zelensky to define an endgame that does not require Ukraine to recapture every kilometre of occupied territory.

Zelensky has resisted, arguing that territorial concessions would reward aggression and invite future attacks. But his domestic political position is weakening. Presidential elections, postponed indefinitely under martial law, cannot be delayed forever. And the longer the war drags on without decisive gains, the harder it becomes to sustain public support for the sacrifices required.

For now, Ukraine continues to mobilise, to fight, and to hope that Western resolve will outlast Russian attrition. But the gap between Kyiv's rhetoric and its reality is growing. The frozen Russian assets remain frozen. The conscription offices remain half-empty. And the men who might fill them are crossing borders, looking for a future that does not involve a trench.

Back in Kraków, Volodymyr Hrytsenko checks Ukrainian news sites every morning, watches videos of artillery strikes, reads the casualty reports that are never officially confirmed. He feels guilt, he says, but also relief. "I want to believe we can win," he said. "But I also want to live long enough to rebuild something afterward."