An 'Explosive Mix' As Ukraine Tries To Tackle Manpower Crisis At The Front

The venues could hardly have been more conspicuous: a concert in the capital by the country's most popular rock group, a high-end resort, and a weekend wedding in downtown Lviv.

Military recruiters showed up at these events, among many others across Ukraine in recent days, looking for men who had not registered for service under a long-debated and highly controversial military mobilization law that was adopted last spring.

In some cases, the result was dramatic. Footage shot outside the Okean Elzy concert at Kyiv's Palace of Sports on October 11 showed officers dragging a man in civilian clothes across the pavement as he shouted in protest and onlookers chanted "Shame!"

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It was a glaring example of two worlds colliding in Ukraine, where deadly battles grind on along the 1,200-kilometer front line as Russia's full-scale invasion heads toward its fourth year with little sign of an end in sight, and where life -- even nightlife -- goes on despite the missile and drone attacks that hit cities and towns nationwide.

"Half the country is crying and half the country is jumping [for joy]," Oleksiy Haran, a political science professor and research director at the Kyiv-based Democratic Initiatives foundation, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, using a phrase that rhymes in Ukrainian to accentuate the divide between soldiers at the front and civilians living relatively carefree lives in wartime.

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In its existential effort to ward off Moscow's onslaught, Ukraine faces multiple challenges. A key city in the Donbas could fall soon as Russian forces advance with the help of air superiority. Russian attacks on power and energy infrastructure could make for a particularly hard winter. And the future of crucial Western support – when it comes to weapons, financial aid, and diplomatic backing -- is clouded by the upcoming U.S. election and disagreements among EU members.

A Deadly Numbers Game

But the recruitment raids point to a problem that "has grown to incredible proportions," said Kyiv-based political analyst Oleksiy Koshel: A dire need for more soldiers on the front lines. It's a problem that is Kyiv's to solve, and one whose effects reverberate far from the battlefield, exacerbating rifts in society when the last thing Ukraine needs is disunity.

SEE ALSO: 'The Bakhmut Meat Grinder': Russian Troops Are Pummeling This Donbas City. It's Unclear Why. 

Manpower is a problem for Russia, too, as Moscow's military makes "pretty modest advances at an enormous cost in men and equipment," said Ruth Deyermond, senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. But it's "more obviously acute in the case of Ukraine."

"There are not enough people at the front -- that is an absolute fact," Ukrainian military analyst Pavlo Narozhniy told RFE/RL. "There is a shortage of personnel in absolutely all units."

To illustrate the point, he described a scenario at the front: "We have an observation post or a defense point that should have 30 people on duty, but in reality there may be five to seven there…. And 30-40 Russians are attacking, and these five to seven have to hold back the attack by 30-40. Because there aren't enough people," he said. "There are simply no people -- they're gone."

Ukraine's army "can never win the numbers game against an adversary like Russia, with a far greater population and a leadership that is prepared to pay a very high blood price for its war aims," Simon Schlegel, senior Ukraine analyst at the Crisis Group, said in an e-mailed comment.

A local resident rides a bike near a recruitment advert for the Ukrainian Army in the Dnipropetrovsk region. (file photo)

This was not a worry in the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion, which started in February 2022. In the beginning, "Volunteers formed long lines outside recruitment centers and often brought their own equipment and organized their own training," Schlegel said. In 2023, however, the "abundant stream of volunteers dried up."

The mobilization law is part of a series of efforts this year to get the number up. Among other things, it required men aged 25 to 60 to update their personal data at military-run recruitment centers or civilian administrative offices, or on a government app, Reserve+.

"That led to a much better overview over what kind of reserve Kyiv can rely on. That reserve, perhaps some 3.7 million conscripts, is much bigger than the maybe 200,000 soldiers Kyiv is hoping to mobilize this year," Schlegel said. "And intake seems to have grown considerably over the summer."

'Wild Mobilization'

But there are plenty of problems, ranging from obstacles to effective training -- for one thing, many soldiers who are qualified to train are dead or fighting at the front -- to corruption that enables men to avoid service through bribes and other machinations.

There are also disincentives to serve, including the fact that the mobilization law does not set out rules for demobilization or rotation. That has left potential recruits concerned that, like exhausted soldiers who have been fighting with little or no respite since 2022 or 2023, once they're in they may never get out alive.

But more and more are trying to do just that: An October 15 report in the media outlet Ukrayinska Pravda cited the Prosecutor-General's Office as saying nearly 18,300 desertion cases were registered in January-September of this year, four times more than over the same period in 2023. AWOL cases were also way up, it said.

SEE ALSO: Amid Corruption Scandals And Mounting Problems, Ukraine Vows To Shake Up The Military Enlistment System. It's A Tough Task.

Forceful efforts to bring men into the military or summon them to register -- sometimes called "wild mobilization" -- have been happening since long before the new law was passed. Since the first full winter of the all-out war, videos showing recruiters handing out draft notices in aggressive, tricky, sometimes violent ways have surfaced online with some frequency.

Violent Videos Raise Questions About Ukrainian Military Recruiters

As Ukraine's manpower problem has intensified, so has the public debate. In a poll by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center in late June, nearly half the respondents -- 46 percent -- said there is "no shame in evading military service," while 29 percent said that there is.

The raid outside the Okean Elzy concert touched a nerve at a sensitive time for Ukraine, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy seeking to sell Ukrainians and Kyiv's foreign backers on a "victory plan" that would require stepped-up Western support and a NATO membership invitation before the war ends.

The incident attracted outsized attention in part because Okean Elzy front man Svyatoslav Vakarchuk is a celebrity spanning culture and politics -- a rock star and former lawmaker who founded the opposition party Holos (Voice) in 2019.

Ukrainian musician and politician Svyatoslav Vakarchuk (file photo)

Footage of the scuffle between recruiters and civilians went viral and prompted vocal reactions on both sides of the divide over military service and the methods used to increase manpower at the front.

"They're taking everyone indiscriminately," a man in the northern city of Chernihiv told RFE/RL. "And where do they send them -- to their deaths? I think that is wrong."

Another Chernihiv resident disagreed. "I believe this is the duty of every man," he said. "I've served since 2015. I've fought in two wars. So, I think it's the duty of every Ukrainian man."

For others, it's more about the methods.

"On the one hand, it seems that we need to replenish our army and help them [to rotate out]. On the other hand, I don't like the way they are doing it," one woman said.

'We Want To Dance While You Fight'

Mobilization methods pitting military recruiters who are in some cases wounded combat veterans against civilians at leisure make for "an explosive mix," Ukrainian parliament deputy Oleksiy Honcharenko told Current Time.

"They've lost their brothers-in-arms and their health, and here they are on the big-city streets where life is bubbling along, where there are restaurants, clubs, concerts."

"This is wrong, the system [of recruitment centers] should be entirely civilian," Honcharenko said. "And all this creates tension in Ukrainian society, of course."

In a Facebook post, servicewoman Lesya Hanzha suggested that the cries of "Shame!" addressed to recruiters and police outside the concert venue were signs of "a society that confuses shame with honor" -- a rift between the military and ordinary citizens on the one hand and a privileged, condescending elite on the other.

"[It] sounds to me like a message of 'You are losers and we're not. We want to dance while you fight, and we think that's okay.' Open chutzpah that's passed off as human rights," she wrote.

Confrontations like the one outside the Okean Elzy concert also open a window for Russian propaganda, according to the state-supported Center for Countering Disinformation. It said Russian media and pro-Kremlin bloggers have used the developments to play up the narratives that mobilization is unfair in Ukraine and that the government "wants to fight to the last Ukrainian."

Ukrainians Protest At Recruitment Center Amid Tensions Over Mobilization

But the manpower problem eclipses any threat from Russian propaganda, analysts suggest.

If the dynamics of mobilization don't change, the prospects are grim, Narozhniy told RFE/RL: A "catastrophe" is unlikely, but "we will constantly be retreating in the areas where the enemy is advancing."

"Yes, they are advancing slowly; yes, they are gaining a few dozen meters a day -- but it is still a creeping offensive. It's like gangrene that eats away at a person, and in our case, unfortunately, it's eating away at our country," he said.

"If things don't change and this negative trend continues, we will lose our country and our people."

With reporting by Aleksander Palikot in Kyiv, Oleh Haliv of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service in Kyiv, Andriy Titok of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service in Chernihiv, and Ivan Grebeniuk and Aleksei Aleksandrov of Current Time.