Brave New Ukraine

Nataliya Gumenyuk

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After more than two years fighting one of the world’s most powerful armies, Ukraine has enacted a new mobilization law—a move hailed by the West as an urgent reform. Signed into law on April 16, the legislation comes at a time when Ukraine faces a series of growing challenges in its defense against Russia, from shortages of Ukraine’s soldiers and ammunition to wavering Western support. In this view, the new law could make it easier for the government to replenish its forces as it prepares for a major Russian offensive this summer.

For Ukrainians, however, the law also represents something else. Subject to more than 4,200 amendments, the law required months of contentious debate in the Ukrainian parliament. Indeed, some of its original provisions—such as planning for how and when the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have been serving since the war began should be discharged—were ultimately left out for a separate bill. But it also has become a symbol of Ukraine’s imperfect yet still flourishing democracy. More significantly, it has helped define the pivot point at which the country now stands: having weathered the initial emergency of war, Ukraine now needs to restructure its institutions and its society as it adapts to a potentially much longer conflict.

Back in the spring and summer of 2022, in the months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukrainians’ response to the attack was almost spontaneous. Huge numbers of men enlisted, and despite brutal fighting and constant bombardment, they were able to defeat Russia’s attempt to take Kyiv and even to reclaim significant territory captured by the Russians. With arms and supplies flooding into Ukraine from the United States and the West and immediate fighting to be done, there was not much time to think about building the country’s own defense industries or managing the wartime economy.

Today, the Ukrainians continue to maintain a tough frontline against the Russians and are as determined as ever to defend their country. But as the war becomes protracted, the country also faces major structural demands. The armed forces must be prepared to fight for months or years to come. The government has to keep the civilian economy afloat, even as it sends more of its able-bodied population into battle. And as the leadership in Kyiv awaits a long-delayed aid package from the U.S. Congress, it must learn to do more with less. In practice, that means creating a system in which much of the adult male population of the country—before the war, there were some 10.5 million men between the ages of 18 and 59—serves in the army. It means building, almost from scratch, a defense production capability that allows Ukraine to lessen its dependence on allies. And it means further reorganizing the national economy to ensure there is enough money to pay for the runaway costs of war.

To meet these daunting tasks, the Ukrainian government has spent months pushing the mobilization bill through parliament. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also taken a series of interim steps to help close the gap in the armed forces, even as members of his administration try to put the economy on a more strategic war footing. But each of these moves requires balancing complex and sometimes contradictory decisions with the need to maintain the country’s social cohesion. Often, there are no perfect solutions.

THE VETERANS’ DILEMMA

After more than two years of war, Ukraine’s need for soldiers is acute. But it is not just a question of adding more people to the existing forces or making up for the fallen and wounded. In actual numbers, officials have made varying estimates of the country’s needs: in December 2023, army commanders demanded 500,000 new soldiers; more recently, the new commander in chief, General Oleksandr Syrsky, suggested that 150,000 recruits per year might be sufficient, although many regard that figure as too low. Equally pressing, however, may be the issue of maintaining troop quality.

For many of the country’s military leaders, a top priority is providing a fair deal for those who have been risking their lives for two years already, even as millions of other Ukrainians have preserved a relatively normal way of life away from the battlefield. Thus, as new troops are mobilized, the army is under pressure to release some of its most experienced service personnel. But it is no secret that the vast combat experience that these veterans have cannot be matched by even the best-trained recruits, creating a dilemma for the army.

Some of these challenges date to well before the current war. In the years leading up to Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine, whose territory had been the major defensive line between the Soviets and the West during the Cold War, had abolished the draft, and its standing army had shrunk to tiny levels. As the 2014 invasion was unfolding, Ukraine’s acting defense minister, with only slight exaggeration, claimed that the country had only 5,000 soldiers fit for combat. Moscow’s aggression became a wake-up call for Ukraine’s military and ushered in major reforms.

The harder the state pushes, the more chance that Ukrainians will rebel.

By 2022, the armed forces had grown to 300,000, many of whom were volunteers. Today, that figure has ballooned to more than one million people, out of a total population of about 40 million. A large majority began their service at the start of the war: following Russia’s February 2022 invasion, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians enlisted, and a draft of serving-age men began. (The call-up has continued to the present: on an almost weekly basis, most Ukrainians witness someone they know going into service.) The huge influx was crucial to Ukraine’s defense, but it also meant that the army began the war with very little experience or internal cohesion. Its soldiers are predominantly civilians who come from widely disparate social and economic backgrounds and have varying political views and levels of education. There is no such thing as a typical Ukrainian soldier anymore.

Under existing law, there is no formal time limit for military service. Soldiers are supposed to be discharged when martial law ends—which means the end of the war and could be years away. As one officer told me, “Even the most determined [soldier] will consider this to be an eternal contract.” To address the problem, the original draft mobilization bill, when it was introduced in January, proposed to mandate demobilization after 36 months of active duty. But that provision was dropped because of pressure from military leaders, who feared they would lose their most experienced troops.

Coming after two years of intense warfare, the challenge of building a just system for military enlistment has turned into a focal point for larger debates about Ukraine’s democratic foundations and the future of the war. Although the mobilization bill was in itself broadly supported, critics argued that some of its provisions violated the Ukrainian constitution, which cannot be changed under martial law and was written in times when a major land war on Ukrainian soil seemed almost unthinkable. For instance, the constitution guarantees the right of free movement and the right of education: if you were studying at a university or for a Ph.D., you could avoid the draft, whereas now, if you are of serving age, you may be conscripted. The new enlistment system also requires Ukrainians of serving age to provide personal data, which may violate existing privacy laws.

Ukraine’s political classes are also sensitive to the country’s implicit social contract: the harder the state pushes and the stricter the rules that are enforced, the more chance there is that the Ukrainians will rebel and disobey. Like the Americans, the Ukrainians have a deep-seated suspicion of government intrusion in their lives. Thus, the government must find ways to encourage people to serve instead of forcing them to do so.

YOUNGER AND STRONGER?

This winter, while the mobilization law was held up in parliament, Zelensky began to issue a series of partial measures to alleviate the growing pressure for more troops. In February, he allowed foreigners to join the National Guard—mainly as a way to allow people who live in Ukraine with residence permits but not citizenship to serve in the armed forces. In early April, the president also signed into law a bill lowering the military mobilization age by two years, from 27 to 25, a step that opens the way to recruiting the country’s population of younger adult males.

Many Ukrainians have long felt that keeping the country’s youth away from the horrors of battle was a wise policy. In Ukraine, mandatory military service starts at age 18 for those who are not studying for a university degree, but thus far, regular conscripts who are under 27 could not be ordered to the battlefield. Those younger men who are fighting in the war have done so of their own volition. (The new mobilization law replaces conscription with what is now called basic military training.)

One result of these policies is that the average age of Ukrainian soldiers today is over 40; men can be mobilized up to age 60. This means that the army rank and file tend to be more mature, and many fighters have families to return to and know what’s at stake. A few of the more experienced soldiers in one squadron I spoke to emphasized that they do not want young men to fight because “the youngest are the least careful, and take too many risks.”

Ukrainian soldiers firing a multiple launch rocket system, Donetsk region, Ukraine, March 2024Sofiia Gatilova / Reuters

After 26 months of war, however, the military understands that soldiers in their 20s are fitter and recover faster, allowing them to bounce back from injuries and return to the front. For instance, a young person who has experienced a concussion from an explosion may be able to recover from temporary hearing loss, whereas someone over 40 faces a higher risk of permanent deafness. In any event, the public seems to understand the military’s shifting needs. Zelensky’s decision to lower the draft age by two years—a move that has been anticipated for more than a year—has caused little popular reaction. He has also signed a bill requiring all Ukrainian men to register with a new “draftee e-account.” The account provides various online services to avoid paper bureaucracy, but it cannot be used for calling people for the draft.

Although these steps—and the new mobilization law—won’t produce an immediate wave of fresh soldiers, they will make millions more Ukrainians visible to the military bureaucracy. Currently, although nearly 20 million Ukrainians use the mobile app DIYA—an identity system that makes official documents, such as passports and university diplomas, available online—the military’s draft registries are maintained on paper and are connected to the places where people are registered to work or their official place of residence. And since millions of Ukrainian men are internally displaced and not officially employed, they may not be in these records.

Meanwhile, the government has sought better ways to deal with people who evade the draft. In 2023, Ukrainian courts prosecuted 1,274 people for evading military service; 60 cases resulted in prison sentences. There is also growing controversy about the abuse of draft exemptions, which are available to fathers who have to care for three or more children, single fathers, men who have to care for disabled relatives, or men who suffer from any one of a long list of health conditions. State institutions and companies also have the right to keep a set number of professionals with unique skills, such as doctors and nuclear scientists—a pool that could amount to as many as 500,000 people nationwide—out of the draft. Since the war began, prosecutors have opened thousands of investigations involving alleged bribes to military commissioners or forged documents; in August 2023, Zelensky replaced all the country’s regional military commissioners.

THE FEAR FACTOR

Still, in absolute terms, available manpower—and womanpower—is not the primary problem Ukraine is facing. According to one analysis released in March, there are as many as five million additional Ukrainian men who are potentially able to serve. Of these, 700,000 are between the ages of 18 to 25 and are currently deemed too young to serve. The study also found that if women who do not have children were mobilized, as many as three million women could be recruited, some of whom could be used in an auxiliary capacity or as support staff. Today, 45,000 women are serving in Ukrainian law enforcement, and around 5,500 are in combat roles as snipers, artillery specialists, or assault forces. But Ukrainian society remains conservative, and the idea of a general enlistment of women is not popular; Zelensky has said he opposes it.

In any case, such far-reaching moves would require extensive debate, including what a total militarization of society lasting for years to come would mean for the population and for the economy. Recently, the Public Interest Journalism Lab, for which I work, together with the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research, conducted a focus group study with both current military members and potential recruits to ask in-depth questions about the draft. Our research is still being analyzed, but the initial findings have indicated that for many Ukrainians, fear of the unknown is a significant factor in shaping negative views of the draft reform. Many are afraid they will find themselves in Bakhmut or Avdiivka just a few days after enlistment.

Almost everyone knows someone who has been killed in the war.

Respondents are also concerned about the inefficient use of draftees’ skills: they wonder, for instance, if an engineer with three degrees and who is not physically fit may be sent to train as a paratrooper, whereas skilled drivers or professional fighters might be sent to join the marine troops rather than the tank brigades or sniper units. Such concerns could be mitigated by more transparent discussions from military commanders about their most acute troop needs, as well as a more nimble system for assessing skills and assigning tasks.

Many Ukrainians also express concerns that the army is given insufficient material support, that soldiers are given little time to rest and recover, that the country’s “selective” approach to mobilization may not be fair, and that there is too little support for wounded soldiers and the families of the dead. In many cases, respondents complained about the lack of clear rules for payments in case of injury or death, even though such rules exist. The Ukrainian government, for instance, has decreed that it will provide families of soldiers who are killed in battle with 15 million Ukrainian hryvnia (about $377,000) compensation, an extraordinarily large sum. Yet the survey demonstrates that much of the population is not aware of it.

The government has attempted a few media and outreach campaigns aimed at providing basic information about military service, but they clearly have been inadequate. Overwhelmingly pervasive, however, is the fear of injury or death, given that Ukrainians face an almost constant barrage of news about fresh casualties, and almost everybody knows someone who has been killed in the war.

DEFIANT NORMALITY

Closely linked to the mobilization dilemma is the question of how to maintain civilian life. The war is already estimated to have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to Ukraine’s economic output. Entire industrial regions and large corporations have been destroyed. Ports that played a key role in international shipping and exports are blocked. Millions of professionals have left the country, and multiple economic sectors have simply disappeared during the war. Sustaining the military itself has also come at a high cost.

Ukraine’s battlefield successes are often now taken for granted, but they have been crucial to sustaining efforts by the government to maintain a working society. The liberation of the capital and Ukrainian regions in the north, east, and south, holding the frontline for almost two years, and the crucial role of Western-supplied air defenses such as the Patriot missile system have helped allow millions of civilians to continue with fairly normal lives in large parts of the country.

Notably, none of the funds provided to Ukraine by foreign partners such as the United States or the European Union are designated for paying Ukrainian soldiers or supporting arms production in Ukraine. Instead, international economic aid covers social payments, such as pensions, civil service salaries, and health care. As a result, almost all national revenues must now be used to maintain the armed forces. And that means that adding tens of thousands of new troops could put a further strain on the country’s coffers.

Families of Ukrainian soldiers demanding demobilization measures, Kyiv, April 2024Sofiia Gatilova / Reuters

For now, the Ukrainian economy has continued to reinvent itself. New types of businesses appear and are even growing, little by little. One such sector is logistics, both inside and outside the country, as many industries have been relocated and require new supply chains. Another growth area relates to reconstruction and rebuilding in areas formerly under Russian occupation. Online services have also expanded across the country to serve the displaced population with e-banking, online education, and other needs. And other sectors, cut off from global markets, have reoriented their production domestically: instead of producing clothes for global retailers, for example, some companies are producing uniforms for the military.

The government has also introduced initiatives to maintain whole industries with fewer people. Take agriculture, the sector that represents a considerable chunk of Ukraine’s economy. Some of the country’s largest fields are located close to the frontline and, in many cases, are now covered in land mines and can’t be planted. Moreover, the drivers of tractors and combines are major assets for the army, because they can drive tanks without much training, so many men in the agricultural sector have been drafted. In their absence, however, companies are developing unmanned farm vehicles that can be operated remotely.

There are similarities to the way that businesses survived the COVID-19 pandemic: it will never be as good as it was in normal times, but many industries can somehow manage to operate. Keeping workers inside the country was and remains critical for maintaining jobs. Another challenge for the government is how to pay for large numbers of enlistees who are not yet fighting but no longer work and pay taxes. The government has negotiated with the military to keep some workers out of the draft in order to keep critical areas of the economy going. Thus, the economy is being gradually transformed through thousands of such small steps.

WHERE ARE THE PATRIOTS?

For months, Ukraine has had a critical shortage of ammunition. Consider the retreat from Avdiivka in February, which has become a focal point for international analysts concerned about the shifting momentum in the war. In fact, Ukrainian forces were forced to pull back after four months of battle mainly because they ran out of bullets, not because they were losing the fight. Even the country’s most experienced battalions cannot overcome this shortfall.

Observing the inability of Ukraine’s Western partners to resupply weapons in a timely fashion, many feared the collapse of the frontline this spring. Those fears were alleviated somewhat by recent deliveries of ammunition, in particular from the Czech Republic and Germany, which have at least partially stabilized the situation. But they have also underscored how crucial this one element is to the overall war effort. Today, military officials must confront the dilemma of whether it makes sense to send waves of new soldiers to a frontline where many current soldiers already lack ammunition.

The most common explanation for Ukraine’s ammunition crisis is a global supply problem: Ukraine’s allies themselves, the logic goes, have not been able to produce munitions rapidly enough to keep up with demand. But arms experts disagree about how many weapons and ammunition supplies are still sitting in the warehouses of democratic allies. A lot depends on distribution. As with vaccine competition during the pandemic, countries may be hoarding supplies at a moment when global instability makes armed conflict more likely.

Loading ammunition into a magazine, near Kyiv, April 2024Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

South Korea, for example, is often mentioned as a state that produces enough ammunition to sell to other partners, yet it tends to keep a large surplus for domestic contingencies. By contrast, a few eastern European states, in particular in the Baltic region, have given almost everything they have to Ukraine, arguing that Russia wouldn’t attack a NATO state and that the Ukrainians are holding the frontline for the entire Western world.

At the World Economic Forum in January, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis stated that what is currently given to Ukraine is just a small part of what is necessary to defend a country of a similar size. Landsbergis noted that Poland has responded to the Ukraine crisis by ordering from the United States some 1,000 Abrams tanks, 500 long-range guided HIMARS missile systems, and 40 Patriot missile systems. “Poland is roughly the same size and has the same population as Ukraine,” Landsbergis said, “and Poland has NATO’s Article 5.” Ukraine, he implied, would need much more than that. Ukraine is currently believed to possess some Abrams tanks, a few dozen HIMARS systems, and fewer than ten Patriot systems. Recently, Zelensky announced that 25 Patriot systems would be enough to defend the whole of the country.

But Russian attacks are intensifying. On March 22, Moscow launched its deadliest attack on the Ukrainian energy system, and in Kharkiv, Odessa, and Zaporizhzhia, it has started to use so-called double strikes, well documented in Russia’s campaign in Syria: after a strike on a target, Russian forces will follow up with a second strike in the same area to deliberately target rescue workers and doctors coming to save the victims. On April 17, Russia also attacked the city center of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine with three missiles, killing at least 18 civilians, injuring 78 more, including four children, and damaging more than 500 apartments in 28 high-rise buildings. The strike has raised new alarms about the expected summer offensive; many observers point out that the attack could have been neutralized if Ukraine had received more air defense systems from its Western partners.

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For the foreseeable future, Kyiv will continue to depend on its allies for more sophisticated weapons such as HIMARS and Patriot systems. To confront Russia’s air dominance, it is also resting its hopes on the long-awaited delivery of F-16 fighter jets this summer. According to an analysis of Ukraine’s military budget through 2030 by Janes, a defense intelligence firm, Ukraine’s military procurement jumped to a projected 20-year high of nearly $10 billion in 2023, compared with a prewar figure of about $1 billion a year.

But the Ukrainian leadership recognizes that it is equally important to bolster the country’s own defense industry. By now, Ukraine has started to produce Bohdana artillery cannons, which are able to shoot NATO-caliber rounds, but it will need to do more. Zelensky is often criticized by the opposition for failing to prepare the economy for the full invasion and instead naively trying to find a peaceful solution to the conflict with Russia. He has responded that scaring the population by moving to a total war footing would have caused an outflow of investors and workers, the departure of businesses and taxpayers, and, in the end, a lack of funds in the state budget with which to wage a defense.

In some ways, today’s dilemma is similar: the government must figure out how to spend more on defense while still preserving some level of normality, so that the country’s best minds do not leave and businesses can function. Although ideas about nationalizing businesses, forcing private companies to produce weapons, and using citizens to make shells have come up during public debates, they are hard to put into practice without compromising Ukraine’s democratic foundations.

For Ukraine’s defense industries, the problem is not lack of capability, but lack of funds.

Nevertheless, the government is making some changes. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s strategic industries minister, has observed that Ukrainian industry could learn to produce various types of shells and drones and currently has $20 billion worth of production capacity. At the moment, however, the state budget can come up with no more than $6 billion for procurement. According to Kamyshin, the problem is no longer lack of capabilities but lack of funds.

But there may be ways around this problem as well. Today, many of Ukraine’s partners prefer to rely on weapons produced by their domestic markets. This is the case with the United States and Canada, just as European countries often rely on European producers. Over the last few years, some private Ukrainian companies have switched to weapons production and also managed to produce cheaper models than their Western counterparts. For instance, a Canadian Sky Ranger R70 drone costs $90,000, whereas a similar Ukrainian model costs from $10,000 to $25,000.

Now, Kamyshin has proposed to Western allies that they should purchase Ukrainian-produced weapons for Ukrainian forces, which, in addition to serving urgent frontline needs, would bring an infusion of cash to develop Ukraine’s defense sector. In fact, on April 18, Denmark became the first Western country to do so, reaching a deal with Kyiv to buy $28.5 million worth of Ukrainian-produced weapons and military equipment for Ukrainian forces.

CONSTANT GAME CHANGING

Observing the evolving war in Ukraine, arms experts have noted that successful defense production depends less on the capacity to produce any one particular technology than on the continual ability to modernize. Consider the case of drones: during the first year of the invasion, the Russians were hardly using any drones; now, they have made drones a central part of their arsenal. Moscow is not only importing large quantities of drones from Iran and North Korea but has also organized its own production of models that it previously bought from Tehran. For Ukraine, the takeaway is that relentless innovation is necessary, because the adversary is constantly learning and adapting.

Many Western defense companies, far from the battlefield, are not equipped to respond nimbly to the latest needs with new prototypes. But for the Ukrainian military and for Ukraine’s engineers and IT specialists, continual adaptation has become the only viable way to proceed. For example, Ukraine has been testing a variety of unmanned technologies—basically robots—that can be used for mining bridges, evacuating the wounded, and delivering weapons. Various IT solutions are in continuous development for communications and intelligence. Sometimes it is not just about the battlefield. As one Ukrainian soldier noted, she now uses ChatGPT for writing military reports, which saves her hours she used to spend on bureaucratic chores.

Ukrainians are cautious about using the term “asymmetric warfare” in their war with Russia. Former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk explains that the term can lead foreign partners to see Ukraine’s fight as a form of guerrilla warfare rather than as a full-fledged military campaign. That assumption caused problems in the run-up to the Russian invasion and during the initial months afterward, when the United Kingdom and the United States limited their supply of equipment to Ukraine to portable antitank weapons. These can be helpful in urban warfare, but they are hardly sufficient for the kind of conventional warfare Ukrainian forces are contending with, involving very long frontlines and thousands of square miles of land. Still, Ukraine has continued to reap tactical benefits by using approaches that surprise the enemy.

A Ukrainian soldier during combat, Chernihiv region, Ukraine, March 2024Gleb Garanich / Reuters

Zagorodnyuk insists the current war of attrition is also bad for Russia. The Ukrainian secret service claimed that one of its recent attacks was aimed at a factory in Tatarstan, where the Russians were producing drones using Iranian technology. Ukraine’s military goal in this war is not just to retake the territories and save people from the brutal Russian occupation. Kyiv has to destroy Moscow’s capabilities to grab new territories and prevent it from carrying out future missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.

During the past year, the armed forces of Ukraine demonstrated they are able to do this in the Black Sea—and almost without naval support, relying mainly on sea drones produced in Ukraine. As a result of Ukrainian pressure, the Russian navy has moved away from Crimea, closer to Russian naval bases. This has significantly decreased Russian missile capabilities. The farther the Russian flagships are from Ukrainian shores, the less they can shoot and the less precise their attacks are. This also unblocked the passageway for Ukraine to resume agricultural exports, which bring money to the state budget. Ukraine has also destroyed some Russian planes, including the Ilyushin Il-20PP, which Russia claimed to be capable of jamming modern AWACS aircraft and Patriots air defense systems while blocking analogous jamming measures.

Nonetheless, the Russian army has also demonstrated that quantity still can override quality. Even without good reconnaissance, an abundance of drones can be used effectively. That’s not an approach that Ukraine can afford, but Ukrainians can benefit from their growing knowledge of how to deal with weapons and plan military tactics.

THE SPARTAN FUTURE

Although Ukraine may have to militarize the economy to survive, that doesn’t mean that it will have to militarize society, as well. There is nothing more normal than aspiring to a world without wars, and after Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, that is what the country mostly did. Its leaders assumed that fewer soldiers were needed and that less could be spent on defense. Then, in 2022, Ukrainians learned the hard way that you can be dragged into a fight without asking for one. Today, no one is arguing that the country’s defenses shouldn’t be further strengthened.

While I was embedded in an elite paratrooper squadron near the Russian border, I asked the squadron members how they see their futures after the war and how the military sees the future of the country. All were in agreement: they missed their wives and kids and dreamed of laying down their arms. “Most of the people here would love to get rid of the guns as long as we’re home, we definitely won’t miss them,” said one. Yet they quickly added that this would be possible only when they knew their families were safe and wouldn’t be attacked again.

In the case of Maksym, the soldier I talked to, he said his whole village was waiting for him to come back home, as soon as the Russians leave Ukrainian soil. “We do not need any piece of Russian land, because then instead of being liberators, we would become occupiers,” he said. “If that happened, what would it all be for?”

Even if a cease-fire agreement is someday reached and the war ends, Ukrainians know that they will always have Russia and Belarus on their borders. That means a permanent threat, and the country will have an ongoing demand for weapons to defend itself. Most European states developed their military infrastructure during the Cold War, when defense spending was high. Ukraine, a very big country, must do so amid a hot war on its own soil, when it has few resources and desperate needs. Under such circumstances, reshaping the social and economic system—and preserving the country’s democratic institutions—cannot depend on one leader or even the armed forces; it requires the involvement of the entire country. And there are no definite right answers.