Ukraine battles its demography to find sufficient soldiers: Peter Apps
The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.
LONDON, Aug 2 (Reuters) -In April the intelligence wing of Ukraine’s defence ministry noted a trend emerging on Ukrainian social media platforms - videos apparently filmed overseas of Ukrainian men holidaying on beaches, enthusiastically telling each other how they had gone abroad to avoid being drafted into the military to fight.
Ukrainian officials swiftly concluded that the videos - disseminated primarily on the social media platform TikTok - were part of a mounting Russian campaign to undercut Ukrainian military recruitment.
As well as the holiday videos celebrating the freedom of “evaders”, the officials said they noted an uptick in newly written “folksongs” celebrating avoidance of military service, as well as videos in which Ukrainian women encouraged men to avoid being pulled into the military.
Almost two-and-a-half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the battle for sufficient human resources to keep on fighting is now as important to both Moscow and Kyiv as the competition for physical supplies of weaponry.
In both nations, the prospect of conscripting ever-larger numbers of personnel is politically hugely contentious, particularly as the conflict shows no signs of ending.
In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed a decree lowering the conscription age from 27 to 25.
Whereas other countries fighting existential wars have usually fallen back on recruiting vast numbers of young men as soon as they reach 18 years of age, Ukraine was already facing a demographic crisis before the war began, and remains desperate to shield its younger adults.
Russia faces not so dissimilar demographic problems - this war is the first in history between ageing states with declining populations.
But of the two, Ukraine’s demographics put it at a disadvantage. While Russia’s population was already predicted to shrink by 25 percent over the next two generations, Ukraine’s was set to fall by almost half.
Long-term studies of Ukraine’s population suggest its birth rate began to fall as long ago as the 1960s - well before much of the rest of what was then the Soviet Union.
But it plunged particularly fast after independence in the 1990s and the start of the new millennium, leaving a particular shortage of young people now in their late teens or early twenties.
The result is a war increasingly fought by older men, supplemented by handfuls of young male and female volunteers.
According to a U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in June, the average Ukrainian frontline soldier is now 40 years of age, while those who watch the conflict closely say that even the growing numbers of increasingly vital drone operators are often in their thirties.
Even without those demographics, simple population numbers would disadvantage Ukraine – its population of 38 million is only just over a third of Russia’s 144 million, giving the Kremlin an inevitably much larger pool of personnel to draw from.
At the start of the full-blown war in February 2022, Ukraine immediately banned all men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country. From July 16 this year, every man in that age group is required to have updated an online or in-person form detailing their location, fitness and other details.
How effective that program has been is not yet clear. Recent Ukrainian rounds of conscription have been messy and unpopular, with plenty of talk of corruption, faked medicals signed off by well-remunerated doctors, and some men fleeing the country or taking whatever steps they can to keep out of military service.
According to a recent report from U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe, more than 30,000 Ukrainian men have crossed into Romania and Moldova alone since the invasion started in 2022.
Ukrainian officials have talked of encouraging European nations to forcibly return such individuals, but few countries have expressed any willingness to do so.
Even more striking are the numbers who appear to have applied for postgraduate university programmes in the hope of deferring or avoiding military service.
In the first six months of 2024, Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science reported an astounding 246,000 individuals applying for postgraduate or masters-level courses, compared to only 7,000-9,000 doing such courses before the war.
Of those applicants, at least 90,000 were fighting-age men, said Ukrainian officials, who added that they would tighten academic application rules.
RUSSIAN FINANCIAL INCENTIVES
Exactly how many service personnel Ukraine still needs is hard to tell - the Kyiv government is understandably cagey on numbers with its forces already spread along 1,200 miles (1,945 km) of front.
In December, Zelenskiy suggested the military might need 500,000 new personnel this year alone, although that number appears to have since been watered down.
Estimates of Russian recruitment and military ones are also similarly varied. What is clear, however, is that Kremlin-backed media have aggressively pushed the narrative that Ukraine is forcing unwilling citizens to fight, while Russia has been able to avoid the large compulsory draft many had expected by using financial incentives to hire volunteer contract soldiers.
Whether that is true is hard to say.
In March, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree calling on 150,000 military-aid personnel to serve as conscripts. In theory, conscripts remain exempt from being forced to fight in Ukraine, although there have been multiple cases throughout the war in which this pledge appears to have been broken.
According to Russian news agency TASS this week, volunteer Russian citizens and foreigners who signed a contract to serve in Ukraine for a year or more will each receive a one-off payment of 400,000 rubles (approximately $4,600), roughly twice what was offered in 2022.
Russian conscript soldiers receive a monthly allowance of around 210,000 rubles (approximately $2,500), almost three times Russia's average monthly wage.
In some Russian regions, local authorities have promised financial incentives for those who persuade friends to join the armed forces, while the Kremlin also appears to be stepping up recruitment from Russia's prison population through offering reduced or cancelled sentences.
Independently conducted opinion polls suggest such moves are much more popular than a forced draft, which up to 57 percent of the population say they would oppose.
Increasingly, however, most analysts believe Russia will turn again to significant draft conscript personnel within the coming year, whether to bolster forces in Ukraine or free up other troops to send there.
CHINA DEMOGRAPHICS
How Russia does choose to manage its military staffing will be closely watched in Europe, particularly those nervous nations along NATO’s eastern flank such as Poland, the three small Baltic republics, and Finland.
For now, most assume Russia will not have the available combat power to attack while it remains entrenched in Ukraine. But they worry that once that war concludes, Russia’s declining demographics may see it turn on one of NATO’s eastern members sooner rather than later.
Almost all the nations of eastern and central Europe have their own declining populations, as do U.S. allies in Asia – Japan and South Korea in particular.
Most Western nations are often in a similar position – and as in Ukraine, face considerable issues recruiting sufficient personnel or retaining them within the military.
The most important demographics shaping future global war risk, however, may be those of China, whose now-abandoned “one child” policy has it on the edge of its own demographic precipice.
According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, China in 2020 had almost 360 million males aged between 15 and 50 - but this will fall to under 300 million by 2040, less than three-quarters of that of nearby India.
Arguably even more important will be the financial drag of China’s ageing population – the population aged over 65 will jump 150 percent from 2015 to 2040 to almost 340 million people.
U.S. officials already say Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Increasingly, they worry that China’s demographic pressures mean that those in charge in Beijing may feel that if they are going to risk a major war, they may need to do it soon.
By Peter Apps; Editing by Mark Heinrich
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