Kyiv, Ukraine – Vladislav thinks lowering the mandatory age in Ukraine from 25 to 18 is a “bad idea”.
His military service is a sad but telling example.
The fair-haired, gaunt 20-year-old volunteered to join the Ukrainian army two years ago – and suffered a massive shock near the eastern city of Kupyansk.
“It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,” Vladislav told Al Jazeera in central Kyiv as he puffed on a cigarette.
“I have seen a lot. I have a headache,” he said apologetically for his reluctance to talk about his war experience.
Vladislav is awaiting a medical evaluation that could see him mobilized — or sent back to the front lines in the southeastern Donbass region, where undermanned and outmanned Ukrainian forces are slowly losing ground to Russian invaders.
While he was able to legally volunteer at age 18, he did not believe in compulsory enlistment for 18-year-olds.
A senior White House official urged Kyiv on Thursday To lower the compulsory age On the 18th, Russian forces increased their advance on several strategic, highly fortified strongholds to make up for the loss of manpower in the Donbass.
“The requirement now is manpower,” the unnamed official told reporters in Washington. “Remobilization and more manpower can make a significant difference in the times we see on the battlefield today.”
Ukraine’s top officials have not discussed the issue.
“No meetings were held to discuss this issue, no suggestions were made about lowering (the enlistment age),” a source in the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
So far, Kyiv has responded with official denial and condemnation.
“When we see that previously announced (Western military) equipment is not arriving on time, it does not make sense to look at calls for Ukraine to lower the mobilization age, potentially in order to draft more people,” Dmitry Litvin, an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, posted on X.
“Due to these delays, Ukraine lacks weapons to equip its already equipped soldiers,” he wrote.
‘We are paying for US resolution’
Some Ukrainians echo Litvin’s opinion.
“How can they give us more weapons without any delay?” Oleksiy Surovchenko, a 64-year-old former police officer, told Al Jazeera, referring to the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden.
“America got us into this mess and now we are paying for their indecision and inaction,” he added angrily, referring to Ukraine’s efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s to destroy a huge stockpile of Soviet-era weapons. referred to Washington’s efforts.
After Barack Obama was elected as a US senator representing Illinois, his first foreign trip was to Donbass in 2005, where he oversaw the destruction of artillery shells.
Obama helped secure a further $48m from the US Congress to destroy 400,000 small arms, 1,000 portable anti-aircraft missiles and 15,000 tonnes of ammunition.
Cash-strapped Ukrainian governments largely ignored the needs of their armed forces and transferred many key weapons, such as strategic bombers, to Russia in payment for natural gas supplies.
Until 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and backed separatists in the Donbass, Russia was not seen as a potential aggressor and its president, Vladimir Putin, enjoyed an average approval rating of 59 percent among Ukrainians.
A decade later — and nearly three years after Moscow’s full-scale invasion — some Ukrainians still see the Russians as a friendly, brotherly Slavic nation they don’t want to fight.
“I would choose to be shot in Kyiv instead of going to the front line,” Serhi, a 17-year-old high school graduate, told Al Jazeera. “I will not be able to lay hands on people of my blood.”
He cites the customs of the Cossacks, a medieval caste of frontier warriors in central Ukraine who created semi-democratic communities and combined nomadic cavalry tactics with firearms.
“Our ancestors, the Cossacks, did not allow a childless, heirless man to go to war,” said Serhi. “I used to do the same. If there are no people, who needs this land?
Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine’s population was 50 million, but the birth rate among Ukrainian women was already among the lowest in Europe.
These days, more than 6 million Ukrainians live in annexed Crimea and large parts of four Russian-occupied territories, and millions have fled to Europe and elsewhere.
Kyiv controls 81 percent of pre-war Ukraine, where fewer than 30 million people live.
Serhi’s mother Nila also opposes a lower age of conscription – because younger people “are not mentally developed, they jump on (enemy) weapons without thinking, without understanding”.
“They still don’t have a sense of self-preservation, they’re just flying into battle,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is the destruction of the Ukrainian people.”
Military experts have compared the White House idea to blackmail.
“You come with unacceptable conditions to the side you communicate with. If you don’t reduce the fighting age, we will discuss the supply of some weapons. This is some kind of justification,” Ivan Tymochko, head of the Council of Reservists of the Ground Forces, told Ukraine Radio, noting that there would be no further military assistance.
In April, President Zelensky signed a law that lowered the fighting age from 27 to 25 – after 10 months of debate.
Since then, Forced patrolling Men of fighting age are being frantically rounded up across Ukraine amid allegations of abuse, use of force and corruption.
Washington’s call followed an announcement from Moscow.
On Monday, Russian Colonel General Ivan Buvaltsev said Russia had trained 300,000 reservists to send to the Ukrainian fronts.
He said the reservists were trained as stormtroopers in conditions that “resembled” Ukraine’s terrain and mimicked Kyiv’s defense installations.
