In the meantime, Ukraine’s manpower challenge is of a higher order — as this column has persistently reported since early 2024. Around two million Ukrainians are wanted for military registration violations, the new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov disclosed last month. In November, Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General revealed there are 310,000 criminal cases outstanding for unauthorized absences and desertion with the bulk occurring in 2025. Simply put, the Ukrainian armed forces (AFU) are recruiting insufficient numbers to compensate for losses — and desertions.
Mobilization is unpopular and there’s a growing reluctance to serve. “The main factors responsible for the AFU’s continuing manpower shortage are Ukrainian institutional weakness and corruption, social fatigue and mental exhaustion, deficiencies in military training and leadership, demographic and economic constraints, and the impact of Russian propaganda,” noted a study by the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies.
Much is written about the missile math gap between Ukraine and Russia with the massive drone and missile strikes unleashed on the country exhausting Ukraine’s supplies of the means for defense, including Patriot air-defense missiles. Much less coverage is focused on the manpower math, which doesn’t favor Ukraine, if Putin can prolong his war of attrition unconstrained as he is by any sense of compassion for the loss of life.
For all the drones and AI, boots on the ground still matter, as the battle for Pokrovsk demonstrated. There the lack of manpower allowed Russia to employ what Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskiy, dubbed “total infiltration” tactics with small infantry units getting behind Ukrainian lines thanks to a lack of Ukrainian manpower to prevent them.
Ukrainian opposition politicians note that the reluctance to serve is fueled by an increasing perception that the West is ready to fight this war to the last Ukrainian, despite the fact that Ukrainian survival as an independent and pro-West nation is crucial for Europe’s own security. That phrase “to the last Ukrainian” could be heard uttered more and more in conversation with ordinary Ukrainians as last year unfolded. And it is freighted with increasing bitterness towards Donald Trump’s America for its seeming embrace of Moscow narratives and the shutting down of direct U.S. government donations of military equipment, as well as towards EU naysayer Hungary, which this week sought to block an agreed €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine aimed at stabilizing the war-torn country’s finances.
Does this mean Ukraine is about to crack? Putin may indeed hope so. His relentless winter bombing campaign on the country’s energy infrastructure is surely geared to exhaust war-weary Ukrainians and break their will.