2024-02-22 10:42:00
As Russia advances, Ukraine needs more soldiers. But the expansion of compulsory military service is controversial
Antonina and her 3-year-old son Sasha participate in a protest in kyiv, Ukraine, calling for a time limit on the mobilization of soldiers.
(Photo: Daria Tarasova-Markina/CNN).
The small group of women thought about calling off their protest when the sirens sounded. But even though Kyiv was again being attacked with missiles, they pressed on. Antonina brought her 3-year-old son Sasha with her.
“My father is not coming home. We are waiting for him. I am waiting for my father to come back,” said the little boy.
Holding a sign that read: “Fair deadlines for demobilization,” Antonina noted that her husband served in a mortar unit near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. She hasn’t seen him in five months and tries to explain her absence to Sasha.
“I tell my son that his father is working, that he is in the army, that he is making money.”
Mobilization periods are currently indefinite, with no regulatory deadline. Antonina’s husband enlisted as a volunteer two years ago, just after the full-scale Russian invasion. Now, at 43, he has served long enough, he told CNN.
“It’s hard for my husband to last so long on the ground, dodging all the projectiles and doing everything he has to do on the front line,” she said.
A short distance from where the women stood, lawmakers debated reforms to Ukraine’s mobilization rules inside the heavily guarded parliament building in Kyiv. Within weeks, a new law could be passed that is expected to pave the way for a significant increase in the number of recruits.
Ukraine’s labor shortage in the war with Russia is once again high on the agenda and reflects how the mood in the country has changed.
Before last year’s counteroffensive, Ukraine was confident. “The time has come to take back what is ours,” was seen in a highly produced video, posted on the Telegram channel of the then commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
Expectations were high that the task of driving back the invaders from Russia, which had begun so successfully in the summer of 2022, could be restarted and perhaps even completed by the end of 2023.
But Ukraine failed to make significant progress, as Russian defenses proved much harder to defeat and drones came to dominate the battlespace. Over the course of 2023, Russia – a country with three times as many people as Ukraine – increased its troop numbers in the occupied territories by almost a third, according to a London think tank.
In recent weeks, the news has been getting worse for Kyiv. Moscow’s forces are advancing in several places along the eastern front and, in the early hours of Saturday, commanders announced that they had withdrawn from Avdiivka, an industrial city in the southeast.
The feeling now is that not only do new soldiers have to step forward, but there also have to be more.
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