By Siobhán O'Grady, Anastacia Galouchka, and Serhiy Morgunov
March 16, 2024 at 2:12 a.m. EDT
A man digs a grave early this month in a new section of the cemetery in Makiv, Ukraine. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post)
MAKIV, Ukraine — Few men of fighting age are left in this village in southwest Ukraine, and those who remain fear they will be drafted at any moment.
Their neighbors are already hundreds of miles east in trenches on the front lines. Some have been killed or wounded. Several are missing. Others from this rural area — about 45 miles from the borders of Romania and Moldova — have fled abroad or found ways to avoid the war, either with legitimate exemptions or by hiding.
“It’s just a fact,” said Larysa Bodna, deputy director of the local school, which keeps a database of students whose parents are deployed. “Most of them are gone.”
Ukraine desperately needs more troops, with its forces depleted by deaths, injuries and exhaustion. Despite Russia’s own enormous casualties, the invaders still far outnumber Ukraine’s defenders, an advantage that is helping Moscow advance on the battlefield. Ukraine’s parliament is debating a bill to expand the draft pool, in part by lowering the eligibility age to 25 from 27, but few decisions are being made in Kyiv that will quickly answer the army’s urgent needs.
Civilians here say that means military recruiters are grabbing everyone they can. In the west, the mobilization drive has steadily sown panic and resentment in small agricultural towns and villages like Makiv, where residents said soldiers working for draft offices roam the near-empty streets searching for any remaining men. Such tactics have led some to believe that their men are being targeted disproportionately compared with other regions or bigger cities like Kyiv, where it is easier to hide.
Locals use Telegram channels to warn of soldier sightings and share videos of troops forcing men into their vehicles — stoking rumors of kidnappings. Some men are now serving time in jail for refusing to sign up.
“People are being caught like dogs on the street,” said Olha Kametyuk, 35, whose husband, Valentin, 36, was drafted in June by soldiers who approached him and asked for his papers after he stopped for coffee on the main road outside Makiv. Despite a diagnosis of osteochondrosis, a joint disorder, he passed his medical exam in 10 minutes, she said, and deployed to the front, where he was wounded.
“The whole village was taken this way,” said Valentin’s mother, Natalya Koshparenko, 61.
“Almost all our men have been scraped out,” said Serhii, 47, an infantry soldier from Makiv who was drafted in March 2022 and serves in Ukraine’s 115th brigade.
Home for a short break this month for the first time in a year, Serhii said he had already been stopped and questioned. So had his son, who is only 22 and not yet eligible to be drafted. The Washington Post is identifying Serhii only by his first name because of the risk of repercussions.
When the soldiers realized he was already serving, he said, they asked how he felt about men “‘who haven’t seen a single day of war” — which he said he regarded as a forced, hollow show of camaraderie. Serhii said he replied by saying it was them, not his fellow villagers, he resented most.
“You’re military and I’m a civilian, but I’m fighting and you’re not,” he said. The conversation, he noted, “ended immediately.”
Oleksii, 30, was fixing his car last year when soldiers approached and handed him a draft order. It was Valentine’s Day and the news broke his girlfriend, Elvira, who works in a small shop in Makiv and barely ate for weeks afterward. Oleksii accepted his fate, but his experience has served as a warning to others about the realities on the front.
After three concussions and shrapnel wounds, Oleksii recently returned home. Scrolling through his phone, he showed a photo of him with more than a dozen fellow troops. Only two are still alive, he said.
This month, villagers in Makiv buried another of their own — Ihor Dozorets, a contract soldier who was wounded so badly that his son, also a soldier, identified him only by a scar on his hand. “He wanted to come home,” Ihor’s sister, Inna Melnyk, 43, said through tears. “He was tired of it all. But what can we do?”
Vasyl Hrebeniuk, 70, said that even at his age — 10 years over the draft limit — soldiers have regularly stopped and questioned him in Makiv.
Six weeks ago, he watched soldiers bang on a neighbor’s door, complaining that the man who lived there had asked to go say goodbye to his wife and mother, then disappeared. One soldier said they “should have taken him immediately, put him in the bus and driven away,” Hrebeniuk recalled.
Scenarios like these have left Polina, 16, anxious about how much longer she has with her father — one of the few draft-eligible men left in the village.
Last summer, Polina and her friend Olha were relaxing at a table outside the village store when Olha’s dad called and asked her to buy something for him there. She brushed off his request, saying she was busy with friends. He walked to the store himself instead, and the teens watched in horror as soldiers surrounded him and handed him a summons on the way in.
He has been serving ever since — and his daughter blames herself. “Olha thought it was her fault,” Polina said.
Tetiana Lychak, 32, a teacher at the local school, lost her husband on the front line in late 2022. Her son Max is only 5 but already speaks of joining the army, Lychak said, and she wonders if she, too, should take a turn. One of her colleagues, a teacher who used to instruct high school students in basic army drills as part of a course called “Protecting Ukraine,” is now deployed. Three students in his class have fathers serving in the military.
Maya Proskurivska, 63, is hiding the truth about her son-in-law, Oleksandr, 41, from his children, who are 8 and 14. Sent to fight in the Donetsk region, he has been missing since December, she said, but the children think he is confirmed as a prisoner of war. These days, she said, “on our street, it’s hard to find a young man.”
On a chilly afternoon this month, Eleanora Voropanova, 4, pedaled her tricycle up and down the quiet road outside her house. Asked if her parents were home, she paused. “Mom is home,” she replied. “Dad is at war.”
Her mother, Tanya, 42, opened the gate. Inside, her nephew, Bohdan, 25, and his friend Artem, also 25, trudged through the yard, chopping firewood.
It had been 16 months since Tanya last heard from her husband, Serhii, who joined the army in March 2022 and disappeared while fighting that November. A fellow soldier called at the time and told her he had two updates. “The first is he’s not among the dead,” she recalled him saying. “The second is he’s not among the living.”
She has lived in that limbo ever since — raising two daughters, now 4 and 8, alone. Her brother-in-law, Bohdan’s father, feared going to fight and fled abroad — a decision she scorns.
“There are people hiding, sitting at home, not even willing to go to the store,” she said. “I saw a car today where the woman was driving and the husband was hiding behind tinted windows in the back.”
The young men cleaning her yard acknowledged that they fear the draft. But Artem said he also resents men from eastern Ukraine who came west for refuge instead of staying to fight. “They came here to hide, and our guys have to die there,” he said. Artem’s father, who was drafted, is now fighting near the eastern city of Lyman.
Down the road from Makiv, in the small city of Kamyanets-Podilsky, a growing gallery honoring the dead fills a main square. Each photo shows the face of a local man or woman killed fighting for Ukraine.
On a recent morning, Lyuda Shydey stood weeping in front of the portrait of her younger brother, Serhiy Kozynyak, who was killed in 2022 in Avdiivka, a city that fell to Russian forces last month. Shydey has never been to eastern Ukraine but still dreams of one day walking barefoot through the place where he died.
“And dreams have to come true,” she said. “Otherwise, what is the point of dreaming?”
Zelensky in bind over how to draft more troops as Russian forces advance
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been unable to forge a political consensus on a mobilization strategy despite months of warnings about a severe shortage of qualified troops on the front. (Adnan Beci/AFP/Getty Images)
KYIV — Even as he promises international partners that Ukraine will handle the fighting if given needed weapons and other support, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his top military commanders have failed so far to come up with a clear plan to conscript or recruit many thousands of new soldiers critically needed to defend against Russia’s continuing attacks.
Zelensky’s inability to forge a political consensus on a mobilization strategy — despite months of warnings about a severe shortage of qualified troops on the front — has fueled deep divisions in Ukraine’s parliament and more broadly in Ukrainian society. It has left the military relying on a hodgepodge of recruiting efforts and sown panic among fighting-age men, some of whom have gone into hiding, worried that they will be drafted into an ill-equipped army and sent to certain death given that aid for Ukraine remains stalled in Washington.
The quandary over how to fill the ranks has confronted Zelensky with perhaps the greatest challenge to his leadership since the start of the February 2022 invasion. The lack of a clear mobilization strategy — or even agreement on how many more troops Ukraine needs — factored into Zelensky’s dismissal of his top general in February, but the new commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, so far has brought no new clarity.
Syrsky has been tasked with auditing the existing armed forces to find more combat-eligible troops, after Zelensky’s office recently announced that of the 1 million people who have been mobilized, only about 300,000 have fought at the front lines. But nearly a month after his promotion, no one in the military leadership or the presidential administration has explained where those 700,000 are — or what they have been doing.
Ukrainian lawmakers say the lack of a unified message from the president and the military has added confusion over next steps.
“I don’t know why Zelensky or his team still try to convince society that everything is always fine,” said Solomiia Bobrovska, a lawmaker from Holos, a liberal opposition party. “It’s not — especially with the army.”
Ukraine’s dwindling number of battle-ready troops is now a strategic crisis that was at least partially to blame for its recent retreat from the eastern city of Avdiivka and surrounding villages, where Ukrainian forces were far outnumbered.
Oleksiy Bezhevets, an adviser to the Defense Ministry on recruitment, said civilians of fighting age must accept that “there’s no time for you left to sit home.”
“It’s quite possible Russians will move much closer quite soon if there’s nobody to stop them,” Bezhevets said. If, in addition to “the lack of ammunition, weapons, shells and so on, we’ve got a lack of personnel, it’s a tragedy,” he added.
But after two years of all-out war, the sense of public urgency that spurred new troops to the battlefield and fueled Ukraine’s early successes has faded. Many soldiers are wounded or exhausted.
For all this time, men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been banned from leaving the country, and men 27 and older have been eligible to be drafted, with some exceptions. Civilians between 18 and 27 can sign up on their own. Parliament has now spent months heatedly debating a bill that would change the mobilization process and widen the scope of the draft, in part by lowering the eligibility age to 25.
More than 4,000 amendments have been made to the mobilization bill, and some lawmakers see the measure as an attempt by Zelensky to pass off responsibility to parliament for inevitably unpopular decisions.
“It’s time to start an adult conversation with society and not to be afraid of it, ” Bobrovska said. “It’s not 2022, when emotions took over.”
Zelensky has long tried to control public messaging about the state of the war to preserve public morale. He publicly announced a death toll for Ukrainian troops for the first time last weekend, saying that 31,000 have been killed since February 2022 — a number that could not be independently confirmed.
Zelensky is also facing mounting pessimism at home and abroad about Ukraine’s chances of holding off the Russian onslaught without more help from the United States. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to take up legislation that includes some $60 billion in aid for Ukraine.
“It’s time for serious talks with society — serious and honest talks and to explain what we have to do without any artificial bravery,” said Volodymyr Aryev, a lawmaker from the opposition European Solidarity party.
Bobrovska is backing proposed changes to the bill that would ensure the demobilization of troops who have already served lengthy stints in front-line positions. As it stands, she said, “the only way to be back is injured or killed.”
“War is math,” she added. “We have to count our resources.”
Aryev voted against an earlier draft of the mobilization bill that he deemed too punitive. He opposes measures like suspending driver’s licenses and seizing bank assets of citizens who do not register for the draft. In January, fearing such measures, account holders rushed to withdraw their money, taking out more than $700 million in a single month — the most withdrawn since February 2022.
The priority, Aryev said, should be to “guarantee to people who will be mobilized for military service that … they will not be sent to the front line without trainings and without proper equipment. It’s really scaring people and creates a lack of trust [in] the government.”
Those fears are driving some draft-eligible men to take evasive steps.
One 31-year-old man, whose parents are living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine, said he is hiding in an apartment in Kyiv, fearful that he will be drafted and sent to the front unprepared and ill-equipped. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns for his safety.
In December, while visiting the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, soldiers stopped him on the street and handed him a draft notice. He left without visiting the recruitment office there, hoping his case would disappear into a disorganized bureaucratic system.
But a month later, police in Kyiv stopped him for a random check. When they searched his name in their database, he saw the word WANTED pop up in big red letters. Officials in Vinnytsia had registered his failure to appear.
He was ordered to appear at a recruitment office the next morning, but had a panic attack and did not go. He has no military experience. “You cannot imagine a person who is further from the army or military stuff,” he said. “It just doesn’t really make sense to me to hunt me like that.”
In November, the Defense Ministry partnered with Lobby X, a recruiting platform that posts job openings in the military, ranging from front-line roles to rear-end logistics or IT.
“People first of all want to control their future as much as possible and want to have clarity about what they will do in the army,” said Vladyslav Greziev, co-founder of Lobby X. While applications have soared for less risky posts, “the challenge is to fill the combat positions,” Greziev said.
The 31-year-old in hiding said he considered applying for a noncombat role but fears that once enrolled, he could be transferred to combat duty. For now, he plans to stay inside indefinitely until a lawyer can help resolve his case. “It’s still better than going there and dying in a week, which is my maximum, I think,” he said.
Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of parliament from the Holos party, said lawmakers are seeking an “appropriate motivation mechanism” to encourage enlistment, including bonuses for destroying Russian equipment and new financial benefits for veterans.
“It’s a hard discussion because previously we mobilized people who have this feeling of duty,” Yurchyshyn said. “Now we must motivate our people to serve in the army.”
Bezhevets, the adviser to the Defense Ministry, said, “The country has a future up to the moment where there are people who are ready to fight for it and to die for it.”
“I don’t like ‘to die for it’ — it’s better to kill for it,” he added. But despite the existential threat to Ukraine, many civilians, he said, are “just dust in the wind.”
Kostiantyn Khudov and Serhiy Morgunov in Kyiv contributed to this report.
