The manpower shortage is leading to long rotations and extreme exhaustion, frontline officers told El Pais
A lack of manpower has now become the main problem for the Ukrainian army as it is forced to gradually yield ground to the Russian advance, El Pais reported on Monday, citing Defense Ministry officials and battlefield commanders.
The Spanish daily’s reporters traveled to the frontline town of Kurakhovo, which is in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic but currently under Ukrainian control. According to the paper, Russian advances in the area mean that Kiev’s forces will soon have to retreat to avoid encirclement.
The head of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s press team on the ground, speaking on condition of anonymity, told El Pais that Kiev’s main problem “is not weapons, it is the people.”
“Nobody wants to go to the army. The brigades tell us they can’t rotate, they’re exhausted. There will be no people to fight soon,” he is cited as saying.
Numerous Ukrainian servicemen interviewed by the outlet shared the same view. “Why are we retreating? Because we don’t have rotations, we don’t rest, we’re demoralized,” one Ukrainian officer fighting in Kurakhovo said.
Yevgeny Churbanov, an officer in the 46th Airborne Brigade, said that nowadays his soldiers have to hold their positions for three months without any rotation, whereas a year ago it was never more than one month, while in the first year of the conflict, troops were typically rotated every four days.
Ukrainian officials have long sounded the alarm about the depletion of the ranks of its military. To address the issue, earlier this year Kiev lowered the draft age from 27 to 25, and significantly tightened mobilization rules. Social media is rife with videos showing military patrols trying to detain potential recruits on the streets and in the shopping malls, with encounters often turning violent.
Last week, Ukrainian media reported that, according to the country’s Prosecutor General’s Office, there have been nearly 60,000 criminal cases related to unauthorized abandonment of a military unit or place of service since 2022. Nearly 30,000 offenses related to desertion have been registered over the same period and the number of such transgressions has increased several-fold in recent months.
In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin estimated Ukrainian losses at 50,000 troops per month, adding that Ukraine’s mobilization was not solving the manpower shortage.
