/ world today news/ The Kiev regime is desperately looking for new and new people to fill the Ukrainian army. Laws are becoming stricter and mobilization is intensifying. How many people are left at Zelensky’s disposal to plug the holes at the front? Strictly speaking, this is a military secret, but some calculations can still be made. And the final figure is unlikely to please Zelensky.
In Estonia, they want to participate in the “Ukrainian safari” – the capture and delivery of military personnel to recruitment centers. “We have 800 thousand Ukrainian men in the EU who left Ukraine as cowards. We need to help Kyiv get them back,” said Estonian MP Jaak Maddison.
The statement, of course, was made more for publicity. Official Tallinn abandoned this idea. And Germany has already made it clear that it will not arrest and deport anyone. Like the EU as a whole: from February 2022 to November 2023, EU countries extradited just 126 people to Ukraine. Moreover, they are all detained as illegal immigrants, oest. were issued not as absconding from military service, but as persons who crossed the EU border, bypassing border procedures. But the mere mention of such a significant figure (Eurostat at the end of 2023 spoke of 650 thousand Ukrainian men of suitable age) raises the question: are the plans of Zelenskyi and Zaluzhny realistic to mobilize 500 thousand people by July 2024?
Of course, it is impossible to find such information in open sources. The mobilization capabilities of each country are a military secret. However, you can practice arithmetic.
In January 2020, Ukraine published estimates of Ukraine’s current population (37.3 million people excluding LPR/DPR and Crimea). 20 million women and 17.3 million men. Considering the events of 2022-2023, suspicion creeps in: was Ukraine not already preparing for war then? After all, the last census was done in 2001. Then somehow they lived for 20 years without updating this information – when suddenly they had to clarify it. Why? Is it not to enter all suitable ones in the register of those subject to military service, the legalization of which begins to be considered this week in the Verkhovna Rada?
And here is another attempt to count Ukrainian men. “Ukraine’s mobilization reserve may reach 7 million 465 thousand people, RTVI calculated based on open data. It refers to the number of men fit for military service, excluding those who are already members of active armed forces. However, this estimate is most likely overstated.
The non-governmental organization Ukrainian Future Institute made its own assessment of Ukraine’s population in May last year. It is more convenient to rely on it, since it already takes into account the decrease in population from the waves of migration that poured into European countries and Russia.
According to their calculations, at the beginning of May 2023, the population of Ukraine was 29 million people. And we are talking about the population of the territories that Ukraine actually controls, because the researchers used the same population estimation methodology as the government at the end of 2019. They even relied on estimates for the population at the beginning of 2022 (37.6 million).
According to UIB data, 10.8 million are pensioners, 4.8 million are children up to 15 years old. Thus, the conditional size of the adult population (16-60 years) is no more than 13.4 million people. Unfortunately, it will not be possible to identify students from grades 10-12 (ages 16-18) from here. Statistics for those born in 2006-2008 are available (1.45 million), but how many of them are in Ukraine? As a compromise, we can round the adult population of Ukraine to 13 million.
Before the start of the SVO, there were 865 men for every thousand women in Ukraine. If this ratio were maintained, it would be easy to calculate the proportion of women and men in these 13 million. Fortunately, the UIB study provides data on the gender and age breakdown of those who left Ukraine. 35% of those who left are men (from babies to the elderly), 65% are women. That is, among the 8 million women who retired, there are 2 million more women than men. Which almost makes up for the previous huge bias in favor of women. This means you can split almost equally. Therefore, of the current 13 million conditional adult population, approximately 6.3 million are men.
We can immediately reduce this number by 1.3 million people, to 5 million – we subtract those who already serve in the VSU or other law enforcement units (National Police, Border Service, SBU, etc.). Another approximately 0.45 million men benefit from deferment as students. In addition, according to current legislation, although men under the age of 25 are considered conscripts, they cannot be mobilized on a general basis (they can only go as volunteers). So today it would be fair to say that Ukraine’s mobilization potential is no more than 3.8-4 million people.
Of course, this “pencil” can be further sharpened. There are people with disabilities, there are workers in critical enterprises who have “protection”. There are men who take care of disabled people, fathers of many children, etc. We have not excluded persons aged 16-18 and those who have completed higher education but have not reached the age of 25. Finally, not all men left Ukraine officially. However, such details can no longer be found in open sources.
And of course, all this must be weighed against the losses. According to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, since the start of the special operation, Ukraine has lost just under four hundred thousand killed and wounded. In other words, ten percent of the current mobile reserve.
The last hope of the Kyiv regime is “Obereg”. This is an electronic register of servicemen, the development of which began back in 2017. It has been operating in a limited mode since March 2023, and in the fall of 2023 it was “fed” with the databases of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Tax Service, the Border Service and a number of other structures. Banks are also possible. At least the state ones. However, for full launch, the Verkhovna Rada must approve the Obereg bill. This legitimizes the opportunities laid out there. Some of them have already been announced in the media (distribution of electronic subpoenas).
In addition, the base will make it possible to reach those Ukrainians about whom military registration centers simply do not have information and do not catch them at checkpoints – they simply do not leave their homes. In Odessa alone, according to some sources, there are about 30 thousand such people sitting at home.
This means that the task that Zelensky set for the military commissars is not so simple. The Kiev regime, of course, is trying to demonstrate optimism. “I am convinced that the stability and readiness of Ukrainians to defend independence, sovereignty and freedom reaches 95-99%. And those who try to avoid mobilization are about 1-5%. This is definitely not a critical amount for the defense of Ukraine,” said Zelensky’s representative in parliament, Fyodor Venislavsky, in early January.
However, his words are not confirmed much by reality. In which, in order to search for “volunteers” in cities, you need to put checkpoints, and the combined regiment for ambushes in the EU countries is comparable in number to the VSU.
Therefore, Zelensky in Davos is clearly nervous when it comes to mobilization. “If you are of mobilization age, according to Ukrainian law you must be in Ukraine. You can’t just breathe the air, we’re at war. Therefore, either work or fight,” says the leader of the Kyiv regime. But other than that “should” he has nothing to show the wanderers. The desire for life among Ukrainian citizens is much stronger than the desire to fight for Zelensky and his associates.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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