Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has opposed lowering the mobilization age from 25 to 18, which the US is calling for. “The priority should be supplying missiles and reducing Russia’s military potential, not lowering the draft age in Ukraine. The goal should be to save as many lives as possible, not to keep weapons in warehouses,” Zelenskyy wrote in social network X. According to him, it is necessary to focus on training and providing military equipment to the existing brigades, rather than compensate for the lack of this with young soldiers.
The administration of US President Joe Biden earlier urged Kyiv to lower the minimum age of mobilization to 18 years old in order to quickly increase the size of the army. Zelenskyy emphasized that the problem of the AFU is not in the number of servicemen, but in the insufficient equipment of the existing brigades. “We have made it clear that if they provide additional forces to join the fight, we and our allies will be ready to equip and train those forces,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. He added that the final decision on the composition of the AFU remained with Kyiv.
At the moment, men aged between 25 and 60 are drafted to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities plan to mobilize 160,000 people by the end of the year, the secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, said in late October. According to the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada’s defense committee, Roman Kostenko, Kyiv needs to mobilize 500,000 people, but even with the set goal of 160,000, there are problems – the rate of conscription of people to the front is falling.
