A senior White House official urged Kyiv on Thursday to lower conscription age to 18 to replenish the losses of manpower in Donbas, where Russian forces have spurred their advance on several strategic, heavily fortified strongholds.
“The need right now is manpower,” the unnamed official told reporters in Washington. “Mobilisation and more manpower could make a significant difference at this time, as we look at the battlefield today.”
Ukraine’s top brass has not even discussed the issue.
“No meetings to discuss this issue have been held, no suggestions on lowering [the conscription age] have been made,” a source in Ukraine’s General Staff of Armed Forces told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
So far, Kyiv has officially responded with a refusal and a rebuke.
“It doesn’t make sense to see calls for Ukraine to lower the mobilisation age, presumably in order to draft more people, when we can see that previously announced [Western military] equipment is not arriving on time,” Dmitry Litvin, an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, posted on X.
“Because of these delays, Ukraine lacks weapons to equip already mobilised soldiers,” he wrote.
A decade later – and almost three years after Moscow’s full-scale invasion – some Ukrainians still see Russians as a friendly, brotherly Slavic nation they do not want to fight.
lol
What can I say, we still have some idiots like that. Not even spending a night in a bomb shelter waiting out an air raid warning is enough for them.
I apologize as I know another article was posted on this recently, but I found it interesting that Al Jazeera covered it from a more dire perspective than US outlets, and thought that was worth sharing for that reason. There’s value in reading stories from foreign outlets and getting a different perspective.
If mods want to take this down, please do.
The perspective aligns with what’s being reported in various pro-Ukraine telegram channels, a lot of aid that’s been promised is simply not (hopefully soon) arriving.
It’s pretty accurate, yeah. There is no point in throwing more people into the meat grinder when we literally have to gather money to buy equipment individually from donations
I remembering reading that a huge majority of the aid that was authorized earlier this year by the US still hasn’t gotten to Ukraine.
Yep, it hasn’t. It’s always soon™
