The veterans problem in Ukraine

Following on from the earlier post on Russia's fairly comprehensive plans for its future tsunami of troubled veterans, we now turn to Ukraine.  The situation looks potentially to be much, much worse.

On the one hand, whatever the 'outcome', Russia will still be there and Ukraine will not be able to stand down its army.

On the other, its overall manpower problem has been dire from Day 1.  If Zelensky has dropped any balls at all, the biggest has been his failure to crack on with a proper conscription plan: so Ukraine has been fighting the war with men (and women) predominantly of age 30+, some a lot older still, when everyone knows that (infantry) warfare is a business for 18+.  Those 30+'s have fought magnificently - much, much better than the Russian rabble** they have faced - but there is a limit.  Meanwhile, back on the home front, a large percentage of the remaining male population has been (a) bribing the local commissar to keep themselves out of the recruiting office, and/or (b) skipping abroad.  There is only so much that can be delegated to a fleet of drones, across a battlefield as large as Ukraine's.

The demographic problem resulting from this is acute, and can only get worse; and I haven't seen much sign of it being addressed.  Well, there's a helluva lot else going on.

The precise details of how this plays out will depend upon exactly how the current conflict is "frozen".  There are of course many scenarios - too many to legislate for every possibility.  There are just two strands I think will feature in any case.

1.  For many years forward the EU (and prob the UK) will be sending huge amounts of cash to Ukraine for civil reconstruction and societal rebuilding (a dismal proportion of which will be swiftly embezzled, as has been the case throughout) - it's the only thing the EU really knows how to do;

2.  There will be very many violent men roaming the world, offering their services as mercenaries or enforcers for organised crime, either as thugs or as expert hackers and drone operators.  As regards the thugs, go back to the first post: that's what happened after Russia / Afghanistan; it's what galvanises Putin; and that was small beer by comparison.

Per the earlier post again: at least Putin is thinking about it.  He has that luxury.  It will take a worldscale genius to solve Ukraine's manpower issues: and if no such person emerges, the legacy will be long and baleful.  Brave, brave Ukraine deserves something better.

ND

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*  I first met Russian soldiers in the flesh in 1985 at a conference in Potsdam.  They were an unutterable rabble, the officers and men of the proud Soviet Army.  The officers wandered around in public with their tunics raffishly unbuttoned and their hats at rakish angles, a parody of caddish behaviour.  The men were pathetically thin and unsoldierly in their ill-fitting, coarse uniforms and bizarre outsize flat caps.  And this was 3rd Shock Army, the tip of the spear!  Forty years on, nothing much seems to have changed: it was troops like this that were humiliated in just a few weeks in Feb-March 2022, and driven off the field in full rout during Ukraine's Kharkiv counter-offensive in the September of that year.