Draft Dodgers, Volunteers and the Complicated Situation of Military Service in Ukraine

"Avoiders."

That's the term used in Ukraine to refer to draft dodgers, the men who have skirted military service as the country continues to wage a protracted campaign against invading Russian forces.

Thousands have seen the impact the conflict has had on their peers and are nervously avoiding being called to bear arms, while the Ukrainian military struggles to keep its ranks filled as Russian forces send wave after wave of recruits to the front line.

"It's quite hard to see the people you know come back different, really different," Alexei, a 28-year-old former tourism student, told Military.com while sipping coffee in downtown Kyiv last month. "And not just physically, obviously. I mean with blank eyes."

He looked around at the other patrons as if to check whether anyone else was listening. Most of his friends have either fled the country or joined the military, leaving a smaller and smaller pool of eligible men to add to their ranks -- and increasing the likelihood that Alexei will be called up. Those who don't serve are often looked down upon by the general public, criticized for not helping protect the country as it wards off an invader.

Alexei feels guilty for hanging back, but does not see the point of joining the fight now.

"No one knows how it's going to end. No one actually sees the end," he said. He suffered a stroke at the onset of the invasion due to stress -- like his grandmother did at the outbreak of World War II -- but does not believe the disorder would exempt him from service.

Because of the sensitive nature of the topics discussed, Military.com agreed to use only the first names or call signs of all interviewees.

Almost three years after Russia launched its first strikes on Kyiv in February 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have tripled in size to include an estimated one million personnel -- one of the largest militaries in the world, but still far short of what the country needs to push back enemy forces from occupied lands. A national draft was instituted on the first day of the full-scale invasion to fill the ranks with conscripts, but governmental mismanagement and misinformation have led to hundreds of thousands of men skirting the law while those already serving wait endlessly for reinforcements. The situation has created a divide in Ukrainian society between those who fight and those who don't.

The Recruiting Gap

Ukraine's government has said it needs many more fighters to maintain its defense and push back Russia from the occupied territories. Recruitment began slowing by the end of 2022, becoming a major problem after the failed summer counteroffensive in the South and East the following year.

As the need for soldiers ramped up and the number of volunteers dropped, the Armed Forces of Ukraine began turning more and more to the draft for fresh recruits. Men between the ages of 27 and 60 were initially eligible for the draft and barred from leaving the country when martial law was instituted. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a new conscription law in April lowering the draft age to 25 after hundreds of revisions were added to the bill.

Several discrepancies still exist in the treatment of possible recruits. Deserters, avoiders and escapees face vastly different consequences for opting out of the same fight. If caught, draft-aged men who do not register for service can be pressed to join an unpopular battalion -- typically those with the highest casualty rates. In contrast, soldiers who desert their unit after enlistment face much harsher penalties, including years in military prison. And the hundreds of thousands of men who have fled abroad currently fear no definite criminal penalties.

While this chasm between fighters and avoiders has widened over the course of the war in many significant and long-lasting ways, other deeper realizations about the impact of the devastation on the future of the country have also taken hold in society.

The looming question of how Ukraine will approach the reintegration and rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of soldiers into normal society -- and how society will view those who fought and those who did not -- after the war's inevitable end remains a major concern.

Some believe that soldiers should gain special status in the future thanks to their sacrifices during the war.

"I fear that, after the war or other circumstances, the idea of being a soldier or volunteer will be discredited by society," Kyrylo, a former AFU mortarman and drone operator, told Military.com. "Those who hid or acted cowardly might have the same social status as those who defended the country."

The 35-year-old joined at the outset of the full-scale invasion, without any previous military experience, but was demobilized late last year after getting injured during the Battle of Bakhmut and again later in Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhia region.

"This is a clash of two worlds -- those who sought to contribute to the defense of statehood and physical survival, and those who took their families abroad and continued with their lives, growing and developing," he said. "I wouldn't have been able to explain to my son why I didn't defend our homeland."

Kyrylo worries most about the impact of the war on his fellow front-line fighters, many of whom have not been rotated out of the hot zone for years due to the manpower shortage. "There's no clear understanding of when demobilization will take place or who will replace us. In everyday life, there's an opinion that the guys who became soldiers in 2022 will remain soldiers until death," he said.

Although he has chosen not to fight, Alexei has not fled the country to escape the draft, the fighting, or the devastation like tens of thousands of his compatriots. He is the sole breadwinner in his family and wants to stay behind in case his younger brother is eventually called up. Only one man per family can be drafted, according to the current mobilization law, and he wants to be there to take his brother's spot if the situation were to arise in the future. Even more, he worries what will happen if everyone flees and Ukraine becomes a "country of old men."

"Someone needs to rebuild this country," he said, referring to the war's inevitable, if unimaginable, end.

A Flawed Draft

The government made some serious missteps when it came to the countrywide mobilization in terms of transparency, information sharing and organization, according to multiple people interviewed by Military.com. Several government officials have been accused of taking bribes to selectively apply conscription rules, and multiple instances of civilians being illegally conscripted into units have made headlines. Misinformation about the current mobilization law runs rampant across the country; everybody seems to have a different understanding of the legalities governing the draft, complicated by the passing of several new regulations in Ukraine's parliament.

The new draft law came "late and is neither effective nor fair," another soldier with the call sign Syvyy explained to Military.com. He summed up the problems. "In the third year of war, the army is desperate for manpower. It has too many draftees well after 40 and too many holes to avoid the army while cities are full of strong young men."

The botched roll-out of the draft both failed to meet strategic military needs from the beginning and -- maybe more significantly -- turned millions of people against the idea of fighting.

Oleksii Bezhevets, a Ministry of Defence spokesman overseeing the country's latest recruitment campaign, said the government has learned from its mistakes and is rapidly trying to shed its problematic reputation. "Our goal is quite simple: We are building trust," he told Military.com.

By opening up different avenues to joining the military voluntarily, he hopes to change the way avoiders and civilians at large think about joining up.

The MoD has organized new recruitment centers that are separate from the notorious draft offices run by the military that have become synonymous with forced conscription and corruption over the last two years. The centers allow recruits to apply for a position within a specific military unit through ads that commanders have posted on a recruitment website, much like applying for any other job online.

Bezhevets said soldiers who volunteer are eligible for different contracts than draftees -- they can opt to sign up until martial law ends or, like draftees, for a three- or five-year term -- and are guaranteed to be placed in the unit they are accepted into.

"Without trust, you cannot recruit people. And to build trust, you really need the whole system to work properly," Bezhevets said. The new recruitment centers, which opened earlier this year, have already claimed responsibility for bringing in thousands of fresh conscripts every month.

For those already fighting on the front lines, the reinforcements are a welcome respite whose means of joining the armed forces are secondary to their dedication to the cause. "There's no difference between draftees and volunteers," Kyrylo said. "The real difference is between those motivated to defend the country and those who are just random passengers in this war."

But years of war are taking a toll on millions of Ukrainians, those on the front lines and those not.

"Three years of being inside the full-scale war -- you definitely will be broken. Definitely," Olga, a 34-year-old Kyiv native whose fiancé fights in the AFU, told Military.com. She put her full-time job as a marketing manager on hold to provide support to the military for the first 18 months of the war, but has since had to find a balance between paid and volunteer work to continue supporting her family.

"I'm not a soldier, but seeing all the constant deaths on social media -- the pictures of bodies and all of that -- it's just not normal. It's toxic."

More than a dozen people who spoke with Military.com in the last month reflected similar feelings of exhaustion and anguish over the neverending nature of the fighting. "I feel like I've lost my mind," Olga said.

She had previously judged avoiders like Alexei, but three years of war have changed her perspective. "I have friends who are so-called avoiders, and I feel like they're so lost. ... They want to escape this tragedy. Me too," she said.

Remembering who is perpetuating their suffering is key to staying united, she added.

"Russia is to blame for all of our pain and anger, and someone needs to fight this horror, even if we're exhausted," Olga said. "We don't have the choice to stop."

The MoD recruitment representative also described how the traumas of war have bonded Ukrainians today. "We are all in the same boat," Bezhevets said. Together.

"And in a way, it's sinking. It's filling up with water."

-- Katie Livingstone is a freelance correspondent currently reporting from Ukraine and Eastern Europe. A graduate of Medill and Wellesley, her work has appeared in Foreign Policy Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine, USA Today, UPI and more. Katie speaks five languages and lives in Washington, D.C.