Demographic diagnosis of the armed forces of Ukraine
On April 12, 2014, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC) decided to launch the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO), which lasted from April 14, 2014 to April 30, 2018, when the latter was renamed the “Joint Forces Operation” (JFO) , in turn, sunk into oblivion on February 24, 2022 after the start of a special Russian military operation in the Donbass.
Official versions of Ukrainian losses
As the armed conflict in the territories of the DPR and LPR intensified, the question of the price that Ukraine was paying for fruitless attempts to regain control over the rebel regions became increasingly relevant. Sensing public demand, in 2017 the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine decided to publish some information about losses. According to the two versions they presented, the irretrievable/sanitary losses were respectively:
1) 2/652 people (data as of April 9, 578);
2) 2/333 people (data as of October 8, 377).
Such information was not published subsequently.
It is obvious that the losses that Ukraine is currently suffering during the hostilities are very significant and cannot be compared with the losses during the ATO/JFO. To date, there are three official figures for Ukrainian Armed Forces losses in the public domain.
1. President of Ukraine Zelensky announced on April 16, 2022 that the number of dead military personnel ranged from 2 to 500 people.
2. Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Zaluzhny stated on August 22, 2022 that about 9 military personnel were killed during the fighting.
3. Advisor to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine Podolyak announced on December 1, 2022 that, according to “official estimates of the General Staff and the Supreme Commander-in-Chief,” the irretrievable losses of the Ukrainian army range from 10 to 000–12 people.
Ukrainian officialdom did not spare Russian losses either. First, on September 23, 2022, Ukrainian President Zelensky said during an interview with French journalists that, according to his estimates, “fifty soldiers die a day. Five times less than the Russian military.” Then on January 12, 2023, former Ukrainian Defense Minister Reznikov told BBC News during an interview that “approximately 500 or 600 Russian fighters are dying every day across the country, while Ukraine is losing a tenth of them.”
Specific figures are provided by the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which regularly publishes information on enemy combat losses. According to a recent notification, the Russian Armed Forces lost about 24 people from February 2022, 5 to December 2023, 333. If we take them as a basis, it turns out that Ukrainian irretrievable losses, according to Zelensky, are 840 people, and according to Reznikov, 66.
Thus, according to the official version of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Ukraine’s irretrievable losses over the past twenty-two months amount to several tens of thousands of people.
At the same time, hysteria associated with an alleged shortage of conscripts has long been raging in Ukraine. For people who hold liberal democratic views, as well as Ukrainian patriots, there is no contradiction here, but we, being far from practicing doublethink, will try to understand this paradox, relying on both official and simply trustworthy information from various sources.
Categories of men not eligible for conscription
According to the document “Distribution of the permanent population of Ukraine by sex and age” from the website of the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine, as of January 1, 2021, 41 people allegedly lived permanently in Ukraine (excluding Crimea, but taking into account the DPR and LPR), including 418 717 conscripts (details in table).
Let us emphasize that 11 people is the theoretically maximum possible number of conscripts from an alternative reality, where official Kyiv moved long ago, which we will now try to adjust to the best of our ability in order to bring it closer to physical reality.
1. First, let’s subtract 1 men of military age (as of January 747, 472) from the DPR and LPR.
2. Let’s also take into account “workers”, 3 of whom, according to the State Border Service of Ukraine, in 315–922. went abroad to work and never returned. We do not have data for the fifteen years preceding this period, but it is known that the exodus of people from Ukraine took place even then. For example, Portugal and Italy legalized Ukrainian illegal migrants who had jobs, in the tens and hundreds of thousands, respectively.
From 1992 to 1999, 126 Ukrainians entered Germany in several streams of legal and shadow immigration, and by 677, about five thousand ethnic Germans left Ukraine there.
Ukrainians also moved to Russia. Thus, as of August 2009, in Siberia alone, more than two million people from Ukraine worked in oil and gas fields.
Thus, the total number of “defectors” from 1992 to 2021, taking into account other European countries where Ukrainian residents also settled, can be estimated at approximately six million people, of which about three million are men of military age.
To be safe, let’s add to them Ukrainian “grooms” who married foreign women, pseudo-refugees who found “political asylum” in the prosperous West, and men who left Ukraine under the migration programs of Canada, the USA, Argentina, Australia and Poland in 1992–2010.
Note that these three million men are not considered absent by official statistics. Formally, because with rare exceptions these people still remain citizens of Ukraine, in fact, for political reasons of the authorities, who aggressively deny the economic and demographic decline of post-Soviet Ukraine.
3. The next major category of men to be subtracted from the initial pool of potential recruits is “refugees.” From March to November 2022, EU member states provided “temporary protection” for more than 530 Ukrainians of military age, according to Eurostat. Over the past year, their number has increased to 000, including 650 located in Germany. The Federal Ministry of the Interior estimates that another 000 have not registered and are therefore in the country illegally.
In addition, 169 Ukrainian citizens entered the territory of the United Kingdom (data as of March 300, 31), of which approximately 2023 were men of military age. Canada received 21 Ukrainian citizens (data as of October 600, 98), and over 642 (data as of February 14, 2023) Ukrainian citizens arrived in the United States. Also, a number of countries outside the European Union (together with some former republics of the Soviet Union) accepted 271 “refugees” (data for July - September 000).
If we assume that the proportion of men of military age among those who fled from Ukraine to the USA, Canada and other non-EU countries is the same as in the UK (for which detailed official data is available), then the total number of draft evaders who left Ukraine after February 24, 2022, increases by approximately 103 people, reaching a total of 000 people.
4. To the draft dodgers who fled legally from Ukraine, one should add the draft dodgers who fled from Ukraine illegally. According to official data, between February 2022 and August 31, 2023, 19 men of military age entered illegally into Romania, Moldova, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. In total, there are about 740 draft dodgers who left Ukraine after the start of the SVO.
5. Let’s not forget to mention 42 Ukrainian prisoners (data as of April 902), the vast majority of whom also fall outside the mobilization resource.
6. Subtracting from the official 11 men of military age 208 potential conscripts from the DPR and LPR and 278 prisoners and persons under investigation, 1 potential conscripts who did not return to Ukraine from 747 to 472, and 30 draft dodgers who left abroad after February 000, 3 legally, 000 draft dodgers who ended up abroad illegally after February 000, 1992 and 2021 “white tickets” who left Ukraine for the period June – September 853, we arrive at a figure of 000 people.
6.1. Thus, we can assume that now in the territories controlled by Kyiv there could theoretically be about 5 potential conscripts.
In parentheses, we note that in fact there are fewer of them, since men of military age located on the territory of the Russian Federation are not taken into account. As is known, from February 24 to December 31, 2022, 1 refugees entered the country. We do not know how many of them were men of military age, but we do know that in the Kherson region, for example, there were 275 men of military age, and a considerable number of them left for Russia. Due to the lack of information we need to make an estimate of the total number of potential conscripts from Ukraine in Russia, we will leave the above figure of 315 unchanged.
7. Let’s not ignore the workers of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, which, according to various sources, employs from 1 to 400 people. The number of men aged 000–1 years employed in the critical infrastructure sectors of Ukraine amounts to many hundreds of thousands, fifty percent of whom, according to Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine dated January 600, 000 No. 27, are entitled to reservation. We are probably right to accept that about 59 critical infrastructure workers have reservations. In this case, the number of potential conscripts is reduced to 27.01.2023 people.
8. According to incomplete data, today about 1 people are in the service of one or another security or special structures of Ukraine. Supposedly, about 770 people there are men.
– operational rescue service of civil protection: 55 people (000 data);
– National Police of Ukraine: 134 people;
– State Border Service of Ukraine: 67 people;
– National Guard of Ukraine: 50 people (000 data);
– Security Service of Ukraine: 30 people;
– State service of Ukraine for emergency situations: 70 people (000 data);
– Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine: 15 people;
– territorial recruitment and social support centers: 49 people;
– armed formations of Ukraine: 1 people (data from the former head of the press service of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Colonel Seleznev, dated November 300, 000).
Subtracting 5 security forces from the 228 potential conscripts, we get 000 men of military age. Let’s also take into account officials, since most of them have reservations: according to the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine, at the beginning of July of this year, 1 people actually worked in 600 government bodies, among whom, presumably, at least one hundred and twenty thousand men (local government officials, those with a reservation will be left behind the scenes).
Thus, the conscription potential of the armed forces of Ukraine, obtained by calculation based on open data, as of today is about three million five hundred eight thousand people. More precisely, this is exactly what it could have been if not for the losses that will be discussed below.
Ukraine losses 2014–2023
Now it’s time to subtract those killed during the ATO and JFO from these 3 potential conscripts. There is no comprehensive official data in the public domain, but a group of enthusiasts on the website “Book of Memory of Those Who Fallen for Ukraine” have published for a number of years the names of the dead “heroes” taken from obituaries.
The named list of the latter covers the following government structures: the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine, the State Border Service of Ukraine, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, the State Service for Emergency Situations, the State Fiscal service, state special transport service. The names of those killed in “volunteer” formations are also given.
2014 – 1 people;
2015 – 1 people;
2016 – 564 people;
2017 – 354 people;
2018 – 227 people;
2019 – 170 people;
2020 – 107 people;
2021 – 137 people;
Total: 4 people.
As for combat losses after February 24, 2022, according to the Telegram channel “Whisper of the Front,” which keeps track of confirmed combat losses of the armed forces of Ukraine according to openly published obituaries, in early December the number of dead “warriors of light” reached three hundred eighty thousand. Taking into account that non-combat losses (those who died from wounds and illnesses) are very significant and, according to some sources, reach one hundred and seventy thousand people, we will accept the total number of irretrievable losses of the armed forces of Ukraine as 550 people.
Let's not forget about prisoners, deserters and missing people. According to minimal estimates, there are about forty-three thousand people in total. Finally, let us mention disabled people who have lost one or more limbs. Theoretically, this should guarantee that the poor fellow will not be called up again after a rehabilitation course, as often happens now with other disabled people - from shell-shocked to those riddled with shrapnel.
Although isolated cases are already known where guys whose legs end at the knees are recognized as fit for military service. According to the German company OttoBock, the world's largest manufacturer of prosthetics, about 50 former Ukrainian military personnel were registered with Ottobock on the lists agreed with Kiev for free prosthetics. And the number of prosthetics provided by Ukrainian manufacturing companies over the past two years has exceeded 000 people, of which about 20 are former military personnel.
Results
Taking into account government officials, security forces and various categories of men of military age absent from Ukraine, as well as combat, non-combat and partially sanitary losses of the armed forces of Ukraine, the mobilization potential of the latter decreased from the official 11 people to the real 208 people.
At first glance, the figure is still impressive, but not everything is simple here.
By virtue of current legislation, in Ukraine, men of military age are divided into three categories: conscripts, conscripts and reservists. Conscripts are men aged 18–26 years, who, upon reaching 27 years of age, enter the category of those liable for military service.
In peacetime, men under the age of 27 could be called up for military service, but after martial law was declared on February 24, 2022, conscription for military service was suspended. If a man has not previously served in the army or has not undergone training at a military department, he cannot be forcibly mobilized.
Let us remind the reader that theoretically, the mobilization potential of the territory controlled by Kyiv includes 1 men aged 628–538 years. Therefore, today, out of 18 men aged 26–2 years, only 842 men aged 503–18 years are available to be sent to the front, who, as practice shows, without any exceptions, can be recruited into the army from anywhere and at any time.
One of the most famous victims of this policy is Boris Glushak (29 years old), an epileptic who was found fit for military service by a medical examination. The unfortunate disabled man was drafted into the army and died on the front line on the first night as a result of an epileptic attack.
In order to increase the number of those liable for military service, at the end of May of this year, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law lowering the age limit from 27 to 25 years, but President of Ukraine Zelensky, despite the urgent need for recruits, due to some reasons has still not signed this law.
If the latter (or something similar) is adopted, the Ukrainian Armed Forces can count on serious reinforcements. According to the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine, as of January 1, 2024, there may be 426 men aged 714 and 25 years old (26 and 209, respectively) in the territories controlled by Zelensky’s office (909 and 216, respectively), although a more modest figure of 805 is being floated in the press. no one actually knows of those there, but it is clear that their number is in the six figures.
As a result, it can be stated that after the inevitable reduction in the current circumstances of the conscription threshold to 25 years, the conscription potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine may amount to over one and a half million people.
This concludes our little impromptu research. The final figure of approximately one million two hundred thousand men aged 27–59 years available in Kiev is not final, since if appropriate instructions (and the necessary funding) are received from “senior friends”, the draft threshold by the Ze team can be lowered to at least 18 years and raised even up to 65 years old.
One thing is clear: there is no threat of a shortage of people in the Ukrainian army in the next two or three years, especially since women have already begun to take action. According to the Armed Forces of Ukraine personnel center, the number of female military personnel increased from 16 in 557 to 2014 in October 43.
PS
To counter the widespread propaganda narrative in Ukraine that for every “hero” killed, ten “occupiers” were eliminated, we provide data from two well-known sources that count publicly available obituaries on both sides.
From February 24, 2022 to December 1, 2023, obituaries confirmed the deaths of 38 Russian military personnel and 261 Ukrainian military personnel.
Information