Trump & Ukraine: The Coming Battle Over Conscription
There may be a battle looming, not just between the Trump administration and Ukraine over the conscription of men between the ages of 18 and 25, but also within the Trump administration.
The call for Ukraine to cast a wider conscription net predates the Trump administration. Facing imminent loss on the battlefield, after NATO had bankrupted its supply of weapons, demanding that Ukraine throw more men into battle emerged as the last grasp solution during the Biden administration.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So, we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary. Right now, 18 to 25-year olds are not in the fight.”
That call was picked up by Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, who said “one of the things we’ll be asking of the Ukrainians is, they have real manpower issues. Their draft age right now is 26 years old, not 18. I don’t think a lot of people realise that they could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers… [I]f the Ukrainians have asked the entire world to be all in for democracy, we need them to be all in for democracy.”
But Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, seemed to take the opposing view to Waltz, recognizing that throwing more Ukrainians into the battle compounds Ukraine’s problems rather than solving them. “The problem with Ukraine is not that they’re running out of money,” Rubio said at his January 22 confirmation hearing, “but that they’re running out of Ukrainians.”
And they are running out of Ukrainians. According to Florence Bauer, the Regional Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the UN Population Fund, Ukraine’s population has declined by over 10 million since the conflict began in 2014, with 8 million of those occurring since Russia’s invasion in 2022. Even before the war, Ukraine ranked sixth in the world for losing citizens to emigration. According to a report by the CIA, Ukraine has the lowest birth rate and the highest death rate in the world. By 2023, the birth rate had dropped by nearly half compared to the year before the war. The Ukrainian armed forces has suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths or injuries and at least 100,000 desertions.
Though the battle may exist within the Trump administration, it will be much more heated if they wage it with the Zelensky administration. Zelensky has consistently resisted lowering the draft age below the current cut off of 25. In April, 2024, Ukraine lowered the age of people who were eligible to be drafted from 27 to 25 and tightened laws around exemptions. But it wasn’t enough. The changes fell far short of making up for battlefield losses. But Zelensky has resisted U.S. pressure to go further. There are several reasons, including military, political and sociological, why Zelensky has been unyielding.
Asking Ukrainians to throw more soldiers into a lost war is asking a lot of Ukrainians. But asking them to send their 18-25 year olds is especially asking a lot. There is a special demographic difficulty with asking Ukrainians to offer up their 18-25 year olds.
Ukraine is in a precarious position that it does not have enough of that generation. When the Soviet Union collapsed, economic hardship led to plummeting birth rates in the newly independent Ukraine. Birth rates dropped from 1.9 per woman to 1.1 in the first year. The small number of children born then are the 18-25 year old cohort now. And many of them are either serving already, have been killed or injured, have left Ukraine or are exempt, making the small pool even smaller.
The small cohort leads to three problems. The first is economic. Losing large numbers of the already anemic upcoming generation will leave a void in the workplace. The second is demographic. It will create a challenge to the future population of the already shrinking nation. As The New York Times put it, “Ukraine must balance the need to counter a relentless Russian offensive by adding more troops against the risk of hollowing out an entire generation.”
The third is military. The pool of 18-25 year olds is not sufficient to make a difference in the war. A poll conducted in the summer of 2024, cited by Peter Korotaev and Volodymyr Ishchenko found that only 32% of Ukrainians disagree with the statement “mobilization will have no effect other than increased deaths.” Ukraine is being pressed to throw more of its young people into the teeth of the Russian advance to win a war that they have come to know cannot be won.
But in addition to the economic, demographic and military reasons why mobilization is failing and lowering the draft age would be unpopular, there is a fourth, more endemic and, potentially, more corrosive reason identified by Korotaev and Ishchenko. Polling suggests that Ukrainians are increasingly unwilling to fight for Ukraine because they increasingly feel abandoned and betrayed by Ukraine.
The abandonment takes the form of the state asking Ukrainians to give to the state when the state has given little to Ukrainians. Richard Sakwa says in his new book, The Culture of the Second Cold War, that Zelensky has pursued a policy of “radical neoliberal policies, including the privatization of land and state property, the weakening of labor and welfare legislation, and steep increases in the price of utilities.” Minimum wage and social security have remained flat while inflation rapidly rises. Ishchenko and Korotaev say “[a]ll of a sudden, a state that had hardly been present in Ukrainians’ lives demanded that they sacrifice themselves for its survival.”
By the third year of the war, public enthusiasm to sacrifice and volunteer was waning. Polling in June 2024 found that only 32% “fully or partly supported” the new mobilization law. And that mobilization only lowered draft eligibility to 25. The U.S. is pushing for 18.
The betrayal takes the form of anger at the unequal application of the draft. While the poor are being nabbed off the street and deposited on the front line, those who can afford it find ways to work the corrupt system and pay their way out of service. The taking of bribes by draft officials has become an industry. Ishchenko and Korotaev cite a parliamentarian who, upon returning form the front near Pokrovsk, said that the soldiers manning the front lines “were mainly those who could not ‘decide things’ with a bribe.”
The unequal distribution of the demand to serve has changed the definition of patriotism. Polling now shows that only 29% of Ukrainians consider it shameful to dodge the draft. And Ukrainians are not only voting for dodging the draft, they’re dodging it. The new mobilization law required all eligible males to submit their papers by July 17, 2024. 6 million out of 10 million have not. Ishchenko and Korotaev add that of the 40% who did file their papers, at least half of them had “medical or other reasons allowing them to legally avoid mobilization.” Mobilization officials in Ukraine are investigating half a million men for draft evasion.
Both Democrats and Republicans have pushed for a plunging age eligibility for conscription in Ukraine. And while there may be some disagreement between security and state in the Trump administration, there seems to be less disagreement among Ukrainians. And there is shaping up to be even greater disagreement between the U.S. and Ukraine if the Trump administration pressures Ukraine to lower the draft age or conditions support on that decision.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net
How Washington Helps: Bloody Lessons From Ukraine to Bosnia
Nearly three years after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Kiev’s outlook appears worse than ever. Ukrainian forces, facing manpower shortages, are losing territory at a faster pace than in the first 30 months of the conflict.
Now, Kiev looks at an evolving political situation where future support is less certain. President Donald Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine, and several prominent figures in the MAGA movement are calling for an end to shipping billions of dollars to Kiev as Americans struggle.
If Kiev is going to make a deal to end the war, it will be decidedly worse than the one that was on the table in 2022. In April, just two months after the invasion, an agreement between Moscow and Kiev was nearly completed that would have seen Ukraine retain all its territory except for the Crimean Peninsula, which was annexed in 2014.
Over the past three years, the Kremlin has annexed four additional regions in Ukraine that Putin says will never be returned to Kiev.
Ukraine fighting a three-year war at the insistence of the West only to get a worse deal is not the first time an American “ally” in Europe was pushed to fight a war for no reason.
30 years after the Dayton Accords were signed, it is important to look back at the Bosnian War because it teaches an important lesson about the current war in Ukraine. The following is an excerpt from Scott Horton’s new book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, on the negotiations in Bosnia during the George HW Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.
~ Kyle Anzalone
Lisbon Deal
In July 1991, Serb Democratic Party (SDS) leader Radovan Karadžić and Adil Zulfikarpašić from the Muslim Bosniak Organization (MBO) signed the Zulfikarpašić-Karadžić agreement which would have kept the union between Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro. However, as mentioned above, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović initially supported but then opposed the deal, killing it. This process repeated itself early the next year after the Badinter Commission, when, in February 1992, the Carrington-Cutileiro plan, or “Lisbon deal,” was struck by Portuguese Foreign Minister Jose Cutileiro between Bosnian Muslim, Croat and Serb representatives. The deal said that Bosnia-Herzegovina would remain united politically but would be divided into three ethno-religious cantons with a very weak central government in the capital city of Sarajevo. The supposedly intransigent Bosnian Serbs were represented at the meeting by Karadžić, who said, “Either we remain in Yugoslavia, or else we will get a sovereign state in Bosnia-Herzegovina which will form an alliance of states, that is a confederation, together with the other two states.” The Bosnian Serbs were willing to accept independence from Yugoslavia and reduce the proportion of land they controlled from approximately 60 percent to only 42.5 percent.
Said by the U.S. to be the aggressors in this part of the war, the Bosnian Serbs were satisfied with this compromise. Zimmermann says “Karadžić was ecstatic” over this deal, which would give the Bosnian Serbs plenty of autonomy in a new system “based on three constituent nations and joined by a common government and assembly.”
Izetbegović had said he would support the arrangement, originally accepting and signing the Lisbon deal; then, two days later, on American advice, he killed it, this time starting a war. It was Amb. Zimmermann who was responsible. As recounted by State Department official George Kenney, then-head of the Yugoslavia desk, “Zimmermann told Izetbegović, ‘Look, why don’t you wait and see what the U.S. can do for you?’ meaning, ‘We’ll recognize you and then help you out. So don’t go ahead with the Lisbon agreement, don’t accept the Cutileiro plan, and just hold out for some kind of unitary Bosnian state.’” Canadian Amb. Bissett added, “Upon finding that Izetbegović was having second thoughts about the agreement he had signed in Lisbon, the Ambassador suggested that if he withdrew his signature, the United States would grant recognition to Bosnia as an independent state.” Izetbegović was convinced. He then “withdrew his signature and renounced the agreement.” Two days later, on March 30, he called for a referendum on secession. Just a few days after that, on April 4, he announced a full military mobilization. On the 6th he declared independence. The war was on. Referring to the peace deal that finally ended the war two and a half years later, Damjan Krnjevic-Miskovic wrote: “One still hears it said that ‘the difference between the Lisbon and the Dayton agreements is simply two years of mass graves.’”
Though he denied it in his book, Zimmermann later admitted his error to the Times. “Our hope was the Serbs would hold off if it was clear Bosnia had the recognition of Western countries. It turned out we were wrong.” He confessed, “He said he didn’t like it. I told him, if he didn’t like it, why sign it?” In retrospect, “the Lisbon agreement wasn’t bad at all.” That was too bad, because, as the paper said, “after talking to the Ambassador, Mr. Izetbegović publicly renounced the Lisbon agreement.”
After citing another Times report which said the U.S. had intervened to ruin the Lisbon deal, Tucker and Hendrickson wrote that “Izetbegović’s repudiation of the… agreement… was the immediate trigger for the war,” but that “[t]he war may have occurred in any event. The Lisbon formula was vague in crucial respects, and contained no agreement respecting the boundaries of the three cantons.” Still, they wrote, that “cannot detract from the judgment that American diplomats acted in an extremely irresponsible manner… If war was to be averted, an agreement respecting cantonization was the last step at which it might have been.” The two also noted that even though the Bosnian referendum was necessary to satisfy the requirements of the EC and U.S., the referendum itself was unconstitutional. The constitution “had conferred a right of secession but made it dependent on the mutual agreement of the nations composing Yugoslavia… [T]o move to secession without the consent of the Serbs was a plain violation of its terms.”
They also showed that there is nothing in the international law that confers upon the United States or anyone else the authority to intervene or to take sides in civil wars or wars of secession in other sovereign nations, and that the U.S. recognition of Bosnia’s independence was “an illegal intervention in Yugoslavia’s internal affairs, to which Belgrade had every right to object.” Otherwise, “the contrary view may only be asserted on the debased view that international law is whatever the United States and the Security Council says it is and that we are free, like an Alice in the grip of deconstructionism, to have words mean anything we like.”
With the Germans making initial inroads in the newly independent Croatia and Slovenia, and taking a strong lead in the EC on the issue, the U.S. government wanted Bosnia to be their project along the same lines, even though the intelligence agencies, and even the Germans, were warning that Bosnia would “blow up” into civil war. David Binder wrote that Secretary Baker, by recognizing Bosnian independence, “literally created… Bosnia-Herzegovina… with the blessing of President Bush, with considerable input from Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Zimmermann.” Despite the warnings from leaders on every side of the issue, Zimmermann had gone ahead and recommended recognition of Bosnian independence. Of course this led directly to war between the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs. In his own defense, Zimmermann deployed the circular argument that the war he helped provoke would have happened anyway, since the Bosnian Serbs’ landgrabs, launched after Izetbegović’s declaration of independence, would have caused what up until then had not happened.
Roger Cohen wrote in the Times that “[w]ith the precedent of 1991, when a much smaller Serbian minority went to war to resist joining a Croatian state, this international decision on Bosnia looks as close to criminal negligence as a diplomatic act can be.” He added, “Indeed, international recognition and the outbreak of the Bosnian war were simultaneous: the world put a light to a fuse.” He must have meant President Bush.
Once the war started, factions of the JNA stayed in Bosnia and merged with Bosnian Serb forces, making them better equipped than their new enemies and leaving open the argument that Serbian troops were participating in a deniable role as members of local Bosnian Serb forces, though the majority of them were still Bosnian.
The Bush and Clinton administrations went on to sabotage a series of peace offers between 1992 and 1995, until Clinton finally signed the Dayton Accords in November 1995, which, as the Times conceded, looked much like the Lisbon deal from three years before, only with less land for America’s chosen Muslim allies and an indefinite NATO military presence.
