RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Ukraine increasingly conscripting older men – media
Ukraine’s military has been forced to conscript more older men to fill its battalions amid the heavy losses suffered in its conflict with Russia, reportedly increasing the average age of its troops by nearly ten years since shortly after the crisis began last year.
The average age of a Ukrainian soldier has risen to around 43, Time magazine reported in a cover story posted last week. That compares with an average of 30-35 in March 2022, when thousands of men were rushing to enlist voluntarily, according to the Financial Times. The heavy toll of dead and wounded “has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever-older personnel,” Time said.
An unidentified aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky told the magazine that the shift in age has changed the makeup of Kiev’s forces. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with. This is Ukraine, not Scandinavia.” The article detailed Zelensky’s struggles with alleged betrayals by Western allies, as well as corruption and discord within his own government as the conflict with Moscow drags on.
Ukraine hasn’t publicly reported its casualty figures, but as of August, US officials pegged the number of killed and wounded on both sides at nearly 500,000. The Russian Defense Ministry estimated last month that Kiev had lost more than 90,000 troops just since June, when a foundering Ukrainian counteroffensive began.
Zelensky’s regime forbade adult males under the age of 60 from leaving the country when the conflict began. Ukrainian authorities have reportedly filed more than 8,200 criminal cases against alleged draft dodgers, according to a local media report posted on Monday. Zelensky fired the directors of Ukraine’s enlistment offices in August, after a government investigation found that officials were selling fake medical exemptions to reluctant recruits for up to $6,000 each.
Aleksey Arestovich, a former senior adviser to Zelensky, said last month that Ukraine should conscript younger recruits because they are better-suited to endure the rigors of the battlefield and are easier to manipulate into an aggressive fighting force. “What is needed are wolves, who are 25 to 28, who want to fight and enjoy that, who still have things to prove,” he said.
Ukraine’s manpower struggles are worsening at a time when US public support for continuing to send massive military aid to Kiev is waning. However, a Zelensky aide told Time that even if Washington were to send all the weapons to Ukraine that have been promised, the country’s military simply doesn’t “have the men to use them.”
WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Ukraine says troops repel Russian attacks along front line
Ukraine's military said on Tuesday its troops had repelled Russian assaults in widely separated sectors of the war and braced for a fresh attempt to capture the key frontline eastern town of Avdiivka.
Russia is engaged in a slow-moving campaign in eastern areas of the 1,000-km (600-mile) front line after failing in its bid to march on Kyiv in the conflict's early days. Ukraine has registered only limited progress in a counteroffensive launched in the east and south in June.
Ukraine's General Staff, in its evening report, said its forces had beaten back 15 attacks near Kupiansk in the northeast and 18 attacks near Maryinka further south, where battles have raged for months.
Nine attacks were repelled in and near Avdiivka, where Moscow launched the latest of several drives in mid-October.
Vitaliy Barabash, head of Avdiivka's military administration, said several days of rain had for the moment ruled out any new Russian advance - what he described as the "third wave".
"We've had nearly a week of heavy rain," he told the public broadcaster Suspilne. "The terrain is too difficult and equipment cannot move."
Barabash said Russian troops had been targeting the town's vast coking plant with artillery for the past week.
The last 16 workers keeping the plant operating had finally been evacuated, he said and only two doctors and four nurses remained in what was a town of 32,000 before Russia's February 2022 invasion.
"These are our city's angels," he told the television.
Avdiivka has become a hallmark of Ukrainian resistance - and is seen as a gateway if Ukraine is to retake main areas in the east, including the town of Donetsk, 20 km away.
Occupied briefly when Russian-backed separatists seized large areas of eastern Ukraine in 2014, the town was retaken by Ukrainian forces who subsequently erected substantial fortifications around it.
Russian accounts of the fighting said Moscow's troops had launched strikes on Ukrainian men and equipment in villages near the eastern town of Bakhmut, seized by Russian forces last May.
Reuters could not independently confirm battlefield accounts made by either side.
RT/Reuters
