IN UKRAINE’S WEST families flee from war as one, but crumble into pieces upon arrival. Using powers conferred by martial law, the government has banned all men aged 18-60 from leaving the country. Instead they must report for duty at a military recruitment office. And so Anna was this week one of many women to bid her husband goodbye as she crossed the border to safety. She is seven months pregnant. Back in Kyiv, her abandoned apartment is full of baby clothes and the cot that she has chosen for her daughter. Anna’s husband, she says via phone from Hungary, “believes that I will give birth in Kyiv,” because peace will come by May. “But I don’t believe it.”
The Ukrainian army enjoys stratospheric morale and is punching far above its weight against Vladimir Putin’s troops, tanks and missiles. Thousands of foreigners have flocked to join its newly created International Legion, while Russian troops abandon their posts. Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, knows his country’s fight is just, whereas Russia’s is rotten. For that he derides Mr Putin, who "collects reservists and conscripts from all over Russia to throw them into the hell of war”.
Russia’s generals did not tell troops that they would be invading Ukraine in a war of territorial conquest. Russian lawmakers have acknowledged that the army includes conscripts who were forced to sign a contract affirming that they were “volunteers”. Intercepted radio communications suggest some have abandoned their posts. Other soldiers have mutinied, deliberately running over their commander in one instance, Western officials claim. On March 24th British intelligence suggested that Russia was looking to enlist more conscripts to replace the killed and injured, who are rumoured to number in the tens of thousands. Unmotivated and ill-prepared troops are commonly cited as one of the main reasons that Russia’s invasion has gone so badly wrong.
Ironically, though, Ukraine’s army is built on conscription as well. For years Ukrainian law has demanded 12 to 18 months of military service from Ukrainian men, even if many of them manage to postpone it through studies or parenthood (registering with a fake address is a popular trick to duck it entirely). The practice of conscription itself, like so much else about Ukraine, is a relic that it has tried to shed: when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, all its men had to complete at least three years of military service. Four of Ukraine’s last five elected presidents promised to abolish it. One succeeded in 2013, but it was reinstated the following year, after Russia began grabbing chunks of Ukrainian territory. Last month, just before the war started, Mr Zelensky proposed an end to conscription by early 2024.
So far Ukraine has forcibly enlisted only those with combat experience, even if much of that experience was derived from conscription. The “general mobilisation” announced by Mr Zelensky on the eve of the war is split into four “waves”. On March 15th the army announced that the second of those waves (former servicemen and reservists with combat experience prior to 2014) would commence. Only in the fourth and final wave, if it comes to that, will ordinary citizens need to head to the front.
At present, military kit is harder for Ukraine’s army to come by than men are. Even before the war it was among the largest in Europe. The government has since raised frontline soldiers’ pay to 100,000 hryvnias ($3,400) a month, seven times the average salary; the bills are being paid through war bonds. By March 6th some 100,000 Ukrainians had already chosen to enlist in the territorial defence force, a new branch of the military. Some wonder whether the popularity of Ukraine’s cause makes conscription unnecessary. At any rate, for the army to call up citizens en masse would require the war to take a dark turn.
What is happening now is not full conscription. One recent morning scores of young men, some gruff, some tender, were waiting outside a recruitment office in Lviv. All newcomers to the city must register there within 24 hours of arrival. An officer pokes his head outside and bellows: “Who here wants to serve”? Only a few men put their hands up and trot in. Those men will go straight to the front. The rest are merely there to provide their names, contact information and a list of their skills. Then they will wait for the call.
Elsewhere, civilians feel mistreated. One family outside Lviv station was distraught: the father was exempt from service as his child has autism, but lacked the documents proving he was the boy’s guardian, and so he could not board the train to Poland. They had rushed to pack the day before when bombs hit their town of Izyum, near Kharkiv. In the case of Anna’s family, her husband refuses to fight on pacifist grounds: “We are people of the church,” she explains. The law allows for this. But army officials “were very aggressive” and tried to send him to battle, she says. The defence ministry has set up a hotline for anyone who feels he was wrongly shipped off to fight.
Conversations with Ukrainians in Lviv reveal strong support for such rules, even if they are imperfectly enforced. “The men must protect the children, the women and the country,” says Evhenii, an economist from Kyiv who has relocated to Lviv. Dmytro, an IT worker from the capital signing up at a recruitment office, says he feels a moral obligation to enlist as well as a legal one: “I want to be useful.” His mother and sister are abroad. If he goes to fight, his wife may join them.
Ukraine remains a society where old-fashioned family norms remain popular, even if a tenth of its combat troops are women. Yana is a police officer from the city of Avdiivka, which sits on the frontline of Ukraine’s earlier war against Russia-backed separatists in Donbas. Her boyfriend serves alongside her. But when Russia invaded, the police force instructed all its women to leave. Yana’s boyfriend is still there, while she is in Lviv with her family. But she says she supports such rules, as they help men “work without worrying about their family’s safety”.
Many feel that conscription during peacetime not only forces people to fight against their will, but also makes little economic sense. It costs a fortune and pulls people away from their preferred jobs. That line of thinking helped persuade America to end conscription in 1972. (Of course, it was not fighting a war of survival against a larger invader.) Even in wartime, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, has suggested exempting the country’s IT workers from military duties so that they could aid the war effort from behind a computer, or simply work to “fill the budget”, though some feel that this unfairly benefits the well-off.
Asylum and human-rights laws offer states ample room to force citizens to fight, or forbid them from fleeing. Anna acknowledges that her country’s circumstances are exceptional. But she cannot help but recall images of Syrian refugees in Europe having fled Russian bombs—men, women and children, suffering acutely but suffering together. Anna dreams of a family reunion. But it may not come until well after May.
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