--- title: "Ukraine's Manpower Crisis: Desertion, Conscription, and the Drone War Keeping Russia at Bay" description: "Some readers instinctively wince at any discussion of Ukraine's desertion and forced-conscription problems, suspecting a pro-Russian talking point dressed up as analysis. That reaction is understandable, but it is also a mistake. The strain on Ukraine's ranks is not Kremlin propaganda; it is one of the most consequential dynamics of the war, and anyone genuinely hoping Kyiv prevails against Vladimir Putin's war of conquest needs to understand it clearly.\n\nEver since the failed 2023 counteroffensive, Ukraine has been beset by manpower problems. Those problems have not eased. If anything, they are now more acute than ever. Battalion commanders describe sometimes fielding fewer than ten combat-effective infantrymen across an entire battalion. Drivers they have. Drone pilots they have. But men who can physically hold a position on the front line are in desperately short supply.\n\nAnd yet, here is the paradox at the heart of late-2025 on the eastern front: despite this glaring weakness, Russia cannot break through. Moscow launched a massive summer campaign meant to threaten cities from Sumy to Pokrovsk, and its gains amounted to almost nothing. The explanation lies in a single transformative technology — the drone — and a battlefield that increasingly resembles the future of warfare itself.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Ukraine is estimated to be short roughly 100,000 troops, a figure that lines up with desertion data showing over 110,000 service members left their posts without leave between January and July 2025.\n- Of the roughly 30,000 Ukrainians mobilized each month, only about one third are deemed fit to fight, and many of those are unwilling conscripts rather than volunteers.\n- Russia's manpower picture is also grim, but Moscow's wealth, enormous sign-up bonuses, and greater success at returning deserters mean its forces are growing by roughly 9,000 troops a month while Ukraine's shrink.\n- Russia's costly summer offensive captured no Ukrainian settlement of significance for months; its losses may include nearly 87,000 killed in action between January and September 2025.\n- A roughly 10km-wide drone killzone now does the work a manned front line once did, punishing whichever side tries to advance — currently Russia.\n\n## A Crisis Measured in Six Figures\n\nThe scale of Ukraine's shortfall is best captured by a single estimate. Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London, has reckoned that Ukraine is short of about 100,000 troops. That number does not float free of the evidence. It lines up neatly with desertion statistics that have begun to surface from official sources.\n\nFiles obtained by Ukrainska Pravda from the Prosecutor General's Office show that over 110,000 Ukrainian troops left their posts without leave between January and July 2025. A significant minority of those later returned under an amnesty for desertions, but even accounting for that, the figures point to a problem that is unmistakably major. As Russia's full-scale war entered its fourth fall season, Ukraine's military found itself gripped by a deep manpower crisis — one most acute, by every account, in the ranks of its infantry.\n\nThis is not a problem Kyiv suffers in isolation. Russian forces are also going absent without leave at alarming rates. But the imbalance matters, and it appears to be worse on the Ukrainian side.\n\n## Why the Desertions Run Deeper on Ukraine's Side\n\nIt would be easy to dismiss claims of a Ukrainian desertion crisis as Russian information warfare. The trouble is that the same point is made by sources with no interest in helping Moscow. Frontelligence Insight, a group tracking the war, reports that while Russian troops are abandoning their posts at an increasingly fast rate, desertions remain more frequent on the Ukrainian side, and Moscow is more effective at returning its troops to the front.\n\nThe most striking confirmation comes from inside Ukraine's own command. In August, Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi himself noted that Russia is mobilizing so many men that its forces are actually growing by about 9,000 troops a month. Ukraine's, by contrast, are shrinking. When the man running Ukraine's armed forces concedes the enemy is expanding while his own army contracts, the dynamic ceases to be a matter of partisan spin and becomes simple arithmetic.\n\nThat arithmetic raises two questions: why is this happening, and what effect is it having on the battlefield?\n\n## On Paper, Ukraine Should Be Fine\n\nThe \"why\" is the harder question. On paper, Ukraine should be in reasonable health. Roughly 30,000 people are mobilized each month, and this at a time when Ukraine is largely on the defensive — a posture that should generally cost fewer troops than attacking. Russia suffered 33,000 casualties in July alone. If Ukraine is generating 30,000 fresh soldiers a month against a foe bleeding at that rate, the books ought to balance.\n\nThey do not. Of those 30,000, only roughly one third each month are deemed fit to fight. The rest are unsuitable for frontline combat for one reason or another, shrinking a seemingly healthy intake to a thin trickle of actual infantry. And beneath the raw totals lies a second, thornier issue: the question of who, exactly, is being mobilized in the first place.\n\n## How Conscription Bred Resentment\n\nWhen the war began, there was a surge of volunteers signing up to defend their homeland. After the 2023 counteroffensive failed, that stream slowed to a trickle. In its place, Kyiv was forced to begin mobilizing people — and the process has been handled so poorly that it has bred deep resentment.\n\nInitially, only those aged 27 or older could be mobilized. The reasoning behind this unusual choice was fear of a demographic crisis. The chaos of the 1990s saw Ukraine's birthrate plunge and stay depressed for a long time. As a result, modern Ukraine has a severe shortage of young men of traditional fighting age, and politicians worried that sending a large share of them to die at the front would deepen the demographic hole for generations.\n\nAfter much debate and political point-scoring, the lower age limit was eventually brought down to 25. But the system became so corrupt that those with means could simply buy their way out of serving. The overall effect is that most of those who do get mobilized do not want to be there. As one frontline soldier put it, many of those arriving in 2025 are \"bussified\" — forcibly taken away in buses by recruitment officers — and they lack the will to fight and have no sense of purpose.\n\n## Why Russia Keeps the Bodies Coming\n\nBefore anyone treats this as proof of Russian superiority, the same maladies afflict both sides. Russian troops are known to suffer from poor morale, and many are in appalling physical condition. Even pro-war Russian milbloggers have begun raising the alarm about the staggering rate of HIV and viral hepatitis among the infantry.\n\nThe difference is money. Russia remains wealthy enough to throw genuinely insane sign-up bonuses and pay packets at volunteers. In some regions, combined local and federal bonuses mean a soldier can earn 5.2 million rubles in a single year — this in a nation where average monthly salaries on the periphery rarely exceed 50,000 rubles, or about $614. That gap guarantees a steady stream of men from impoverished areas chasing pay that is quite literally life-changing, if also frequently life-ending.\n\nThe system has limits. As of October 2025, reports emerged of some regions failing to hit recruitment quotas despite the enormous payouts. Even so, the scale of Russia's financial inducements still dwarfs anything Kyiv can offer.\n\n## A Freer Society, and Its Costs\n\nUkraine carries a further disadvantage that flows directly from being a more open society: better public access to information about what is actually happening at the front. When stories get out — as, all too often, they do — of high command forcing infantry to hold untenable positions purely to avoid political embarrassment, the effect on potential recruits is corrosive.\n\nThis is one reason many experts would dearly like to see the back of Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, has argued that Ukraine was successful in the first year of the war because its army fought differently. Once President Zelensky replaced Valeriy Zaluzhnyi with Syrskyi, in this reading, it turned into a war of a small Soviet army against a big Soviet army, with predictable consequences.\n\nThat is not a take every analyst shares. But many blame an ethos of \"no retreat whatever the cost\" on Syrskyi, and there is little doubt that such an ethos actively harms volunteer recruitment.\n\n## The Killzone: How a Smaller Army Holds the Line\n\nWhat effect does all this have on the battlefield? Less than one might fear, which is the genuinely surprising part. Moscow's summer campaign, meant to menace cities from Sumy to Pokrovsk, delivered almost nothing. No Ukrainian settlement of significance has fallen to Putin's forces for months. The one major breakthrough, at Dobropillia, was ultimately pushed back. Chasiv Yar remains contested, and that is about the extent of it.\n\nIn return, the cost to Russia has been catastrophic. Russian analyst Yan Matveev has estimated that at least 30,000 troops were killed and another 60,000 wounded in that effort. More broadly, leaked documents appear to indicate that the Kremlin's forces lost nearly 87,000 killed in action between January and September 2025 — killed in action, note, not total casualties including wounded and missing. For scale, the United States saw slightly under 41,000 troops killed in action in the entire Vietnam War.\n\nFor the Kremlin, those are dismal returns: an insane level of losses absorbed against a foe that can barely man its own front line. So what gives?\n\n## Drones, and the 10km Band of Death\n\nThe answer is drones. Instead of a traditional front line, Ukraine's war today features a roughly 10km-wide killzone in which drones slaughter almost anything that tries to move. These drones belong to both sides, but the very nature of the killzone makes it far more dangerous for the attacker, because seizing ground requires actually moving forward through that band of death. Right now it is Russia doing the attacking, and Russia paying the price.\n\nRussia's own deep-seated problems compound the toll. Recruits are often unfit, untrained, and unmotivated, and commanders remain all too eager to throw their men into the meatgrinder in pointless assaults. The result is a strange new reality in which huge stretches of territory are held by a handful of infantry and a great many drones. Ukrainian commanders interviewed by The Atlantic described their current goal as avoiding any situation in which their infantry ever encounter a Russian soldier at all, preferring instead to have men hold a position while drones and artillery do the killing.\n\n## A Porous Front and the Theater of Advance\n\nThe emptiness of the front has bizarre side effects. It is genuinely hard to tell who is winning in a given sector. Russia has taken to dispatching small groups of soldiers deep into the killzone with orders to do little more than stand inside a contested village and be photographed by a drone holding up a Russian flag, manufacturing the impression of an advance that is not real.\n\nThat same porousness cuts both ways. The thinness of the line makes sudden breakthroughs — like the failed one at Dobropillia — increasingly likely, though not necessarily in a way that lets the attacker exploit them. If you want a vision of the future of warfare, this is it: FPV drones patrolling the skies above an ever-expanding no-go zone while tiny clusters of infantry spend months hidden within it, rarely if ever making contact with the enemy.\n\nThis dystopian arrangement is currently allowing Ukraine to severely limit the gains of a much larger opponent. But it does not erase Kyiv's recruitment problem. As analyst Rob Lee has written, given Putin's fixation on Ukraine and Russia's capacity for enduring high costs, the war should be expected to continue well into 2026 — and improving the manpower situation in Ukrainian brigades, alongside continued foreign support, remains critical.\n\n## The Future of Drone Warfare: Battleship or Missile?\n\nThe drone-saturated front naturally invites a question about where this technology goes next. Is there any serious counter to one-way attack drones, not just at the level of swarms but against individual machines?\n\nThe honest answer is that counter-drone technology is still in relatively early stages, but directed-energy weapons can already counter individual drones one by one, and bring down swarms by acting across a wider area of effect. One example is the Leonidas system by the company Epirus, which uses high-powered microwaves to disable the electronic systems that let drones fly. Leonidas can spread its electromagnetic pulse beams over a wide area or focus them on individual incoming targets. China is developing several similar systems — the FK-4000, the Hurricane 2000, and the Hurricane 3000 — while America's THOR system and Raytheon's Phaser offer comparable capabilities. Laser-based systems such as Israel's Iron Beam, designed first to intercept rockets and artillery, can also be turned against individual drones.\n\nCrucially, all of these outperform jamming. Jamming can sever a drone's wireless link to its operator, but it cannot stop drones that maintain a direct connection through long, thin spools of fiber-optic cable.\n\n## Will Drones Become Useless? Probably Not\n\nWill counter-drone systems eventually make drones obsolete against the world's top militaries? Almost certainly not. There are two broad ways drone evolution could unfold: drones could be like battleships, or drones could be like missiles.\n\nIf drones were like battleships, they would be a technology thwarted by a counter so effective it is not even worth innovating around — much as the aircraft carrier rendered the battleship a dead end rather than something navies kept trying to save. But the missile path looks far more likely. Missiles and missile defenses have been locked in a push-and-pull for decades: missiles improve, air defenses rise to intercept them, missiles innovate around those defenses, and the defenses catch up again. That cycle is already playing out in Ukraine, where both sides have innovated and countered each other's drone technology several times over.\n\nDrones have proven incredibly versatile. Every time a counter creates a new barrier, drones find a way over, under, around, or through it. There will be moments when a top military's counter-drone systems outclass an adversary's drones, but it will only ever be a matter of time before both drones and defenses must innovate in new directions.\n\n## Myanmar: A Slow Crawl Backed by Beijing\n\nThe same logic of slow, grinding momentum is visible far from Ukraine, in Myanmar's civil war. Both in the town of Kyaukme in Shan State and elsewhere, Myanmar's military regime is gaining ground — but slowly, in the same ultra-slow crawl that characterizes Russia's eastern offensive. The regime does not appear to have the resources to force a larger breakthrough, let alone reverse the overall tide of the war.\n\nRight now the regime's offensive is mostly confined to areas near the partially surrounded city of Mandalay, where it captured a couple of important nearby towns in July, and then Kyaukme, which sits on a vital highway leading to China. Elsewhere, the regime has fought the Arakan Army in the west with limited success, though in August it recaptured Demoso, a strategic gateway toward the national capital, Naypyidaw. Throughout, the regime has kept up pressure on civilians, including a bombing on Monday, October 6, 2025, at a combined Buddhist festival and anti-regime demonstration that killed over forty people. Several large ethnic militias have launched their own small offensives or stonewalled the regime's attacks, while sieges such as the Battle of Bhamo remain in active stalemate.\n\n## The Chinese Thumb on the Scale\n\nThe detail about Kyaukme sitting on a highway to the Chinese border is the key to understanding the regime's recent run of victories: most of them have something to do with Beijing putting its finger on the scale. This echoes an earlier episode in which China struck a deal with a rebel group in the city of Lashio, effectively forcing the rebels to give up the city so that the Myanmar government and a Chinese convoy could move in.\n\nChina does not really care who wins Myanmar's war. What China cares about is that none of the warring factions interfere with Chinese interests — a major pipeline running across the nation, trade and travel routes to and from China, and the city of Mandalay itself, where a large ethnic Han Chinese population dominates the local economy. Most of the regime's recent victories have focused on consolidating the territory around Mandalay and securing a safe highway link to China. In some cases, rebel troops abandoned positions after minimal fighting, suggesting Chinese pressure rather than battlefield defeat. In nearly every case, the regime's progress has meaningfully enhanced the safety of Myanmar's ethnic Chinese population — the one thread most of the regime's 2025 victories share.\n\n## Why the West Advertises Its Arsenal\n\nA final question runs through all of this: why do Western powers, the United States especially, so loudly announce their new military hardware and capabilities? Surely telling your enemy what is in your arsenal hands them a playbook to study, copy, and improve upon. Wouldn't tension and uncertainty in an adversary's mind be a more powerful deterrent?\n\nThe answer turns on the concept of deterrence — discouraging an adversary from aggression by helping them realize they should fear the consequences. If Mexico ever contemplated conquering California but chose not to, fearing the United States would unleash its nuclear arsenal on Mexico City, that is deterrence at work. Some uncertainty genuinely helps: how dangerous are an adversary's weapons, and how willing are they to use the worst of them? But while it is useful to be vague about how a deterrent will be used, it is not useful to be vague about whether a deterrent exists at all. Potential adversaries cannot be deterred by an arsenal they do not know is worth fearing.\n\nThe global West does maintain ambiguity about exactly what its most advanced ships and aircraft can do. The goal is to leave an adversary asking how badly they might be beaten, rather than whether they could win at all — like revealing you carry a big, heavy stick without showing precisely how you would swing it. Tellingly, some NATO members are currently being very explicit about when they will and won't deploy weaponry in response to Russian provocations. But that is not deterrence; it is an attempt at appeasement, signaling that if everyone de-escalates, things can return to normal — a stance that, this analysis argues, fundamentally misreads Russia's intentions.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### How large is Ukraine's troop shortage, and what evidence supports it?\n\nLawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London, has estimated Ukraine is short of about 100,000 troops. That figure aligns with official data: files obtained by Ukrainska Pravda from the Prosecutor General's Office show over 110,000 Ukrainian troops left their posts without leave between January and July 2025, though a significant minority later returned under an amnesty.\n\n### If Ukraine mobilizes 30,000 people a month, why is it still short of soldiers?\n\nOnly roughly one third of those 30,000 each month are deemed fit to fight. On top of that, many who are mobilized are unwilling conscripts — \"bussified\" by recruitment officers rather than volunteers — and corruption has allowed those with means to buy their way out of serving, meaning the intake is both small in number and low in fighting will.\n\n### Why is Russia able to keep replacing its losses while Ukraine cannot?\n\nRussia remains wealthy enough to offer enormous sign-up bonuses; in some regions combined local and federal payments let a soldier earn 5.2 million rubles in a year, against average peripheral salaries rarely above 50,000 rubles. Russia is also more effective at returning deserters to the front. Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi himself acknowledged that Russia's forces are growing by about 9,000 troops a month while Ukraine's are shrinking.\n\n### How does a depleted Ukrainian army still hold the line against a larger force?\n\nA roughly 10km-wide killzone, patrolled by drones from both sides, slaughters almost anything that tries to move. Because seizing ground requires crossing that band of death, the attacker — currently Russia — suffers most. Ukrainian commanders now aim to have infantry hold positions while drones and artillery do the killing, ideally without infantry ever directly encountering Russian soldiers.\n\n### Will counter-drone systems eventually make drones obsolete?\n\nAlmost certainly not. Directed-energy systems like Epirus's Leonidas, China's FK-4000 and Hurricane systems, America's THOR, Raytheon's Phaser, and Israel's Iron Beam can already counter drones, but the technology is expected to follow the missile-versus-air-defense arms race — a continual cycle of innovation rather than a permanent solution, with both drones and defenses improving in response to each other.\n\n## Sources\n\n1. Kyiv Independent: https://kyivindependent.com/behind-ukraines-manpower-crisis-lies-a-bleak-new-battlefield-reality-for-infantry/\n2. Comment is Freed: https://samf.substack.com/p/the-battle-for-pokrovsk?utm_source=publication-search\n3. Tymofiy Mylovanov, X: https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1972320574883148161\n4. Tatarigami, X: https://x.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1976078407541850409\n5. Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/09/17/russia-inflates-battlefield-gains-after-a-costly-summer-offensive-a90548\n6. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/10/ukraine-russia-drone-war-attrition/684419/\n7. Rob Lee, X: https://x.com/RALee85/status/1975913770829717573\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/ukraine-manpower-crisis-recruitment-drone-war.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/ukraine-manpower-crisis-recruitment-drone-war datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/8mBqJjwywLg/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 2d3306844ca15db071e47caffaee5b315632bcde1bf7d16e1b721a44c7952dc3 tokens: 5581 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/ukraine-manpower-crisis-recruitment-drone-war.md.summary.md --- Some readers instinctively wince at any discussion of Ukraine's desertion and forced-conscription problems, suspecting a pro-Russian talking point dressed up as analysis. That reaction is understandable, but it is also a mistake. The strain on Ukraine's ranks is not Kremlin propaganda; it is one of the most consequential dynamics of the war, and anyone genuinely hoping Kyiv prevails against Vladimir Putin's war of conquest needs to understand it clearly. Ever since the failed 2023 counteroffensive, Ukraine has been beset by manpower problems. Those problems have not eased. If anything, they are now more acute than ever. Battalion commanders describe sometimes fielding fewer than ten combat-effective infantrymen across an entire battalion. Drivers they have. Drone pilots they have. But men who can physically hold a position on the front line are in desperately short supply. And yet, here is the paradox at the heart of late-2025 on the eastern front: despite this glaring weakness, Russia cannot break through. Moscow launched a massive summer campaign meant to threaten cities from Sumy to Pokrovsk, and its gains amounted to almost nothing. The explanation lies in a single transformative technology — the drone — and a battlefield that increasingly resembles the future of warfare itself. ## Key Takeaways - Ukraine is estimated to be short roughly 100,000 troops, a figure that lines up with desertion data showing over 110,000 service members left their posts without leave between January and July 2025. - Of the roughly 30,000 Ukrainians mobilized each month, only about one third are deemed fit to fight, and many of those are unwilling conscripts rather than volunteers. - Russia's manpower picture is also grim, but Moscow's wealth, enormous sign-up bonuses, and greater success at returning deserters mean its forces are growing by roughly 9,000 troops a month while Ukraine's shrink. - Russia's costly summer offensive captured no Ukrainian settlement of significance for months; its losses may include nearly 87,000 killed in action between January and September 2025. - A roughly 10km-wide drone killzone now does the work a manned front line once did, punishing whichever side tries to advance — currently Russia. ## A Crisis Measured in Six Figures The scale of Ukraine's shortfall is best captured by a single estimate. Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London, has reckoned that Ukraine is short of about 100,000 troops. That number does not float free of the evidence. It lines up neatly with desertion statistics that have begun to surface from official sources. Files obtained by Ukrainska Pravda from the Prosecutor General's Office show that over 110,000 Ukrainian troops left their posts without leave between January and July 2025. A significant minority of those later returned under an amnesty for desertions, but even accounting for that, the figures point to a problem that is unmistakably major. As Russia's full-scale war entered its fourth fall season, Ukraine's military found itself gripped by a deep manpower crisis — one most acute, by every account, in the ranks of its infantry. This is not a problem Kyiv suffers in isolation. Russian forces are also going absent without leave at alarming rates. But the imbalance matters, and it appears to be worse on the Ukrainian side. ## Why the Desertions Run Deeper on Ukraine's Side It would be easy to dismiss claims of a Ukrainian desertion crisis as Russian information warfare. The trouble is that the same point is made by sources with no interest in helping Moscow. Frontelligence Insight, a group tracking the war, reports that while Russian troops are abandoning their posts at an increasingly fast rate, desertions remain more frequent on the Ukrainian side, and Moscow is more effective at returning its troops to the front. The most striking confirmation comes from inside Ukraine's own command. In August, Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi himself noted that Russia is mobilizing so many men that its forces are actually growing by about 9,000 troops a month. Ukraine's, by contrast, are shrinking. When the man running Ukraine's armed forces concedes the enemy is expanding while his own army contracts, the dynamic ceases to be a matter of partisan spin and becomes simple arithmetic. That arithmetic raises two questions: why is this happening, and what effect is it having on the battlefield? ## On Paper, Ukraine Should Be Fine The "why" is the harder question. On paper, Ukraine should be in reasonable health. Roughly 30,000 people are mobilized each month, and this at a time when Ukraine is largely on the defensive — a posture that should generally cost fewer troops than attacking. Russia suffered 33,000 casualties in July alone. If Ukraine is generating 30,000 fresh soldiers a month against a foe bleeding at that rate, the books ought to balance. They do not. Of those 30,000, only roughly one third each month are deemed fit to fight. The rest are unsuitable for frontline combat for one reason or another, shrinking a seemingly healthy intake to a thin trickle of actual infantry. And beneath the raw totals lies a second, thornier issue: the question of who, exactly, is being mobilized in the first place. ## How Conscription Bred Resentment When the war began, there was a surge of volunteers signing up to defend their homeland. After the 2023 counteroffensive failed, that stream slowed to a trickle. In its place, Kyiv was forced to begin mobilizing people — and the process has been handled so poorly that it has bred deep resentment. Initially, only those aged 27 or older could be mobilized. The reasoning behind this unusual choice was fear of a demographic crisis. The chaos of the 1990s saw Ukraine's birthrate plunge and stay depressed for a long time. As a result, modern Ukraine has a severe shortage of young men of traditional fighting age, and politicians worried that sending a large share of them to die at the front would deepen the demographic hole for generations. After much debate and political point-scoring, the lower age limit was eventually brought down to 25. But the system became so corrupt that those with means could simply buy their way out of serving. The overall effect is that most of those who do get mobilized do not want to be there. As one frontline soldier put it, many of those arriving in 2025 are "bussified" — forcibly taken away in buses by recruitment officers — and they lack the will to fight and have no sense of purpose. ## Why Russia Keeps the Bodies Coming Before anyone treats this as proof of Russian superiority, the same maladies afflict both sides. Russian troops are known to suffer from poor morale, and many are in appalling physical condition. Even pro-war Russian milbloggers have begun raising the alarm about the staggering rate of HIV and viral hepatitis among the infantry. The difference is money. Russia remains wealthy enough to throw genuinely insane sign-up bonuses and pay packets at volunteers. In some regions, combined local and federal bonuses mean a soldier can earn 5.2 million rubles in a single year — this in a nation where average monthly salaries on the periphery rarely exceed 50,000 rubles, or about $614. That gap guarantees a steady stream of men from impoverished areas chasing pay that is quite literally life-changing, if also frequently life-ending. The system has limits. As of October 2025, reports emerged of some regions failing to hit recruitment quotas despite the enormous payouts. Even so, the scale of Russia's financial inducements still dwarfs anything Kyiv can offer. ## A Freer Society, and Its Costs Ukraine carries a further disadvantage that flows directly from being a more open society: better public access to information about what is actually happening at the front. When stories get out — as, all too often, they do — of high command forcing infantry to hold untenable positions purely to avoid political embarrassment, the effect on potential recruits is corrosive. This is one reason many experts would dearly like to see the back of Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, has argued that Ukraine was successful in the first year of the war because its army fought differently. Once President Zelensky replaced Valeriy Zaluzhnyi with Syrskyi, in this reading, it turned into a war of a small Soviet army against a big Soviet army, with predictable consequences. That is not a take every analyst shares. But many blame an ethos of "no retreat whatever the cost" on Syrskyi, and there is little doubt that such an ethos actively harms volunteer recruitment. ## The Killzone: How a Smaller Army Holds the Line What effect does all this have on the battlefield? Less than one might fear, which is the genuinely surprising part. Moscow's summer campaign, meant to menace cities from Sumy to Pokrovsk, delivered almost nothing. No Ukrainian settlement of significance has fallen to Putin's forces for months. The one major breakthrough, at Dobropillia, was ultimately pushed back. Chasiv Yar remains contested, and that is about the extent of it. In return, the cost to Russia has been catastrophic. Russian analyst Yan Matveev has estimated that at least 30,000 troops were killed and another 60,000 wounded in that effort. More broadly, leaked documents appear to indicate that the Kremlin's forces lost nearly 87,000 killed in action between January and September 2025 — killed in action, note, not total casualties including wounded and missing. For scale, the United States saw slightly under 41,000 troops killed in action in the entire Vietnam War. For the Kremlin, those are dismal returns: an insane level of losses absorbed against a foe that can barely man its own front line. So what gives? ## Drones, and the 10km Band of Death The answer is drones. Instead of a traditional front line, Ukraine's war today features a roughly 10km-wide killzone in which drones slaughter almost anything that tries to move. These drones belong to both sides, but the very nature of the killzone makes it far more dangerous for the attacker, because seizing ground requires actually moving forward through that band of death. Right now it is Russia doing the attacking, and Russia paying the price. Russia's own deep-seated problems compound the toll. Recruits are often unfit, untrained, and unmotivated, and commanders remain all too eager to throw their men into the meatgrinder in pointless assaults. The result is a strange new reality in which huge stretches of territory are held by a handful of infantry and a great many drones. Ukrainian commanders interviewed by The Atlantic described their current goal as avoiding any situation in which their infantry ever encounter a Russian soldier at all, preferring instead to have men hold a position while drones and artillery do the killing. ## A Porous Front and the Theater of Advance The emptiness of the front has bizarre side effects. It is genuinely hard to tell who is winning in a given sector. Russia has taken to dispatching small groups of soldiers deep into the killzone with orders to do little more than stand inside a contested village and be photographed by a drone holding up a Russian flag, manufacturing the impression of an advance that is not real. That same porousness cuts both ways. The thinness of the line makes sudden breakthroughs — like the failed one at Dobropillia — increasingly likely, though not necessarily in a way that lets the attacker exploit them. If you want a vision of the future of warfare, this is it: FPV drones patrolling the skies above an ever-expanding no-go zone while tiny clusters of infantry spend months hidden within it, rarely if ever making contact with the enemy. This dystopian arrangement is currently allowing Ukraine to severely limit the gains of a much larger opponent. But it does not erase Kyiv's recruitment problem. As analyst Rob Lee has written, given Putin's fixation on Ukraine and Russia's capacity for enduring high costs, the war should be expected to continue well into 2026 — and improving the manpower situation in Ukrainian brigades, alongside continued foreign support, remains critical. ## The Future of Drone Warfare: Battleship or Missile? The drone-saturated front naturally invites a question about where this technology goes next. Is there any serious counter to one-way attack drones, not just at the level of swarms but against individual machines? The honest answer is that counter-drone technology is still in relatively early stages, but directed-energy weapons can already counter individual drones one by one, and bring down swarms by acting across a wider area of effect. One example is the Leonidas system by the company Epirus, which uses high-powered microwaves to disable the electronic systems that let drones fly. Leonidas can spread its electromagnetic pulse beams over a wide area or focus them on individual incoming targets. China is developing several similar systems — the FK-4000, the Hurricane 2000, and the Hurricane 3000 — while America's THOR system and Raytheon's Phaser offer comparable capabilities. Laser-based systems such as Israel's Iron Beam, designed first to intercept rockets and artillery, can also be turned against individual drones. Crucially, all of these outperform jamming. Jamming can sever a drone's wireless link to its operator, but it cannot stop drones that maintain a direct connection through long, thin spools of fiber-optic cable. ## Will Drones Become Useless? Probably Not Will counter-drone systems eventually make drones obsolete against the world's top militaries? Almost certainly not. There are two broad ways drone evolution could unfold: drones could be like battleships, or drones could be like missiles. If drones were like battleships, they would be a technology thwarted by a counter so effective it is not even worth innovating around — much as the aircraft carrier rendered the battleship a dead end rather than something navies kept trying to save. But the missile path looks far more likely. Missiles and missile defenses have been locked in a push-and-pull for decades: missiles improve, air defenses rise to intercept them, missiles innovate around those defenses, and the defenses catch up again. That cycle is already playing out in Ukraine, where both sides have innovated and countered each other's drone technology several times over. Drones have proven incredibly versatile. Every time a counter creates a new barrier, drones find a way over, under, around, or through it. There will be moments when a top military's counter-drone systems outclass an adversary's drones, but it will only ever be a matter of time before both drones and defenses must innovate in new directions. ## Myanmar: A Slow Crawl Backed by Beijing The same logic of slow, grinding momentum is visible far from Ukraine, in Myanmar's civil war. Both in the town of Kyaukme in Shan State and elsewhere, Myanmar's military regime is gaining ground — but slowly, in the same ultra-slow crawl that characterizes Russia's eastern offensive. The regime does not appear to have the resources to force a larger breakthrough, let alone reverse the overall tide of the war. Right now the regime's offensive is mostly confined to areas near the partially surrounded city of Mandalay, where it captured a couple of important nearby towns in July, and then Kyaukme, which sits on a vital highway leading to China. Elsewhere, the regime has fought the Arakan Army in the west with limited success, though in August it recaptured Demoso, a strategic gateway toward the national capital, Naypyidaw. Throughout, the regime has kept up pressure on civilians, including a bombing on Monday, October 6, 2025, at a combined Buddhist festival and anti-regime demonstration that killed over forty people. Several large ethnic militias have launched their own small offensives or stonewalled the regime's attacks, while sieges such as the Battle of Bhamo remain in active stalemate. ## The Chinese Thumb on the Scale The detail about Kyaukme sitting on a highway to the Chinese border is the key to understanding the regime's recent run of victories: most of them have something to do with Beijing putting its finger on the scale. This echoes an earlier episode in which China struck a deal with a rebel group in the city of Lashio, effectively forcing the rebels to give up the city so that the Myanmar government and a Chinese convoy could move in. China does not really care who wins Myanmar's war. What China cares about is that none of the warring factions interfere with Chinese interests — a major pipeline running across the nation, trade and travel routes to and from China, and the city of Mandalay itself, where a large ethnic Han Chinese population dominates the local economy. Most of the regime's recent victories have focused on consolidating the territory around Mandalay and securing a safe highway link to China. In some cases, rebel troops abandoned positions after minimal fighting, suggesting Chinese pressure rather than battlefield defeat. In nearly every case, the regime's progress has meaningfully enhanced the safety of Myanmar's ethnic Chinese population — the one thread most of the regime's 2025 victories share. ## Why the West Advertises Its Arsenal A final question runs through all of this: why do Western powers, the United States especially, so loudly announce their new military hardware and capabilities? Surely telling your enemy what is in your arsenal hands them a playbook to study, copy, and improve upon. Wouldn't tension and uncertainty in an adversary's mind be a more powerful deterrent? The answer turns on the concept of deterrence — discouraging an adversary from aggression by helping them realize they should fear the consequences. If Mexico ever contemplated conquering California but chose not to, fearing the United States would unleash its nuclear arsenal on Mexico City, that is deterrence at work. Some uncertainty genuinely helps: how dangerous are an adversary's weapons, and how willing are they to use the worst of them? But while it is useful to be vague about how a deterrent will be used, it is not useful to be vague about whether a deterrent exists at all. Potential adversaries cannot be deterred by an arsenal they do not know is worth fearing. The global West does maintain ambiguity about exactly what its most advanced ships and aircraft can do. The goal is to leave an adversary asking how badly they might be beaten, rather than whether they could win at all — like revealing you carry a big, heavy stick without showing precisely how you would swing it. Tellingly, some NATO members are currently being very explicit about when they will and won't deploy weaponry in response to Russian provocations. But that is not deterrence; it is an attempt at appeasement, signaling that if everyone de-escalates, things can return to normal — a stance that, this analysis argues, fundamentally misreads Russia's intentions. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How large is Ukraine's troop shortage, and what evidence supports it? Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London, has estimated Ukraine is short of about 100,000 troops. That figure aligns with official data: files obtained by Ukrainska Pravda from the Prosecutor General's Office show over 110,000 Ukrainian troops left their posts without leave between January and July 2025, though a significant minority later returned under an amnesty. ### If Ukraine mobilizes 30,000 people a month, why is it still short of soldiers? Only roughly one third of those 30,000 each month are deemed fit to fight. On top of that, many who are mobilized are unwilling conscripts — "bussified" by recruitment officers rather than volunteers — and corruption has allowed those with means to buy their way out of serving, meaning the intake is both small in number and low in fighting will. ### Why is Russia able to keep replacing its losses while Ukraine cannot? Russia remains wealthy enough to offer enormous sign-up bonuses; in some regions combined local and federal payments let a soldier earn 5.2 million rubles in a year, against average peripheral salaries rarely above 50,000 rubles. Russia is also more effective at returning deserters to the front. Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi himself acknowledged that Russia's forces are growing by about 9,000 troops a month while Ukraine's are shrinking. ### How does a depleted Ukrainian army still hold the line against a larger force? A roughly 10km-wide killzone, patrolled by drones from both sides, slaughters almost anything that tries to move. Because seizing ground requires crossing that band of death, the attacker — currently Russia — suffers most. Ukrainian commanders now aim to have infantry hold positions while drones and artillery do the killing, ideally without infantry ever directly encountering Russian soldiers. ### Will counter-drone systems eventually make drones obsolete? Almost certainly not. Directed-energy systems like Epirus's Leonidas, China's FK-4000 and Hurricane systems, America's THOR, Raytheon's Phaser, and Israel's Iron Beam can already counter drones, but the technology is expected to follow the missile-versus-air-defense arms race — a continual cycle of innovation rather than a permanent solution, with both drones and defenses improving in response to each other. ## Sources 1. Kyiv Independent: https://kyivindependent.com/behind-ukraines-manpower-crisis-lies-a-bleak-new-battlefield-reality-for-infantry/ 2. Comment is Freed: https://samf.substack.com/p/the-battle-for-pokrovsk?utm_source=publication-search 3. Tymofiy Mylovanov, X: https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1972320574883148161 4. Tatarigami, X: https://x.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1976078407541850409 5. Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/09/17/russia-inflates-battlefield-gains-after-a-costly-summer-offensive-a90548 6. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/10/ukraine-russia-drone-war-attrition/684419/ 7. Rob Lee, X: https://x.com/RALee85/status/1975913770829717573 <!-- youtube:8mBqJjwywLg -->