On April 16, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law approved earlier by the national legislature aiming to intensify military conscription in the country. According to the new law, all Ukrainian men of military age who are not yet registered for military service must present themselves to a military enlistment center within 60 days, with or without formal notification to appear. And if they are already registered for military service, they must update their information within 60 days. The law comes fully into force in July 2024.

The law considers notice of registration as being duly served by virtue of the law's adoption. Those who do not show up within 60 days are subject to arrest. Even Ukrainian men abroad are subject to the law. 

Men between the ages of 18 and 60 are required to register for military service and must carry proof of registration with them at all times. They must present proof to police or conscription officers when demanded. Only those who are registered can apply for a passport. Effectively, a Ukrainian passport now comes in the form of proof of military registration.

Earlier in April, a new law lowered the age of obligatory military service from 27 to 25. All female Ukrainian citizens with a military or medical specialty are also required to register.

A war to the last Ukrainian

According to the lawmakers and the military, the amended conscription law will force out of the shadows those who have been avoiding military registration by hiding or living at a different address than the one registered with the military. Police and conscription officers are empowered to detain anyone lacking proof of military registration. 

"The 60-day rule [for self-reporting to the military recruitment office] and other clauses of the adopted draft law are making hundreds of thousands or even millions of Ukrainians into lawbreakers. In fact, it places them outside Ukraine's legal framework entirely," the Ukrainian daily Strana wrote on April 11. The widely-read, online news outlet writes that intensified conscription will mean a huge increase in corruption among police officers, border guards, and the military, implying bribery of those officials in order to avoid service.

Strana continued, "The new law aims to boost military conscription, but its success is doubtful. A key problem is the reluctance of a very large part of society to go to war (which we [Strana] explained in our report last October." Strana says that unwilling recruits are unlikely to be persuaded to change their minds by the fines provided in the amended law. 

Reuters news agency explained in an April 23 dispatch, "The initial patriotic flood of volunteers who flocked to the army following the invasion of February 2022 has dried up. The government has acknowledged its conscription drive has run into difficulties, with thousands of people evading the draft and some fleeing abroad rather than risk the trenches."

In reality, a huge and expanded repressive apparatus, working like clockwork, will be needed to fully implement the new law.

One of the most scandalous features of the new law is its exclusion of a proposed provision for the demobilization of active-duty personnel once they have served 36 months of service. This is a demand of military personnel and their relatives, pleading that people who have already been living in the trenches for two years or more are tired and worn out. But a majority of deputies in the Ukrainian legislature ('Verkhovna Rada') insist there must be no demobilization until the end of hostilities. Yevgeniya Kravchuk, a deputy from the ruling Servant of the People party, has warned that automatic demobilization after three years of service could cause a reduction in Western aid.

Strana reports on April 12 that according to a poll in February 2024 by Kyiv-based research agency 'Info Sapiens' for media outlet Texty.org, only 35 percent of the 400 men surveyed said they were prepared to serve if called up.

Ukrainian experts say that the adoption of the new law is a signal to the West that Kiev is ready to continue its war against Russia. Without the law, new loans and military supplies from the West would be harder for the government to obtain. The passage of the law was timed to coincide with the vote in April in the U.S. Congress for more military assistance to Ukraine (and more military assistance to Israel and Taiwan).

However the new law is being very negatively received by Ukrainian society. Media is focused on the negative responses, explaining that a great many civilians fear dying at the front, while those already conscripted see no possibility of demobilization, not even in the long term. Essentially, a Ukrainian soldier has only three paths out of military service short of three years: death, serious injury and disability, or being taken prisoner by the Russian armed forces.

Ukrainian MPs say they plan to further strengthen punishment for evading conscription. They are now discussing increasing fines, blocking of bank accounts, seizure of property, and a number of other measures "up to the harshest ones", says a member of the legislature cited in Strana. Ukrainian courts are already issuing summons nearly every day for those evading conscription. Thousands have already been sentenced to prison terms. 

But the courts cannot cope with the number of such cases because there are tens of thousands in every region of the country. According to UA-Reporter, Ukrainian lawyer Yuriy Demchenko has made an inquiry to the Justice Ministry revealing there are currently about 34,000 vacant spots in Ukrainian prisons for those already convicted of evasion of military service. According to him, it is simply impossible for the authorities to put all evaders and deserters in jail. For example, in Ivano-Frankivsk region in western Ukraine alone, according to official information, there are 40,000 men wanted for evading service.

Border guards in the Transcarpathia region in southwest Ukraine, meanwhile, are reportedly building miles of new, barbed-wire fencing along the country's border there, making the region appear as a concentration camp because minefields laid by Russian armed forces already block some routes to the north and east. Authorities say they are building the fencing to 'save lives', that is, to prevent people from undertaking the often highly risky gambit of crossing mountain rivers in order to escape the country.

The most popular Google query in Ukraine these days is 'How to swim across the Tisa'. The Tisa (Tisza) River originates in the eastern part of Transcarpathia, eventually flowing into the Black Sea, roughly tracing Ukraine's borders with Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia along the way. In some places, the river is the border. Several dozen Ukrainians are reported to have died trying to make the dangerous crossing of the Tisa, particularly during the winter months. 

The New York Times reported on April 13, "The roiling waters [of the Tisa] can be treacherous; the banks are steep and slick with mud; and the riverbed is covered in jagged, hidden boulders. Yet Ukrainian border guards often find their quarry — men seeking to escape the military draft — swimming in these hazardous conditions, trying to cross the Tisa River where it forms the border with Romania."

Conscription evaders as new national heroes in Ukraine 

In the Ukrainian language, the word 'mobilization' (that is, 'military conscription') sounds similar to the word 'mogilization' which means placing a body into a grave. So in common speech, people are replacing the first word with the second, equating the 'mobilization' efforts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with probable death.

At the end of April, a 52-year-old Ukrainian man named Borys Laboyk managed to escape to Hungary and became a social media hero in doing so. At a border checkpoint, he was asked for his papers but he took off running to the nearby Hungarian border. The Ukrainian border guards caught up with him and tackled him to the ground, but the man was apparently in very good physical shape because he managed to break free and then outrun the border guards for good. Hungarian border guards allowed him to cross and make a declaration of asylum. They turned back the Ukrainian border guards; the latter are prohibited by Hungary from crossing the border in pursuit of anyone fleeing Ukraine. 

The military draft in Ukraine has long ago turned into a game of run and catch. The Ukrainian telegram channel 'Rubicon' recalls the comedy 'Welcome to Zombieland', where 33 rules of survival in the world of zombies are described. "In modern Ukraine, these rules are certainly much more useful for personal safety than, for example, the Constitution. The first rule in Zombieland is: 'Be in shape.' Most often, when meeting with zombies, you will have to run a lot. If you are overweight or do not have good physical fitness, be prepared to die at the hands of a living corpse." Rubicon reminds the reader that the simple ability to run fast may save a conscription evader from capture, with a 90 percent probability of success.

Songs glorifying draft dodgers are becoming popular among Ukrainian youth. "The borders were closed, laws were passed, and I became a draft dodger. A dodger is a good guy, a young guy 25 years old," goes one of the popular songs.

T-shirts with the inscription 'evader' are now popular on the Internet. A report on Telegram writes, "Due to the draconian law on military mobilization, Ukraine has some ten million citizens living abroad and who are ready to renounce their citizenship due to their colossal distrust of authorities. 

Political scientist Andrey Zolotarev states further that in his opinion, the popularity on social networks of flash mobs about 'evaders' and the queues for renewals of passports at Ukrainian consulates in European countries are obvious evidence of the unpopularity of the war taking place. Also to blame for the unpopularity is the behavior of those members of the legislature and those government officials who have hidden their relatives abroad while at the same time sending ordinary citizens or their children to their deaths in a highly unpopular war.

Another reason for the popularity of draft evasion is, strangely enough, the sexual overtones involved. When hundreds of thousands of men in the country have died, become disabled, or are suffering from mental disorders brought on by trauma, women are preferring the young, healthy men still remaining who can avoid death or crippling injury, and who can support them through life, according to readings of social media. Attention to such details by women is yet another reason why young men are avoiding military service in every possible way and undertaking personal training in running or swimming, in place of weapons training on a firing range.

The new, unofficial heroes of Ukraine are the men who manage to escape from the country or otherwise escape from the clutches of military recruiters or from the training officers assigned to 'make soldiers out of them'. For so may younger Ukrainians, the new, 'model' man is young, with long legs and in great physical shape, able to fight off or run away from an overweight or slow-moving military man tasked with dragging them into military service. 

Young people are deliberately practicing swimming, and stories of such are gaining popularity on the Internet. The training is just in case, one day, they need to escape the country by crossing a border river. They practice for months to run fast and swim well. Escaping from already conscripted soldiers has become a survival quest, a sign of good health and courage. Growing numbers of young people believe that if you are in a Ukrainian military uniform, it means you couldn't run fast enough or you couldn't fight off the military recruiters using your fists, and you have no money to bribe your way out. You are tagged as a 'loser' destined to die in a trench from artillery fire.

Degradation of agriculture

These trends of rising evasion of military service are more characteristic of the young men in the urban middle classes. In the Ukrainian countryside, most men have already been drafted, and many have already died. After the deindustrialization of the 1990s and 2000s and the later secession of the industrial region of Donbass, the foundation of the Ukrainian economy has slipped back to agricultural production and exports. 

Following the pro-American Maidan coup in Kiev in February 2014, then-U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt declared that Ukraine's future "should be that of an agricultural superpower". However, the economic trends of recent years in Ukraine actually show the opposite-decline in crop yields and overall agricultural production and a transition back to more primitive forms of production.

In April 2024, Ukraine is once again in the midst of its sowing season. But this year, once again, the area sown with grain and other crops is reduced. The harvest is expected to drop by ten percent, according to the forecasts of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy. Last year, it dropped by 13%. The Ukrainian website Novyny reports that according to estimates of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), sown areas of wheat, corn, and barley for the 2023/2024 growing season will be reduced by 32%, 27%, and 37%, respectively, for the three crops, compared to the 2021/22 season. There are several reasons for this.

Dmytro Solomchuk, a member of the parliamentary committee for agrarian policy, says that farmers are abandoning intensive cultivation technologies. "Agricultural producers are buying less fuel, chemicals, and fertilizers because this is unprofitable in today's conditions. Many are switching to traditional methods by which, predictably, there will be lower yields but production costs are also lower. The yields per hectare will be lower for all crops," he says, admitting that depending on the weather, the yields using older, traditional, growing methods will decrease by 30%.

As well, shortages of fertilizers are obliging Ukrainian farmers not to grow many crops. Most crops require nitrogen fertilizers, which are mainly produced by synthesizing natural gas. The gas used to be purchased cheaply from Russia, but no longer. Ukraine has voluntarily cut all its economic ties with Russia.

Denys Marchuk, deputy head of the Ukrainian Agrarian Council, also speaks about the acute shortage of personnel due to military conscription, saying, "The lack of human resources is one of the main problems of this year's sowing campaign."

A report in TSN.ua cites Deputy Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine Taras Vysotskyy saying that the minimum number of workers needed in the agricultural industry is 500,000. He stresses that there is a particular shortage of mechanics and tractor drivers. Their required training and skill levels are much higher than in the past. What's more, such workers are prioritized for recruitment to the Armed Forces of Ukraine because they make better drivers or repair technicians of tanks and armored personnel carriers.

Some enterprises try to attract male students and young women to work on agricultural machinery, but most, if not all, have neither the experience nor the training for this. Expensive, modern imported machinery quickly breaks down when operated by lesser-trained operators, and trained workers to make necessary repairs are also in short supply. Many qualified training instructors have been conscripted into the army. 

Ukraine also has little or no machine-building capacity remaining because Soviet-era industrial enterprises were sold and plundered many years ago. Before 2022, the main supplier of less expensive machinery was Belarus, which did not follow Ukraine's example of selling or scrapping its industrial, machine-building capacities.  

Ukrainian farmers do not have the funds to purchase expensive, imported machinery from Western countries. The Ukrainian Institute of Agrarian Economics recently noted that there is a sharp decline in imports of agricultural machinery. The import shortages are especially critical for tractors, combine harvesters, and sowing equipment. As a consequence, many agricultural enterprises and individual farmers refuse to buy or use expensive imported machinery, turning instead to traditional (often manual) methods of work, leading, in turn, to lower yields and massive degradation of the very foundations of the Ukrainian economy.

With shortages of qualified specialists and workers in all fields, including in machine building and repair, and with shortfalls in the production of fertilizers, Ukraine is slowly reverting to the type of agriculture that existed here in the 19th century, before the Soviet industrialization and collectivization of the 1920s and 1930s.