Manpower shortage leaves Ukrainian city on the brink

As Russian forces advanced deeper into the battered Ukrainian stronghold of Pokrovsk this month, figures in Ukraine’s outspoken military and civil society circles pleaded with their leadership: pull back before it is too late.

“Despite the official bravado, the situation is more than complicated and less than controlled,” former deputy defence minister Vitaliy Deynega, the founder of Come Back Alive — a Ukrainian foundation supporting the military — wrote on Facebook. Ukrainian forces, Deynega said on November 4, “need to get out of these cities while it is possible”.

Deynega was among a growing number of voices suggesting the situation in the twin cities of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad in eastern Ukraine, which together housed close to 100,000 people before the invasion and served as a logistics hub for the military until last year, had reached a point of no return.

Fighters and experts said the imminent threat to Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad — which, if captured, could be used as a staging ground for deeper Russian advances — stems largely from Ukraine’s struggle to recruit enough manpower. Kyiv’s military is increasingly thinly stretched across the 1,000km-long frontline.

Artem Kariakin, a Ukrainian serviceman fighting in the area, said: “All of this might have been avoided if we had more people and hundreds, if not thousands, of ballistic missiles . . . It would probably take a huge number of people to liberate a city of this size, and I just don’t think there are any right now.”

Russian forces secured positions deep within the frontline city, and have used a relentless barrage of drone strikes over a narrowing Ukrainian access corridor to prevent Kyiv’s troops from resupplying.

With Russian troops roaming through most of Pokrovsk, the satellite town of Myrnohrad is “under threat of operational encirclement”, Ukrainian war monitoring group DeepState wrote on Saturday.

The military’s failure to prevent creeping Russian infiltration into the city has highlighted Kyiv’s manpower imbalance with Russia, which has benefited from a far larger population to draw on and has been able to replenish its frontline forces with volunteers attracted by major financial incentives, despite heavy losses.

Speaking on Ukrainian television on Sunday, top Ukrainian commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said the situation in the city was “generally under control” as the intensity of Russian assaults in the city had decreased. “Of course, there is a plan B and a plan C, for all scenarios,” he said.

Russian infantry squads slipped through Ukrainian defences in October and secure positions in the basements of high-rise buildings, despite near-constant Ukrainian drone strikes.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week said 314 Russian soldiers had made it into the city. He had put the figure at about 200 in late October.

Ukraine has long struggled to replenish its frontline brigades through conscription targeting able-bodied men aged 25 to 60. Each kilometre of the frontline is on average guarded by just four to seven Ukrainian infantrymen, Maria Berlinska, a Ukrainian volunteer with close ties to the military, claimed in October.

Kyiv has also wrestled with a rise in desertions. Nearly 20,000 cases for absence without leave and desertion were opened in October, the highest monthly figure this year, according to Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office.

How many men actually desert is unclear, as Ukrainian soldiers have routinely left units led by commanders seen as reckless in order to join a better one — with brigades competing to attract the former deserters.

But a significant number of newly mobilised soldiers flee long before reaching their units, one military official told the Financial Times.

“The result is that the land forces are not expanding but are actually declining in numbers,’’ said Konrad Muzyka, director of Rochan Consulting, a Poland-based group monitoring the conflict. ‘‘The Ukrainian force density is already so low that there are parts of the front that are essentially only guarded by drones.”

The shortage of men has forced Ukrainian commanders to make increasingly difficult choices.

Russian forces closed in on the Pokrovsk agglomeration in late summer 2024. But for months, their advances remained slow and grinding as Ukrainian drone crews pounded the small assault groups attempting to advance from one tree line to another across the exposed fields surrounding Pokrovsk.

Squads of lightly equipped Russian infantrymen began trying to advance into the city itself in July, but were ultimately repelled thanks to Ukrainian battle-hardened units known as “firefighters” who are dispatched to the hottest points on the frontline.

However, in August several of these units were sent 20km north to stem a surprise, 15km-deep Russian advance that threatened to flank a string of cities crucial to the defence of the Donetsk region.

“And then Pokrovsk did not have the advantage of these sorts of counter-infiltration groups,” said Rob Lee, a military analyst and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

At the same time, Russian advances towards Pokrovsk allowed Moscow to deploy elite drone units that targeted vehicles going in and out, exhausting the few Ukrainian forces that remained.

Special forces from Ukraine’s land army, security service and military intelligence were dispatched again to Pokrovsk in late October.

But a Ukrainian officer deployed near Pokrovsk told the FT these units had probably been deployed too late to meaningfully change the situation.

Ukraine has been reluctant to address the manpower issue by conscripting more men. It has looked instead to increase volunteers and rely more on elite drone units.

Still, Kyiv this year launched a one-year contract with financial incentives to attract men aged 18 to 24 who are exempt from conscription, and extended amnesty measures for deserters who rejoin.

Zelenskyy also said the forces would offer new short-term military contracts to all soldiers, ranging from one to five years — a long-standing demand from soldiers whose mobilisation period is indefinite — and who have, in some cases, been fighting since 2022.

But the measures have either failed to deliver the expected results or have not started. Defence minister Denys Shmyhal said the new contracts would be available at the start of next year.

There are also fears that Kyiv’s insistence on trying to hold on to Pokrovsk, despite the deteriorating situation, would end in the fate of previous Ukrainian strongholds lost to Russia: with a chaotic, bloody retreat under fire.

“I have this concern that, if not managed correctly, the battle for Pokrovsk may have an impact on the perception of the armed forces,” said Rochan Consulting’s Muzyka.

“If people see [that] we’re seeing Bakhmut all over again, or Avdiivka, or Vuhledar, people will have no incentive to join, out of fear of ending up in the same situation.”