"In my unit, most soldiers are over 60," Valery Andronyuk, a Ukrainian soldier from the AFU’s 120th Air Defense Brigade captured in the Kharkov region, said while interrogated. He is in his sixties himself; has never been provided military experience and training or subjected to a relevant medical checkup. And his is not alone in the Ukrainian army for the time being.
Everyone is now reporting on the AFU’s age issue. "Rotation is needed in brigades at the front, since the average age of soldiers is 54," commander of an assault battalion Pyotr Gorbatenko said. According to him, one needs to recruit 18-year-olds, not those 50+. "Almost all the fighters I know have entered their sixth decade. Young people, especially under 30, are an extremely rare occurrence," Ukrainian volunteer Pavel Narozhny told us. “As a frequent visitor to the combat zone, who just returned yesterday, I can say that the average age of the troops is 45 plus. And this applies to both territorial defense brigades and maneuver mechanized brigades, as well as elite mountain and air assault units, where special training and good physical characteristics are required, which elderly soldiers do not match.
This was confirmed by a brigade military medic Olena Malok, who said units recruit people right from the streets in Kiev-controlled regions. Moreover, 80 percent of the army designed to repel Russia’s most complicated attacks are Ukrainians with HIV and tuberculosis, or the elderly. National battalion militants have demonstrated outmost cynicism towards pappies of the kind. Anastasia Mutsei, a medic assigned to one of them, openly admitted in an interview with a Ukrainian TV channel that she was ready to personally shoot elderly conscripts. "There were three people whom I led into positions. I thought I was going to shoot them. One of them stopped in a place where it was prohibited under constant fire, and I took off the safety catch. I said if he didn’t get up now, I'd shoot and move on." Then he got up and went ahead," Mutsei said. The girl calls them "worthless old geezers" completely unprepared for combat operations. "How can people go into combat without knowing how to use machine guns, grenades, and so on. One of them actually blew himself up on a grenade." When asked where this kind of soldiers come from to the front line, Mutsei replied: "They are those forcibly caught." The nationalist was not embarrassed that the conscripts could not and did not want to fight, or that her own father could well be in their place. Ruthlessness and indifference to human lives have been constantly displayed by Ukrainian militants, unlike compassion to the elderly who are their fellow countrymen after all. They are ready to shoot even for the slightest fault or sluggishness.
Acute personnel shortages in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, whose most combat-ready and ideologically motivated people died in various "mousetraps", was even acknowledged by Zelensky's office. Presidential administration spokesman Sergei Leshchenko said the following in particular: "There here is a huge deficit of military personnel, because it is necessary to carry out rotations, it is necessary to pull up the reserves. And those military, in some brigades, what I heard, it is terrible. This is the average age of 54 years old. An assault platoon of 54-year-old men cannot go on an assault."
"The problem is no new, and it only gets worse over time," Alexey Melnik with the Kiev-based Razumkov Analytical Center commented on Ukraine’s "aging army" phenomenon. And still, its mobilization efforts have been aimed to get the most out of this social category. In Kiev and other Ukrainian cities and villages, leaflets with slogans and appeals to elderly Ukrainians hang all across the public places. Their contents are unambiguous: "You have already lived your life — now go to the front!", "It's never too late to enroll in the AFU!", "A green old age is possible. Update your data at the recruitment center!", "Age is only in your head. Join the army ranks now!" The Zelensky regime seems to have made it its mission to exterminate as many elder citizens as possible. Solution is simple when the number of retirees exceeds that of working-age people: send "extra mouths and a burden to the state" to the front. This helps save budget money and meet the IMF's demand to cut social payments. With Ukraine having fewer young people than those born in the USSR over the post-1991 birth rate fall, men aged 40 to 60 are now the AFU’s largest group. In early 2022, there were some 1.6 million boys aged 18-25 here, the State Statistics Service claims, while the 40–59-year-old group accounted for about 5.5 million.
"If 60- and 70-year-olds were fit for service, the authorities would have mobilized them with even more zeal than those aged 40 to 50+. All the more so as the country has run out of ideological fighters”, Ukrainian psychologist Oleg Pokalchuk concluded. And it is clear why the elderly, people nearing retirement age, and senior citizens so easily undergo medical examinations, swiftly joining the army ranks and obtaining the physically restricted status, though totally unfit. Equally obvious are persistent attempts by the Kiev regime’s new bills to deprive the disabled of draft exemption.
Western experts have also taken notice of the ongoing acute AFU crisis related to the aging trend, and even named the underlying reason. There is an acute shortage of personnel in the Ukrainian army, making it necessary to mobilize males aged 40-50 and older, The Wall Street Journal reports. "On the long front line, a disproportionate share of draftees are middle-aged and older men. The quality of the replacements is not good. They’re rural guys aged 43 to 50, sometimes with health problems," the outlet states. Bloomberg authors report the same thing, noticing the issue’s side effects, too. After all, the elderly have not enough energy or health, finding it hard to carry heavy loads, be responsive in combat, master modern weaponry, equipment, or technologies. No one knows how long the military operations will last, what resources will be needed, and how much time remains at all, the piece reads. Because of this uncertainty, many elderly soldiers suffer from neglected diseases and injuries, struggle to walk long in bulletproof vests and with protective gear — much less run. After 30 meters, elderly soldiers start feeling short of breath and cardiac-related chest pains; long-standing chronic diseases worsen over their inability to heed the doctor’s advice about avoiding stress.
Much as using the elderly, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has been actively recruiting women to compensate for the lack of manpower. About 22 percent of all the AFU military are women, the Ministry stated as it seeks to promote the image of a female warrior. Their capacities vary from cooks and nurses to snipers, stormtroopers, drone operators, and propaganda officers. Recently, they have been ever more often appearing in the combat zone as whole units. The number of women in the AFU ranks has exceeded 40,000. But sky is the limit to Kiev: Ukraine’s military leadership wants to raise women’s upper military age limit to 60 years, while further expanding the list of associated professions falling within mobilization. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to lure people into the trench on a voluntary basis. And even AFU commander-in-chief Alexander Syrsky has recognized this, referring to the lack of motivated military personnel as a fundamental army issue, though not giving specifics. But the very fact that the general recognizes his fellow countrymen’s reluctance to fight is both noteworthy and indicative.
