As Russia presses its offensive, Ukraine faces a crisis that experts say is as critical as its shortages of ammunition and weapons: a dwindling supply of infantry.
“Drivers, artillerymen, and cooks” are holding the line, says Bohdan Krotevich, an officer formerly with the Azov Brigade's headquarters. “A maximum of 12 fighters hold sections 5-10 kilometers wide.”
The lack of manpower is allowing Russia to employ what Ukraine’s commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskiy, recently called “total infiltration” tactics. Small infantry groups make it through Ukrainian lines -- including into Pokrovsk, the key city in the Donetsk region that is likely the main target of Russia’s current offensive.
One of the brigades responsible for defending the area had “run out of infantry,” according to Ukrainian conflict-monitoring group DeepState, allowing the Russians through. A video from July, geolocated to a gas station in the southern part of the city, shows a Ukrainian transport coming under fire from one of the infiltration groups, and other units had to be sent in to attempt to clear the area.
The Manpower Gap Flips In Russia’s Favor
Early in the war, the balance was radically different. In the lead-up to the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia’s army had about 1 million troops, with some 150,000 - 190,000 concentrated along Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus.
At the time, Ukraine’s military had some 260,000 in active service, but the country mobilized up to 700,000 men by mid-summer, handing it a manpower advantage over the invading Russian forces, who had by then been expelled from the Kyiv region. Russia was forced to conduct a “partial mobilization” of about 300,000 reservists to stabilize the front line after yielding thousands of square kilometers of territory in eastern Ukraine.
In 2023, Russian recruitment picked up, introducing thousands of prison inmates to the army as well as mercenary groups like the infamous Wagner private military company and offering significant sign-up bonuses to volunteers. Ukraine, on the other hand, was struggling to find new recruits to replace losses. As analysts from the investigative group, the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) observed, this was the year that momentum shifted in Moscow’s favor, as Russia’s recruitment drive neutralized Ukraine’s manpower advantage while Kyiv faced mounting difficulties replenishing its ranks.
In 2025, according to The Military Balance, an annual assessment of military capabilities worldwide, Russia’s numbers of active-duty personnel reached over 1.13 million -- with Syrskiy claiming that some 640,000 of them were on Ukrainian territory, a figure echoed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. While Ukraine's total troop strength is officially over 1 million, the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) says not more than 300,000 of them are deployed on the front lines.
Russia Recruiting More Than Ukraine
According to the OSW, Ukraine needs to recruit some 300,000 soldiers to replenish its brigades, some of which are only at 30 percent strength. Last year, it managed 200,000, a number that “proved insufficient to maintain unit strength at an adequate level” given “the scale of desertions and personnel losses,” the OSW report says. Currently, Ukraine is estimated to recruit 17,000 to 24,000 people per month, or between 204,000 and 288,000 per year.
While it has had to increase its sign-up bonuses, Russian recruitment is estimated to have increased to a rate of about 30,000 per month –- an advantage of roughly 70-150,000 per year.
Thousands AWOL
Beyond the gap in recruitment figures, Ukraine’s army has a desertion problem, with tens of thousands of instances of soldiers going Absent Without Leave (AWOL) recorded per year. According to popular Ukrainian war correspondent Yuri Butusov, the Anne of Kyiv brigade, trained in France, had up to 1,700 soldiers go AWOL between March and November 2024 -- a staggering figure, given that Ukraine’s average brigade strength is between 4,000 and 5,000.
The founder of the Frontelligence Insight group says cases of forced mobilization, where Ukrainian men are taken off the street to a recruitment center, contributes to the desertion problem, with mobilized recruits often less motivated than those who volunteer. A Ukrainian commander told CNN that “the majority” of these recruits leave their positions. “They go to the positions once and if they survive, they never return. They either leave their positions, refuse to go into battle, or try to find a way to leave the army.”
Can Ukraine Close The Gap?
Ukraine has adopted several policies to address the recruitment and desertion issues. Soldiers who went AWOL have been allowed to avoid prosecution by voluntarily returning to their units. Tens of thousands have done so -- although the numbers of those deserting are still higher.
Despite pressure from both the Trump and Biden administrations, Ukraine has so far resisted lowering its draft age to 18 -- a move that would be deeply unpopular with the public. Ukrainian men aged 25 and above can be drafted after the age was lowered from 27 in April 2024. However, the military has begun offering monthly salaries of 120,000 hryvna (about $2,900) and other financial incentives to incentivize those aged between 18 and 24 to volunteer.
Presidential military adviser Pavlo Palysa said in April that the new program had drawn just 500 recruits in the first weeks since it was launched, and it’s unclear whether the figures have picked up since then.
While US President Donald Trump has recently threatened increased pressure on Moscow if a cease-fire deal is not agreed to soon, analysts haven’t seen a shift in the Kremlin’s policy yet. “I do not observe any substantive change in Russian tactics toward Trump or Ukraine,” Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said on X.
With no indication that Putin is willing to back down or accept a cease-fire along current lines -- his forces have so far failed to take much of the four Ukrainian regions Russia officially claimed to have annexed in 2022 -- Ukraine will need to deal with its manpower shortage to hold the line.
