Fixing Ukrainian conscription

Saturday 31 January 2026

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s instruction to Ukraine’s newly appointed Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, to ‘fix’ the system of military conscription marks one of the most politically sensitive interventions of the war to date. It is also one of the most consequential. Conscription sits at the intersection of military necessity, social justice, state capacity and public trust. By placing it at the top of the new minister’s agenda, the President has signalled that Ukraine’s struggle is entering a phase in which administrative endurance may matter as much as battlefield ingenuity.

The Ukrainian state has now been at war, in one form or another, for more than a decade. Since February 2022 however the scale and intensity of the conflict have placed unprecedented strain on the human foundations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. While technology, drones and precision weapons have transformed the character of fighting, territorial control and defence remain labour-intensive. Infantry still holds ground, rotates through trenches and absorbs attrition. No amount of innovation has eliminated the need for trained, motivated soldiers in sufficient numbers.

It is against this backdrop that Zelenskyy’s intervention must be understood. His instruction was not framed as a call for harsher mobilisation for its own sake, but as a demand that a visibly creaking system be made credible, equitable and militarily effective. The problem is not simply that Ukraine needs more soldiers. It is that the existing conscription and mobilisation apparatus has, in the eyes of many Ukrainians, lost coherence and legitimacy.

Over the past two years public frustration has grown around several interlinked issues. Reports of uneven enforcement have proliferated, with perceptions that wealth, connections or geography can determine whether a man is called up or overlooked. Territorial recruitment centres have been accused of arbitrariness, poor record-keeping and, in some cases, corruption. Families complain of inadequate communication, unclear legal status for conscripts and insufficient preparation before deployment. Veterans and serving soldiers, meanwhile, increasingly raise the question of rotation: why some fight continuously at the front while others remain untouched by service.

Zelenskyy’s political challenge is acute. Ukraine is a democracy fighting for survival, and she cannot sustain a mass war effort indefinitely without consent, or at least acquiescence, from society. Coercion alone would be corrosive. At the same time, voluntarism has limits after years of mobilisation. Fixing conscription therefore means restoring a sense that the burden of defence is shared fairly and administered competently.

What then is Fedorov likely to be tasked with doing in practice?

First, structural reform of the mobilisation bureaucracy appears unavoidable. This will almost certainly involve a consolidation and digitisation of conscription records, building on Ukraine’s wider efforts to modernise state administration during the war. A centralised, transparent system linking population registers, medical assessments and service history would reduce discretion at the local level and make evasion harder without resorting to indiscriminate sweeps. Such reforms are technically complex but politically necessary if trust is to be rebuilt.

Secondly, medical and fitness assessments are likely to be overhauled. One of the most persistent complaints has been the inconsistency of medical decisions, with some men deemed unfit while others with comparable conditions are mobilised. Standardisation, external oversight and clearer appeal mechanisms would not only improve fairness but also military efficiency. An army burdened with unfit soldiers is neither humane nor effective.

Thirdly, Zelenskyy’s instruction implicitly acknowledges the rotation crisis. Any serious attempt to fix conscription must be paired with a credible system of service duration, rest and demobilisation. Soldiers who see no end to their service are less likely to fight effectively and more likely to undermine morale through resentment. While Ukraine cannot promise short wars or fixed timelines, she can articulate clearer principles governing rotation from the front and eventual release from service.

Fourthly, training will come under scrutiny. Mobilisation that delivers under-trained soldiers to the front line merely shifts risk rather than reducing it. Fedorov is therefore likely to be instructed to align conscription more closely with training capacity, even if this temporarily slows deployment. This may require difficult trade-offs between immediate manpower needs and long-term force quality, but the alternative is attritional waste of human life.

Finally, there is a communicative dimension. Zelenskyy has repeatedly demonstrated an acute awareness that war is fought not only with weapons but with narratives. Fixing conscription will require the state to explain, in plain terms, why reforms are necessary, how decisions are made and what citizens can expect. Silence or opacity would only reinforce rumours and resistance.

None of this will be easy. Every reform risks alienating some constituency, and any tightening of enforcement will be politically painful. Moreover, Russia’s strategy of protracted pressure is designed precisely to exacerbate these internal strains. Yet Zelenskyy’s decision to confront the issue directly suggests an understanding that avoidance would be more dangerous still.

In instructing his new Defence Minister to tackle conscription head-on, Zelenskyy is acknowledging a hard truth of modern war: legitimacy is a strategic asset. Ukraine’s ability to continue defending herself depends not only on foreign aid or battlefield tactics, but on whether her citizens believe that the state asks of them only what is necessary, lawful and shared. If Fedorov can move Ukrainian conscription in that direction, he will have strengthened the country’s defences in a way no single weapons system ever could.