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March 20, 2025

Ukraine’s Not-So-Whole-of-Society at War: Force Generation in Modern Developed Societies

Ilmari Käihkö and Jan Willem Honig
©2025 Ilmari Käihkö

ABSTRACT: This article argues that Ukraine offers a cautionary tale regarding the two main modern models of force generation. Neither the professional high-tech war model, favored by Western militaries, nor the whole-of-society war approach, said to have saved Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, proved successful formulas for Ukraine. Considering that Ukraine is fighting for survival, with Russian forces inside the country, the failure of both models in action has serious implications for NATO member states as they deliberate on their choices regarding future force generation.

Keywords: strategy, sociology of war, militias, contemporary war, Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, volunteers not serving in the military rushed to halt the invaders. Ukrainian society was soon praised for saving Ukraine for the second time. The first time volunteers were lauded for playing a decisive role in war was in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan protest movement when Ukrainians fought Russian-supported separatists to a halt in the Donbas region. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s military, quipped in 2022 that “military theory does not account for regular dudes with track pants and hunting rifles.”1

Historically, there have been two main models of national force generation: a professional, regular force that relies on quality through training and technology and a conscription-based force that emphasizes quantity obtained from a whole-of-society willingness to mobilize. To date, the Ukrainian experiences have been interpreted as the validation of the second model. Ukraine seemed to exemplify a “rush to the colors,” revolutionary levée en masse mobilization, recalling the elementary fervor expressed by the French people when “la Patrie” found itself in mortal danger from foreign invasion after the French Revolution. What Clausewitz wrote about those wars also appeared to apply to Ukraine in 2014 and 2022: war appeared, once again, to have become a matter of the people.

Yet, even if many would like Ukraine to constitute a successful popular mobilization and resistance case, it does not. In 2014–15, the Ukrainian combination of regulars and volunteers stopped the Russians but could not evict them from the country. Even after 2022, it was not the whole of society that resisted but only parts of it. This article argues that Ukraine offers a cautionary tale for the professional high-tech war and the whole-of-society war approach. Both models are problematic and raise fundamental issues about force generation and sustainability for NATO and its member states, which are ruminating on the relative benefits of the models.

The natural outcome of the failure of the two models in Ukraine has been a problematic hybrid model of force generation. The first section, which focuses on Ukrainian military reforms from 2014–22, discusses its evolution. The persistence of the hybrid model has contributed to a protracted war of attrition that is unlikely to allow any quick military decision. Considering that Ukraine’s survival is at stake, one of the main questions arising from the largest war in Europe since 1945 is that if Ukraine cannot make the war a whole-of-society affair with the Russians fighting inside the country, can or should NATO countries take for granted that they can do so with the Russians still outside their borders?

One major challenge—the subject of the second section—is long-standing tensions in the relationship between political elites, society, and the armed forces. Traditionally, elites and military professionals have harbored suspicions regarding mobilizing society for war that have centered on a fear of escalation—that the participation of the people in war would inescapably lead to violence spiraling out of control. Simultaneously, they regard the people to be of insufficient quality to constitute a strategically effective instrument. Civilian citizens cannot be made to do what must be done in war efficiently and precisely. Consequently, a professional, regular force has usually been deemed a superior alternative. Finally, the people may also harbor suspicions about the motives and competence of political and military elites and about the usefulness of war. Ultimately, they might not be ready to put their lives at risk for their state.2

The obvious alternative is to rely solely on selected parts of society. This choice, however, comes with another major challenge: the elements willing to fight may represent, in ideological terms, the more politically extreme parts of society. Selective force generation, too, has implications for strategy and control, as the third section discusses.

These two challenges are examined through Ukrainian examples. While one could argue that what transpired in Ukraine is an isolated problem peculiar to the corrupt, divided, and impoverished society of Ukraine, this interpretation would be mistaken. Many specifics of the Ukrainian case are unique, but the fundamental challenges are more general. They are directly applicable to NATO countries, which almost all went wholesale for the regular force generation model in the past 30 years and are now considering the reintroduction of conscription and even touting whole-of-society–based resilience models. The concluding section discusses the implications for NATO forces.

Ukrainian Military Reforms That Targeted Society Prior to 2022

If Ukrainian society played a central role in saving the country in 2014–15, a first puzzling feature is that the Ukrainian state and its armed forces did not develop and harness its potential further from 2014 to 2022. Due to various pressures, Ukrainian policy flip-flopped and struggled to find a balance in the various lines pursued.3

First, it is important to remember that in 2014 Ukraine possessed what the Ukrainian Chief of the General Staff Viktor Muzhenko that year described as “a literally ruined army, [with] Russian generals at the head of the Armed Forces and security agencies, [and with] total demoralization.” The enormity of the task of reform was one reason for the sluggish and haphazard progress made until February 2022. A second reason was economic difficulties. Between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine lost more than half of its comparatively meager GDP, which raised defense expenditures from 1 percent to 2.5 percent of GDP with little effect in real terms. A third factor was the low-intensity war in Donbas that festered from 2015 to the 2022 invasion. It required the maintenance of a sizeable standing force, which provided a continuous distraction from pursuing military reforms.4

At the same time, the Ukrainian government, military, and society had a difficult relationship with conscription. Following its independence in 1991, Ukraine retained the Soviet conscription model, though its duration was halved from two years to one. It was unpopular. Conscription was commonly compared to slavery. Training and treatment of conscripts were poor, and the system was, in practice, selectively applied and, thus, considered unfair. In 2013, it was abolished. However, the year after, with the Crimea and Donbas crises, it was re-introduced. It was again selective but meant that in 2022 a pool of trained reserve manpower existed, though much smaller than the 900,000 soldiers often mentioned.5

There was a further major pressure: foreign influence. Since the early 2000s, a main driver behind Ukrainian military reforms was Ukraine’s desire to join NATO. From that desire flowed an intent to adopt NATO practices and structures. Adopting Western standards of military professionalism strengthened after 2014 when NATO armies began training and equipping the Ukrainians in a manner familiar to them. Since these military bureaucracies were biased in favor of regular professional military practices and Western styles of operations, the trainers were not sympathetic to utilizing conscripts or irregulars.6

The Ukrainian government also actively reinforced the move toward a NATO-type regular professional force. It believed that such a force would be more politically reliable than the one it possessed. In 2015, the presidential administration invited RAND to assess the Ukrainian defense sector. Western and Ukrainian government biases found a common voice in the report. The RAND experts emphasized quality over quantity and implanted their (and their funders’) ideas of military professionalism in training and doctrine. Their report opined that “for both the current conflict and most likely contingencies, Ukraine would find an all-volunteer professional force to be more effective.” Universal conscription was deemed too expensive for Ukraine and judged to remain unfair and societally contentious because those with means or political connections could avoid service.7

Economic realities, foreign and domestic military preferences, and the general unpopularity of conscription affected perceptions of the practicality of universal conscription among the political elites. Ultimately, the military and political elites opted for building a professional force as a declared intent but, in practice, continued with a mixed model of regulars reinforced with selective conscription. As late as February 1, 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told parliament his plans to professionalize the military, which included 100,000 new personnel to be contracted over the coming three years. By January 2024, instead of conscription, youngsters could opt for a three-to-four-month period of “intensive training.” Ukraine seemed to be moving toward marrying a core professional army with an organized volunteer element.8

When Russia invaded in 2022, the active Ukrainian forces reportedly consisted of just under 200,000 personnel. The 200,000 figure, perhaps affordable and societally acceptable, appeared woefully insufficient against a large-scale invasion. What saved the nation was not the official system of force generation or the conscript reserves but the 100,000 volunteers who, in the first 10 days after the invasion, unplanned and unexpected, rushed to support the outnumbered professionals.9

Mobilizing Whole Societies for War

Historically, views of the roles of the people fighting in war have been ambivalent, with conservative and revolutionary military thinkers valuing their power differently. Conservatives—a camp to which most military professionals belong—regard the people with suspicion. Fearing loss of control, they sought to curb the people’s direct participation in matters of war. Wars were best left to technocratic military professionals. Revolutionaries, in turn, saw the power of the people as a means that could transform war and, through war, politics. Once in power, politicians of all stripes have become suspicious because they fear that mobilizing and arming the people can endanger all regime types. Generally, popular mobilization is regularized through conscription systems, which, by demanding long training periods, attempt to integrate volunteers into the tight, disciplinary embrace of the regular armed forces.10

In Ukraine, the Maidan protest movement and the war that followed forcefully re-introduced the people into thinking about war. Yet, Ukrainian political and military elites felt society overstepped the mark—first politically by challenging and then toppling the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime, and then, militarily by escalating the war in Donbas.

The political and military elites soon put the people back into their proper place. Most so-called “volunteer battalions” were disbanded or integrated into official military structures by June 2015. Since the disbanding and integration of volunteers was not followed by substantial reforms, the continued Soviet practices in the military disillusioned many volunteers with Ukrainian politics and state bureaucracy.11

The state simultaneously struggled with mobilization. Despite the early wave of volunteers, numbers soon dwindled, and society’s suspicion toward its political and military leaders began to manifest as draft dodging and anti-conscription protests became widespread. Ukraine aggressively deployed soldiers to pursue draft dodgers in public. The situation worsened until the sixth wave in August 2015 called up half of the planned conscripts. President Petro Poroshenko later admitted that one-third of the conscripts deployed to Donbas in the first wave had deserted.12

The mobilization of volunteers in 2014 has been described as a “premodern” and “neo-medieval” way to generate force: the volunteer battalions consisted of ideologically motivated fighters paid by local notables to fight on behalf of the state. The volunteers, nonetheless, bought time for the state to conduct a partial mobilization. While this plan helped the military stave off further advances by the Russian-supported separatists, it also laid bare the deficiencies of Ukraine’s mobilization system—it did not offer a reliable solution for long-term force generation.13

The regular military considered the volunteers poorly trained, difficult-to-control radicals. Leaders expected any short-term benefits they might bring to be less than the long-term damage they would cause. The volunteers, in turn, were suspicious of the military professionals’ politics and deemed the military commanders poorly motivated careerists out of touch with reality. The perception of unreliability is clear from the way Ukrainian defense officials pinned the responsibility for the critical Ukrainian defeat in Ilovaisk in September 2014 on the volunteers, whose independence they claimed had hampered efforts to coordinate with the regular military. The defeat forced the Ukrainian government to accept the Minsk ceasefire agreement.14

After the Russian invasion in 2022, the Zelensky government sought popular mobilization by opening weapons depots to citizens. On orders from the president, anyone presenting a Ukrainian passport would be handed an assault rifle. Leaders brushed aside potential risks with the argument that in case of defeat, the Russians would seize the arms anyway. The hope was that arming “patriots” would inflame popular resistance and deter collaboration with the enemy.15

However, government doubts about the reliability of the population surfaced when it sought to bar most men between 18 and 60 years old from leaving the country. The fear was justified. According to European Union figures, by the end 2023, some 768,000 Ukrainian male citizens between 18 to 64 years old had been granted temporary protection status in the EU. As the threat of a Russian capture of Kyiv receded, Ukrainian authorities collected the weapons they had distributed to re-assert control and reduce friendly fire incidents by inexperienced and panicked citizens.16

Manpower demands did not abate, however. Not only did much of the professional army perish on the front lines, but with their loss, the training establishment also largely vanished. The armed forces felt forced to mobilize the teaching staff of the military academies with the officer cadets to generate additional infantry battalions. Ukraine paused conscription. Even if Ukraine had mobilized substantial manpower, it would have faced a major challenge in training them.17

As a result of the reduction in training standards and then the decreasing morale as mobilization began to rely increasingly on coercion rather than ideology, a simplification or primitivization of war emerged. The Ukrainians struggled to coordinate formations larger than company level, and these units were forced to employ not very artful and bloody attritional tactics. In a perverse way, the Ukrainians were fortunate to find the same dynamic also applied to the Russian side: Their regular forces suffered high casualties, too, concomitantly, training capacity deteriorated, and the Putin regime’s distrust of its population restricted mobilization, with stagnated numbers on the front line and reduced operational quality and coordination.

In interviews, Ukrainians who first fought as volunteers in 2014–15, and who immediately remobilized to fight the Russians in February 2022, admitted they were pleased about Russian atrocities and missile attacks against Ukrainian civilians because they assumed their fellow Ukrainians would now be forced to take an active role in the war. This did not happen.18

By 2023, the same volunteers began to talk about the emergence of a “weird” social contract characterized by a live-and-let-live attitude on the home front. Ukrainian politicians did not demand sacrifices from society, and society, in return, demanded little from its leaders. This ambiguous situation left the military, especially the volunteers who had mobilized early on, with the short end of the stick. Without an influx of recruits, troops could not demobilize (or rotate from the front to rest at regular intervals). Recruits increasingly felt they had been handed a one-way ticket to the front.

Civil society, however, gave conflicting signals. Between 2022 and the end of 2024, more Ukrainians opposed peace negotiations than favored them. A Ukrainian poll conducted in June 2024 claimed that six out of 10 of those questioned thought a general mobilization was necessary to prevent defeat in war. Yet, according to the same poll, fewer than one-third felt it was shameful to avoid mobilization orders. One explanation was that half of the respondents did not trust the military’s ability to provide sufficient training and equipment. Paradoxically, other polls continued to show sky-high trust in the military. In January 2024, no fewer than 95 percent trusted the armed forces—the highest of all institutions—followed by volunteer units at 85 percent. By comparison, three-quarters distrusted state officials. Ukrainian society seemed to display a peculiar form of dissociative disorder. While being convinced that the military could do its job and required national mobilization, many people simultaneously believed that the war did not need to involve them. Even a war generally deemed existential remained, in practical terms, a matter for only a part of Ukraine’s people.19

Meanwhile, desertion from the front lines increased. As one volunteer explained, many in the armed forces felt the politicians and society sought to wash their hands of the war and delegate the responsibility for winning it to the military. In September 2024, the public desertion of Serhii Hnezdilov brought the dire plight of the exhausted military to light. Hnezdilov volunteered for the military in March 2019 on a three-year contract. Because of martial law, however, he had become stuck in the army for the duration of hostilities. Hnezdilov’s public protest reflected the deep discouragement felt by many volunteers because of lukewarm societal support and continued corruption and incompetence among officials involved in the war effort. They sympathized with Hnezdilov and noted that other erstwhile highly-motivated volunteers had also abandoned the front lines.20

Overall, the war was not going well for Ukraine. After the failure of the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, Russia regained the initiative. Ukraine increasingly struggled to find frontline infantry. Then–Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valerii Zaluzhnyi was fired in February 2024 after speaking about the challenging situation and demanding the mobilization of 500,000 new recruits. Later in the year, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office reported that between January and September 2024, some 51,000 soldiers left their units without permission—more than twice the number from the entirety of 2023. The nomination of a new commander of Ukraine’s ground forces and his promised “massive transformation” of training, management, and recruitment in December 2024 was welcomed, but came too late.21

The Ukrainian experience illustrates how difficult it is for a democratic state fighting for its survival to introduce a system of conscription that bears fairly on society and is supported. In Ukraine, whole-of-society mobilization was an aspiration in peacetime and in wartime, but, consistently deemed impossible to implement. The alternative of relying on regulars and advanced technology similarly failed. A well-trained professional force equipped with advanced weapons was too expensive and inadequate for anything but a short war. Resilience could only be gained from greater societal involvement. Yet instead of whole-of-society participation, Ukraine came to rely critically on a form of highly politicized volunteerism not reflective of society as a whole.

Mobilizing Parts of Societies for War

If mobilizing whole societies for war is difficult and professional forces alone are insufficient for the likely challenge, the logical alternative is to augment professionals from selected parts of society. Ukraine was not the only country pushed in this direction. In the absence of a popular surge of support and a willingness by the Putin regime to enforce universal conscription, Russia came to rely on paid paramilitary organizations, especially the Wagner Group, and individual volunteers attracted by monetary gain.

The immediate issue with such schemes is that while volunteers may serve in structures that resemble—and may even formally constitute—official military units, they primarily serve a political (or, as in Russia’s case, monetary) cause instead of the state. Their personal politics and interests do not necessarily represent or align with the whole of society or the government in power.22

The ideological motivations of volunteer forces raise three particular issues. First, suppose the people in general are deemed difficult to transform into effective, disciplined, and obedient soldiers. In that case, this concern is likely to worsen with politically driven volunteers whose agendas may differ from the state’s political and military leadership. For example, in Ukraine, volunteers actively sought to escalate the conflict with separatists to drag an unwilling state and its military into an expanded war. On the home front, they first opposed the Minsk agreements in 2014–15 and then threatened another revolution if Ukraine made political concessions to Russia. After 2022, control issues persisted. While centralized mobilization measures initially covered losses during 2022–23, Ukrainian military units increasingly looked for recruits and funding independently. Such practices affected the relationship between the regular armed forces and these units, which in Ukraine was one of negotiation and relative independence, both matters inconducive to central operational control. Cohesion also suffered from the practice of trying to glue different military units together in a piecemeal manner. The resulting problems with coordination and control affected defensive performance, but they were especially revealed when forces went on the offensive. The reliance on volunteer recruitment reinforced the primitivization of the war dynamic.23

Secondly, mobilizing only part of a society may cause domestic polarization, hindering whole-of-society mobilization. Social cohesion will likely suffer if the political agenda pursued by those mobilized is not reflective of broader societal values. For instance, the Ukrainian 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, formed in January 2023, was based on the remnants of the Azov Regiment, a unit associated with far-right views before 2022 and, later, the heroic defense of Mariupol. When individual units attract recruits through their recruitment centers and media channels, they risk exacerbating the issue of national political cohesion. The composition of the military affects the trust it receives from society. Traditionally conservative military professionals, therefore, strive to project an apolitical image by stressing that their service is to the nation as a whole irrespective of partisan political opinion.

Thirdly, volunteers, especially of an ultranationalist persuasion, are often more concerned with internal than external enemies. In Ukraine, for instance, volunteers focused much less on the Russians occupying Crimea in spring 2014 than the Russian-supported domestic enemy of the separatists in eastern Ukraine. This domestic obsession also had to do with the volunteers’ relative military weakness. It was easier to battle separatists and establish order in Donbas than successfully fight a war with Russia over Crimea. Furthermore, extremists perceive the world with little nuance; one is either a friend or an enemy. Historically, a division of labor has often emerged, whereby the regular military defends against foreign threats, and volunteer paramilitaries task themselves with combating perceived domestic threats.24

If volunteers focus on an external enemy instead, their best hope of victory may come from forcing popular resistance by playing up enemy atrocities and perhaps inviting indiscriminate responses. As noted, setting off an escalatory spiral is what several Ukrainian volunteers hoped for in 2022. Recognizing their limited numbers, one described the volunteers as catalysts. Paradoxically, their failure to set off a whole-of-society mobilization underlines their limited political appeal and the vital importance of societal support.

While ideologically motivated volunteers can compensate for manpower shortfalls, they may simultaneously undermine control over the frontline armed forces and support of the home front. These risks are considerable, especially when set against their likely benefits. In Ukraine, volunteers may have held the front at key moments in 2014–15 and 2022, but their numbers were too small to tilt the balance of the war and lead the country to victory. Instead, they reduced the effectiveness of the regular armed forces and failed in their efforts to inspire, cajole, or trick the people of Ukraine into full societal mobilization. Moreover, once the fighting stops, whether through a ceasefire or a peace agreement, they will likely pose a significant danger to national political stability because they are unlikely to be satisfied with either outcome.

Conclusion

The hypothesis promising an easy victory behind Russia’s plan to invade in 2022 was the presumed existence of a weak relationship between Ukrainian society, the military, and the political leadership. The firm belief in the truth of the hypothesis is apparent from Putin’s speech broadcast on the morning of the invasion in which he addressed Russians and Ukrainians. Putin called the Zelensky administration a “junta,” which held Ukraine “hostage,” and urged the Ukrainian armed forces to serve the Ukrainian people by laying down their weapons and disobeying the “criminal orders” of the “neo-Nazis” in power.25

Putin had a point, but it was not as telling as he believed. While some Ukrainian officials and citizens heeded his advice, enough did not. The ensuing conflict was a reminder that war is the business of the people. Yet, as this special commentary has argued, the war did not become the business of all the people. As a result, Ukraine suffered manpower shortages. What is more, to the extent that people were mobilized, the force generation practices led to problems with operational control and what we labeled a primitivization of warfare. It contributed overall to Ukraine’s inability to turn the war around on the battlefield and acquire a strong position at the negotiating table. Ukraine has found itself between a rock and a hard place. It has not found a viable defense solution derived from generating a state-controlled professional force relying on advanced technology or creating one based on a classical universal conscription model. Instead, it fought with a hybrid force of regulars, some conscripts, and volunteers—a force over which the first struggled to exert full control and direction over the last, with the conscripts generally as an ill-motivated and ill-trained entity in the middle. The volunteers played a critical role, but their motivations made them a mixed blessing. Their willingness to fight did not necessarily originate from a sense of shared national interest as represented by the state with its elected government and regular military but often from partisan political concerns.

NATO member states would be wise to learn from Ukraine’s struggles. NATO forces, especially in Europe, require a greater involvement of society and militaries that can sustain themselves over the long(er) haul. The traditional approach relied on convincing society the threat was clear and present and, then, using long, coercive conscription terms, to socialize and discipline very young civilians into an obedient state instrument. As Ukraine illustrates, those recipes no longer work effectively. Instead of blaming society for its unwillingness to serve, or opting for forced conscription models, some key points require thorough consideration. Military establishments have little choice but to attune their command style and training methods more closely to societal norms to achieve maximum social traction. That means a return to the “warrior ethos” and the emphasis on the social exclusivity and uniqueness of the military profession that is seeing a renaissance should be viewed with skepticism. Training must necessarily be short and the reliance on mobilizable reserves high, including systems of territorial defense. Equipment and tactics should be adapted to minimum training and large numbers. A socially and politically realistic model of national force generation reinforces the need to prioritize resilient, easily mass producible and standardized equipment for large numbers of personnel over the highly advanced, expensive, and hard-to-produce weapons systems that NATO’s armed forces prefer.26

Ukraine (and, for that matter, Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah) also illustrates the difficult balancing act that must be struck between maintaining a standing force that can hold off the likely forms the first enemy blow can take and the simultaneous maintenance of a training establishment of reserves that can replenish and rotate the frontline fighting forces over a possible long haul.

While this hybrid model does not favor the clean and short, decisive, or shock-and-awe kind of war advocated by professional Western militaries, it will increase state survivability. Admittedly, though, bloody attrition would be a hallmark of this model of force generation which is, sadly, not unfamiliar to democracies. The war in Ukraine emphasizes the strength of defense over offense and illustrates how soldiers with a couple of weeks of training have been able to hold their ground. And since NATO is on the political defensive and aims at war prevention and dissuasion, there is one possible bright spot: The prospect of attritional warfare may be so unappetizing to potential aggressors that it offers prospects for the effectiveness of conventional deterrence.

 

Author’s Note: Ilmari Käihkö’s work for this commentary at the Swedish Defence University was generously supported by a Swedish Armed Forces’ Forskning och Teknik (FoT) grant.

 
 

Ilmari Käihkö
Dr. Ilmari Käihkö is associate professor of war studies at the Department of War Studies, Swedish Defence University, a university researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, and a veteran of the Finnish Defence Forces. He has studied the wars in Ukraine since 2017. His latest book, “Slava Ukraini!” Strategy and the Spirit of Ukrainian Resistance 2014–2023, was published in open access by Helsinki University Press in December 2023.

Jan Willem Honig
Jan Willem Honig is professor of international security studies at the Netherlands Defence Academy and a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is coauthor (with Ilmari Käihkö) of An Exemplary Defeat: Sweden and Finland’s War for Peace in Afghanistan (Helsinki University Press, forthcoming 2025) and joint editor of Who Owns War? The Role of Non-State Actors in Contemporary Warfare (Leiden University Press, forthcoming 2025).

 
 

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Endnotes

  1. While we recognize that members of regular state militaries are volunteers, we distinguish them from the ideologically motivated volunteers who primarily serve a political cause instead of the state. For the sake of clarity, the former are called “regulars,” the latter, “volunteers”; James Marson, “The Ragtag Army That Won the Battle of Kyiv and Saved Ukraine,” The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-invasion-ukraine-battle-of-kyiv-ragtag-army-11663683336; Huseyn Aliyev, “Strong Militias, Weak States and Armed Violence: Towards a Theory of ‘State-Parallel’ Paramilitaries,” Security Dialogue 47, no. 6 (December 2016); Kostiantyn Fedorenko and Andreas Umland, “Between Frontline and Parliament: Ukrainian Political Parties and Irregular Armed Groups in 2014–2019,” Nationalities Papers 50, no. 2 (March 2022); Olena Klymenko, “Armed Forces of Ukraine in Donbass at the Beginning of ATO,” Evropský Politický a Právní Diskurz 5, no. 2 (2018); Deborah Sanders, “ ‘The War We Want; The War That We Get’: Ukraine’s Military Reform and the Conflict in the East,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 30, no. 1 (2017); and Bob Woodward, War (Simon & Schuster, 2024), 131. Return to text.
  2. Perhaps most famously discussed by Clausewitz. See Jan Willem Honig, “People’s War vs Professional War: Which Has the Future in Europe?,” in Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War, ed. Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels (C. Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2024). Return to text.
  3. Kateryna Hladka et al., eds., Volunteer Battalions: Story of a Heroic Deed of Battalions That Saved the Country (Folio, 2017). Return to text.
  4. “Армия. Война. Экзамен [Army. War. Test.],” Day, March 9, 2014, https://day.kyiv.ua/ru/article/podrobnosti/armiya-voyna-ekzamen; According to World Bank, Ukrainian GDP fell from $190.5 billion in 2013 to $91.03 billion in 2015, “GDP (Current US$) – Ukraine,” 2024, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=UA&view=chart; and Sanders, “ ‘The War We Want,’ ” 47–48. Return to text.
  5. Ilmari Käihkö, “Slava Ukraini!” Strategy and the Ukrainian Spirit of Resistance, 2014–2023 (Helsinki University Press, 2023), 140; Andrzej Wilk, The Best Army Ukraine Has Ever Had: Changes in Ukraine’s Armed Forces Since the Russian Aggression (Centre for Eastern Studies, 2017), 9–17; and Valeriy Akimenko, “Ukraine’s Toughest Fight: The Challenge of Military Reform,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2018/02/ukraines-toughest-fight-the-challenge-of-military-reform. This figure was repeated in “Chapter 5: Russia and Eurasia,” The Military Balance 122, no. 1 (2022). Return to text.
  6. Wilk, Best Army. Return to text.
  7. Leonid Polyakov, “Defense Institution Building in Ukraine at Peace and at War,” Connections 17, no. 3 (2018): 104–5; and Olga Oliker et al., Security Sector Reform in Ukraine (RAND Corporation, 2016), 48. See even Andriy Zagorodnyuk et al., “Is Ukraine’s Reformed Military Ready to Repel a New Russian Invasion?” (Atlantic Council, December 23, 2021), https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/is-ukraines-reformed-military-ready-to-repel-a-new-russian-invasion/. Return to text.
  8. Isabelle Facon, “Reforming Ukrainian Defense: No Shortage of Challenges” Institut Français des Relations Internationales, 2017, https://www.ifri.org/en/papers/reforming-ukrainian-defense-no-shortage-challenges; and “Minister Proposes Replacing Conscription with 3-4 Months Military Training,” Militarnyi, February 4, 2022, https://mil.in.ua/en/news/minister-proposes-replacing-conscription-with-3-4-months-military-training/. Return to text.
  9. “Russia and Eurasia”; Wilk, Best Army, 32; Sanders, “ ‘The War We Want,’ ”; and Simon Shuster, The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow, 2024), 82. Return to text.
  10. Honig, “People’s War.” Return to text.
  11. Käihkö, “Slava Ukraini!,” 187–89. Return to text.
  12. Artur Gora, “Генштаб: Можлива Повна Мобілізація, Все Залежить Від Ситуації На Сході [General Staff: Full Mobilization Is Possible, Everything Depends on the Situation in the East],” Sohodni, August 13, 2015, https://ukr.segodnya.ua/ukraine/genshtab-vozmozhna-polnaya-mobilizaciya-vse-zavisit-ot-situacii-na-vostoke-640162.html, page discontinued. Return to text.
  13. Sanders, “ ‘The War We Want,’ ” 41–42; and Wilk, The Best Army, 15. Return to text.
  14. Käihkö, “Slava Ukraini!,” 129; and Sanders, “The War We Want,’ ” 43. Return to text.
  15. Yaroslav Trofimov, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence (Penguin Press, 2024), 26. Return to text.
  16. Samya Kullab and Joanna Kozlowska, “Ukraine’s Divisive Mobilization Law Comes into Force as a New Russian Push Strains Front-Line Troops,” AP, May 18, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-mobilization-kharkiv-599753d08518b46e22bf38d1360cce86; and Trofimov, Our Enemies Will Vanish, 29. Return to text.
  17. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi et al., Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 (Royal United Services Institute, 2022), 28. Return to text.
  18. The interviews are part of an ongoing research project on Ukrainian volunteers that began in 2017. See Käihkö, “Slava Ukraini!,” 260. Return to text.
  19. Benedict Vigers, “Half of Ukrainians Want Quick, Negotiated End to War,” Gallup, November 19, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/653495/half-ukrainians-quick-negotiated-end-war.aspx; Lesia Lytvynova, “Will We Break Through? Military Evasion and Results of Sociological Research,” ZN,UA, July 30, 2024, https://zn.ua/eng/will-we-break-through-military-evasion-and-results-of-sociological-research.html; and “Оцінка Громадянами Ситуації в Країні Та Дій Влади. Довіра До Соціальних Інститутів, Політиків, Посадовців Та Громадських Діячів [Citizens’ Assessment of the Situation in the Country and the Government’s Actions. Trust in Social Institutions, Politicians, Officials, and Public Figures],” Razumkov Centre, 2024, https://razumkov.org.ua/napriamky/sotsiologichni-doslidzhennia/otsinka-gromadianamy-sytuatsii-v-kraini-ta-dii-vlady-dovira-do-sotsialnykh-instytutiv-politykiv-posadovtsiv-ta-gromadskykh-diiachiv-sichen-2024r. Return to text.
  20. Despite efforts to tackle corruption, new cases continued to come to light. For instance, see Kateryna Denisova, “2 Ukrainian Regional Officials Alleged of Corruption, Nearly $6 Million Found,” The Kyiv Independent, October 4, 2024, https://kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-officials-exposed-on-alleged-corruption-nearly-6-million-found/; and Veronika Melkozerova, “Ukraine’s Top Prosecutor Falls on Sword amid Fake Disabilities Scam,” Politico, October 22, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraines-prosecutor-andriy-kostin-scandal-russia-troops/. Return to text.
  21. Constant Méheut and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn, “A Soldier Chose a Radical Way to Publicize Troop Fatigue: He Deserted,” The New York Times, October 19, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/19/world/europe/ukraine-troop-fatigue.html; and Dan Peleschuk, “Ukrainian General to Overhaul Training, Management amid Manpower Woes,” Reuters, December 13, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-general-overhaul-training-management-amid-manpower-woes-2024-12-13/. Return to text.
  22. A good historical example is the interwar German Free Corps which were free to decide who, what, and where they served—with questionable political results; see Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany 1918–1923 (W. W. Norton, 1969). Return to text.
  23. Ilmari Käihkö, “A Nation-in-the-Making, in Arms: Control of Force, Strategy and the Ukrainian Volunteer Battalions,” Defence Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 147–66; and for a recent example, see Diana Butsko and Yaroslav Herasimenko, “Battle for Pokrovsk: What’s at Stake as Russian Forces Move Within 3 Km of Strategic Donbas City,” Hromadske, December 15, 2024, https://hromadske.ua/en/war/236229-battle-for-pokrovsk-whats-at-stake-as-russian-forces-move-within-3-km-of-strategic-donbas-city. Return to text.
  24. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2012). Return to text.
  25. Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” February 24, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843. Return to text.
  26. For instance, see Patrick Bury, “The End of the All-Volunteer Force: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recruitment and Love Selective Conscription,” RUSI Journal 169, no. 7 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2024.2432820. Return to text.