By Gordon Hahn, Substack, 5/3/26
The recent two-day delay by Ukraine in extending state of martial law was largely the result of the need to adopt a reform of the Kiev’s brutal forced mobilization of men to fight in the beleaguered Ukrainian armed forces. On April 27th the Rada passed an extension of martial law and military mobilization until August 2nd on the basis of the standard three-month term, and Zelenskiy signed the law the next day. But without redressing the population’s increasing alienation from the war effort and the regime as a result of coerced mobilization of men to fight at the front, some deputies were unprepared to pass the martial law resolution. The violent recruitment process has included the killing and maiming of captured draft evaders, mass resistance against the mobilizers’ attempts to seize evaders, and even the use of firearms by both mobilizers and evaders resisting capture. This has raised a firestorm of criticism, resentment, and anger teetering on the edge of open revolt among the public, forcing Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelenskiy, the government, and the Verkhovna Rada deputies to at least feign an attempt to right the situation. Even the police are now hated by the public for failing to protect citizens against the mobilizers’ violent methods and often siding with the latter. Many are asking why can not the Rada deputies, government ministers, their sons, the 120,000 police, and 100,000 mobilization center press gangs be subjected to the draft.
Therefore, two days after martial law and mobilization both were extended Zelenskiy ordered a kind of army reform touching the mobilization system and an increase in pay for soldiers at the front from 100,000 to 250-400,000 griven/month and for those in the rear from 33,000 to 100,000 gr/mo. Zelenskiy’s instruction also called for establishing guaranteed rotation from the front to the rear for resting Ukraine’s exhausted frontline soldiers (https://strana.news/news/504704-voennoe-polozhenie-i-mobilizatsija-v-ukraine-prodleny-eshchjo-na-90-dnej-.html). There has been no such rotation for troops leading to the AWOL of some 300,000 troops from the front.
Zelenskiy’s reform envisages an unrealistic reform that would drain the number of troops serving on the constantly receding front lines and is based on increased expenditures Kiev cannot provide if it hopes to purchase weapons at the levels needed. A previous program provided a similarly advantageous remuneration for contract soldiers, which led to only several hundred takers over the course of months. Ukraine needs several hundred thousand new recruits this year at a minimum. Russia recently reported some 35,000 recruits per month this year. None are coerced; there is good pay promoting the number of contract soldiers and steady flow of volunteers.
The only thing that could make Zelenskiy’s army reform marginally workable would be a fundamental shift in the mathematics of Ukraine’s recruitment potential. Ukraine is lucky to garner 25,000 recruits per month. There are virtually no volunteers, and almost all of the mobilized men have been captured or otherwise coerced into the armed forces, hurriedly trained if trained at all, and deployed to the front wholly unprepared for what they are about to face.
The Ukrainian government has proposed reducing the number of people eligible for exemptions, which will not come close to increasing sufficiently the number of recruits but will increase the flight of Ukrainians, particularly men, abroad. Kiev may be counting on the new policy of many European states, including Germany, of terminating subsidies for Ukrainian refugees and returning men to Ukraine to be conscripted. However, the likely outcome of this is Ukrainian violence in Europe by those seeking to avoid de facto extradition to Ukraine as well as in Ukraine by those who are forced to return to their war-torn homeland or are ineligible for, or soon lose exemption or deferment.
The military-building process is further compromised by the massive corruption in the mobilization centers, where release (not exemption) can be purchased for large sums by those who can muster the funds. The process, therefore, has been totally discredited in Ukrainian society, prompting one symbolic search of a mobilization center by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Any promise or empty demonstration by the Zelenskiy Maidan regime to root out violence or corruption in the mobilization process is plagued by its own massive corruption scandals.
The regime’s corruption crisis intensified recently with a new release of ‘Mindichgate’ tapes implication Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Chairman and former Defense Minister Rustem Umerov in corrupt purchases of bulletproof vests among other things. Thus, not only are close personal friends of Zelenskiy, such as Timur Mindich himself, his former chief of staff Andriy Yermak, and his top national security official, Umerov, deeply implicated in massive corruption schemes directly impinging on the military’s fortunes in time of war, but ultimately so are Zelenskiy and the entire Ukrainian elite (www.pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2026/05/01/8032710/;
From the NABU wiretaps that were published two days ago, it clearly follows that the real owner of the company Firepoint is the corrupt official and criminal Mindich. Because of this, there are calls in Ukraine to nationalize this company and to deny it government contracts
;www.facebook.com/share/p/18Hyad2fZj/?mibextid=wwXIfr; https://epravda.com.ua/rus/biznes/mindichgeyt-pyshnyy-prokommentiroval-zapisi-gde-upominaetsya-ego-imya-821058/;www.facebook.com/share/p/1bZknKo96m/?mibextid=wwXIfr; https://strana.news/news/500462-shefira-videli-v-aeroportu-varshavy.html; https://strana.news/news/461261-ukhod-koshelka-prezidenta-chto-oznachaet-otstavka-serheja-shefira.html; https://strana.news/news/493841-nabu-mohlo-proslushivat-byvsheho-pervoho-pomoshchnika-prezidenta-serheja-shefira-chto-eto-znachit.html).
In sum, it is unlikely if not impossible that the return of potential recruits and the decrease in the number of exemptions will stop the bleeding of the Ukrainian army. And it is even more unlikely that the Ukrainian public will see the prospects that the reform will change the dismal fortunes of the Ukrainian state and its embattled army in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. The extension of martial law and mobilization means only the prolongation the war agony, the intensification of Ukraine’s multifaceted ruination, and the polarization of relations between the regime and society. Kiev is caught in a self-feeding cycle of deepening crisis in which the war requires forced mobilization, which alienates the population from the regime and the war, which reduces willingness to fight, which requires intensifying forced mobilization. In other words, the war requires forced mobilization, and forced mobilization undermines the war effort and around and around again…until the end of either the war or Maidan Ukraine.