Can Ukraine be Saved?

The Mathematics of Viability

Can Ukraine be saved? I’m not talking about the war. It is now generally accepted that the Russia-Ukraine war is not winnable if we define the desired end state as the eviction of Russia from all occupied territory. That’s not going to happen. As I’ve discussed, the most likely outcome is a peace agreement along the lines of “Istanbul Plus,” Russia’s peace proposal of June 2024. For reference, see How President Trump Can Obtain a Ceasefire in Ukraine (Istanbul Plus). It is a modification of the agreed and initialed Istanbul peace proposal of April 2022, from which Ukraine walked away.

No. I’m talking about whether Ukraine can survive as a country.

Over three years of war, Ukraine’s population has almost halved. Much of the population has emigrated, either to Russia, Europe, the UK, or North America. That is not a surprise, but government policy has also created distortions. The Zelensky regime has closed the borders to all men aged 18-60 and has been aggressively conscripting or even press-ganging males over age 25. Russia occupies the industrial and mineral-rich lands east of the Dnieper. It will probably take at least four eastern regions and their populations in a peace settlement. That means all the population figures you see in Wikipedia and other atlases are provisional. It will be a long time before those entries are properly firmed up.

Surveys conducted in Europe and the UK indicate that few refugees intend to return. When the war ends and the border restrictions are lifted, those in Ukraine will probably join the emigrants abroad.

Conscription and Demographics

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) minimum draft age is 25. In the waning days of 2024, AP reported that a Biden administration official (we can guess who it was) confirmed that the US was pressuring Ukraine to mobilize its 18-24 age group. This is backwards. Most countries mobilize that age group first. Young men are stronger, fitter, have better endurance, and recover from physical stress faster than older men. Furthermore, they are psychologically more malleable. When you think about it, an army is a highly organized, highly trained youth gang. Mobilized to kill for their country.

That unnamed official said, “the pure math” of Ukraine’s situation now is that it needs more troops in the fight. Currently, Ukraine is not mobilizing or training enough soldiers to replace its battlefield losses while keeping pace with Russia’s growing military.

From the Kyiv post, December 2, 2024: Ukraine’s actual number of fighting troops is about 350,000 men and dropping fast. One of the reasons Kursk collapsed is that Zelensky pulled two strong brigades out of Sudzha in late February and sent them east. After the now-legendary pipeline raid collapsed the Kursk salient, he rushed one of them back – too late. Now he’s sent it back east to Belgorod in an effort to seize Russian land in another media stunt. The point is, Zelensky does not have enough troops to defend Ukraine’s front. Ukraine is no longer capable of a sustainable offensive effort. Such efforts only cause it to lose more men it cannot afford to waste.

The AFU was 750,000 in 2022 and is 350,000 now. Ukraine is losing 30,000 men a month to combat casualties and an additional 6,000 per month through desertion (source: Ukraine Office of the Public Prosecutor, see the SOFREP article Ukraine Struggles With an Epidemic of Desertion). That 36,000 per month is conservative. The AFU cannot mobilize men fast enough to cover its losses. Whole towns and villages in western Ukraine are deserted. No men.

Zelensky has been reluctant to mobilize 18-24 year old males for two reasons. First, it will be so unpopular it will probably lead to civil unrest (and rock his already shaky hold on power). Second, Figures 3 and 4 clearly show that the 18-24 cohort is the smallest in the Ukrainian population. Its mobilization won’t make a difference.

Why was the Biden administration pushing Zelensky to mobilize 18- to 24-year-olds? Let’s apply some common sense. You don’t mobilize your smallest, youngest, male cohort and ship them off to the front unless you’re out of everything else.

Let’s look at those charts.

Let’s do a bit of arithmetic. They want to mobilize 18-19-year-old males. That’s 2/5 of the 15-19 cohort, or 2/5 * 2.3 = 0.92%. Then they want to mobilize the whole 20-24 male cohort, which is 2.4%. That sums to 3.32% of the male population. It is obviously the smallest cohort of males capable of combat. Why draw from that pool? It is self-evident – they’ve already ground up the 25 to 59 age group.

Figure 4, from the New York Times, shows the same data in absolute terms rather than percentage terms. By adding the 200,000 reference line, the NYT allows us to make some decent quantitative estimates.

Why does the chart look this way? Ukraine was in the depths of recession following the breakup of the Soviet Union. From 1995 to 2005, the birth rate was cataclysmically depressed.

Look at the depth of that trough at around 20 years old. Then ask yourself, where did all the men in that 25-59 age group mountain go? If there are so many of them, why go after the teens? I can only think of one reason – there is no longer a mountain of men aged 25-59. They’ve been lost at the front. There’s nothing left to draw from.

Now let’s ask ourselves how many men in that 25-59 cohort must have been killed or crippled.

The AFU began the war in 2022 with 750,000 men and it is 350,000 now. Where did the 400,000 difference go, such that we have to mobilize teenagers? It does not mean that only 400,000 have been killed. Look a little deeper – Ukraine kept topping up the AFU between 2022 and 2024 by conscripting and press-ganging more men from the 25-59 cohort. They tried to keep the total number constant at 750,000. Those of us who have followed the conflict closely have followed the AFU as they struggled to maintain their numbers. And kept losing ground. The reason the AFU is down to 350,000 is because they haven’t been able to continue topping up to 750,000.

When you toss a trained quantitative professional a number, what’s his first reaction? He asks himself: “Is that number reasonable?” His second reaction is – “What number do I expect?”

So when Zelensky says Ukraine has lost 45,000 men killed, a competent professional stops to think about it. Is that number reasonable? Zelensky pulls a different number out every time he’s asked. So, what number is reasonable? When people float more “reasonable” numbers of 400,000 killed, the competent professional doesn’t just accept it – he thinks some more.

What makes sense? 45,000? 100,000? 400,000? One million? Estimates of Ukrainian KIA range from Zelensky’s 45,000 to seemingly aggressive estimates of 1.25 million. On September 17, 2024, the Kyiv Independent and Wall Street Journal called it one million killed and wounded, which seems optimistic. Let’s do the tummy test.

Some terminology. The Ukrainian and Russian armies refer to Killed in Action as “200s” and wounded as “300s”. They inherited the practice from the old Soviet days, where the dead were loaded onto a train with a packing form called “Form 200” slapped on the body bag. Wounded were sent to the hospital with a Form 300.

In World War I, there were four 300s for each 200. In World War II, there were three 300s for each 200.

Let’s use the World War II ratio – for every one “200” killed there are roughly three “300s” wounded. Many 300s are “irrecoverable” – amputees, and so on. So, just to pick round numbers, if there are one million 200s, then there are roughly three million 300s. That sums to four million 200s and 300s. Now, those look like the kind of numbers it would take to deplete that vast 25-59 cohort.

The New York Times chart in Figure 4 shows a horizontal bar at 200,000 men per each year of age. Between 25 and 59, do the math. You can eyeball it from the chart. I’ll guess there’s a bit over 6 million in that 25-59 cohort. That’s a lot of men. How many men had to die or be crippled so the AFU would have to draft the 18-24 group?

Let’s say there are two million men in the 25-59 cohort who can’t be drafted and sent to the front. Hospital workers. Doctors. Factory workers in essential industries. Men who work in the conscription business. Politicians. Rich men with influence. There are all kinds of men who can get exemptions. Of course, there will be a lot of men in that age group who simply fled the country to avoid the draft.

That leaves about 4 million who could have been conscripted between 2022 and 2024. The AFU would have been constantly drawing from that pool to top up its numbers.

If Zelensky’s number of 45,000 is correct, Ukraine would have no reason to mobilize the 18-24 age group, right? Ukraine would have millions remaining in its 25-59 group.

What about the Washington Post/Kyiv Independent number of 1 million killed and wounded? Once again, Ukraine would have three million men left available for conscription in the 25-59 group. There’s no reason to get desperate and mobilize the 18-24 year olds.

But – if we hypothesize one million 200s and three million 300s, a total of four million 200s and 300s, we’ve cut that 25-59 cohort from six million down to the two million non-mobilizable baseline. There’s no one in the 25-59 cohort left to draft. That’s when the country gets desperate.

That’s why the Biden administration was looking at the situation and concluded the regime wouldn’t last six months. They weren’t alone. AFU General Kiril Budanov (commander of AFU military intelligence and special operations) met with Biden administration officials and told them Ukraine was running out of ammunition, men, and materiel. He recommended shifting from a strategy of high-intensity conflict to a strategy of unconventional warfare.

All I will say is – anyone who makes his living looking at charts and numbers just has to glance at Figures 3 and 4 and think about it. What number do you think explains the desire to draft the 18-24s? Zelensky’s 45,000? WAPO/Kyiv Independent’s 1 million killed and wounded? Or 1 million killed plus 3 million wounded?

We’ll leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Conscription and Training

Let’s be clear: we can give Ukraine money and weapons until we are bankrupt, and it won’t help. Ukraine does not have the trained men to use them. It doesn’t even have the untrained men to use them. Let’s talk about training a little bit.

Ukraine is shipping some conscripts off to Europe and the UK for three weeks of training. When they get back, they have to be organized into units and trained to function together. I’m talking about squads working together as platoons, platoons working together in companies, companies in battalions, and battalions working together as regiments and brigades. This takes years in the American army. Building brigades is not as simple as Zelensky makes it out to be. NATO advisers should know better.

In June 2023, the media boasted that the commander of the elite Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade was just 28 years old. A wunderkind. What rank would he have held in an American outfit? A company commander?

Recently, a young British lad volunteered and spent his eighteenth birthday at the front. He was in Ukraine for two months. He was crossing a 100-yard field, carrying more than his body weight in supplies to the next trench line. When a Russian drone spotted him and hovered overhead, he froze. His friends yelled at him to run. He didn’t drop his load, he didn’t try to shoot at the drone, he didn’t try to run a zig-zag. He just froze, and the drone blew him in half.

The survivability of those newly conscripted 18-year-olds is going to be near zero.

After World War II and Korea, studies demonstrated that only 10 – 15% of troops on a defensive line actually fired their weapons. This is from Lt. Col. David Grossman’s book “On Killing.” It is not natural for the normal, socialized young man to kill. The 18-year-old Ukrainian with a rifle thrust into his hands will be reluctant to use it.

Training disciplines soldiers to perform from habit. They don’t “rise to the occasion” under pressure. They fall to the level of their training, and these Ukrainian conscripts haven’t been sufficiently trained. That’s why they are being killed in industrial quantities.

Long-term viability

In the early 1990s, the fertility rate in Ukraine stood at 2.3 children per woman. By 2005, it stood at 1.2 children per woman, and in 2023, it was not much better, at 1.4 children per woman (Source: Blue Europe). The generally accepted breakeven level below which a population becomes unable to renew itself is 2.3 children per woman. On that basis alone, Ukraine is a dying country.

The same can be said of many European countries. Their fertility rates are below the replacement rate. European countries have been “renewing” their populations with immigration. That’s a problem for Ukraine. It is unlikely to enjoy material immigration for a long time to come. On the contrary, as we have noted above, men who have been forced to remain in the country will probably leave when restrictions are lifted.

Conclusion

Ukraine continues to battle heroically against a nuclear-armed country with 7 times its population. No country mobilizes its smallest cohort of seed corn if larger cohorts remain viable. I leave it to the reader to study the numbers above and draw their own conclusions as to Ukraine’s casualties.

What if Russia rolls from Kursk and into Kiev? Are Europeans going to supply patriotic Ukrainian children with rifles and panzerfaust? Get the kids to fight BMPT-72s in the streets? It sounds oh-so-heroic until they get splattered by a 30mm autocannon.

Ukraine has been resisting throwing its future into the meat grinder. The Biden administration was pushing them to do it, knowing full well the goal of evicting Russia could not be realized. To his credit, President Trump wants to stop the killing. If he can get a peace deal soon enough, he might just save the future viability of Ukraine. The only way to do a deal is to shake hands on Istanbul Plus while it remains on the table.

If Russia takes all four of the regions up to their borders, the next deal on offer may be Istanbul Plus Six or Seven.

Now is the time to make a deal.

About the Author

You may reach Cameron at: cameron.curtis545@gmail.com

Cameron Curtis has spent thirty years in the financial markets as a trader and risk manager. He was on the trade floor when Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait, when the air wars opened over Baghdad and Belgrade, and when the financial crisis swallowed the world. He’s studied military affairs and warfare all his adult life. His popular Breed series of military ad-venture thrillers are admired for combining deep expertise wit/h propulsive action. The premises are realistic, the stories adrenaline-fueled and emotionally engaging.

Check out the books here: Cameron Curtis’s Amazon Page

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