MOSCOW, August 30. /TASS/. Ukraine is drafting more than twice as many people to the army now than it did in the first quarter of 2024 thanks to the law toughening mobilization rules, the Ukrainian Telegraph news outlet reported, citing Ukraine’s defense ministry.

"The law has helped us to increase the number of draftees in the period of mobilization by 2.5 times as compared to the first quarter of this year, the news outlet cited the ministry’s reply to its inquiry.

Amid combat failures and the retreat in Donbass, the Ukrainian army command has been a target for criticism over the understaffing of frontline units and the lack of reserves to rotate them. This problem has been repeatedly raised in the Western media. Moreover, the lack of workforce due to the mobilization is also felt in industry and agriculture. According to Roman Kostenko, secretary of the Verkhovna Rada’s (parliament) national security, defense and intelligence committee, the mobilization campaign rate is not enough even after the new law came into force. In late April, Sergey Shoigu, the then Russian defense minister, said that Ukraine’s overall losses since the beginning of the special military operation amounted to nearly 500,000.

General mobilization was announced in Ukraine in February 2022 and has been extended several times since, with the authorities doing everything possible so that draft-age men cannot evade military service. Men of the draft age are banned from leaving the country (with few exceptions) and those who want to be granted draft determent need to have a package of documents confirming their right to this. According to the Ukrainian media, many men now choose not to leave their homes for months or flee the country, legally or illegally, out of fear of being forcibly dragooned into the army and sent to the combat zone. Videos of drafting young men by force surface on Ukrainian social networks regularly. Despite this, on April 16 Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a controversial law toughening mobilization rules, which is called to help draft hundreds of thousands of fresh soldiers. The law came into effect from May 18.