Ukraine’s young men are fleeing the country, and that’s potentially fatal news for its increasingly desperate war effort. In August the Kyiv government allowed men aged 18 to 22 to leave the country for the first time the invasion, and since then some 100,000 have crossed the border into Poland.
At the same time increasingly violent Ukrainian army press gangs are helping to recruit some 30,000 new recruits a month, according to MP Fedir Venislavskyi. But thousands, perhaps as many as 20,000, desert or go absent every four weeks. Since the beginning of the war Ukrainian prosecutors have launched some 290,000 formal criminal cases for desertion.
