Recruitment officers in Ukraine are resorting to conscription raids on gyms and shopping centers: report

• Ukraine is struggling to recruit soldiers to fill in the gaps in its military, per The Economist.
• Recruitment officers are resorting to conscription raids on gyms and shopping centers, it reported.

Recruitment officers in Ukraine are so desperate for new recruits that they are resorting to conscription raids on gyms and shopping centers, per The Economist.

And an unnamed senior officer told the magazine that they are now seeing 45- to 47-year-old recruits who are "out of breath by the time they reach the front line."

According to The Economist, Ukraine recently sent a platoon of 20 soldiers to fight in Donbas, with some taken from villages without notice and one older man who didn't even have time to pick up his false teeth.

After just one week of being in the trenches, three had been killed and another three seriously wounded, per the news outlet.

Given the lack of recruits, "we have no choice other than to be bloodthirsty," Viktor Kevlyuk, a retired colonel, told the Economist, calling for a new mobilization strategy for Ukraine.

From 2014, when pro-Russian forces attacked eastern Ukraine, until 2021, Kevlyuk was in charge of Ukraine's mobilization strategy in the western part of the country, per the magazine.

He said that Russia will intensify its mobilization efforts after its presidential election next March, and if Ukraine doesn't wake up to the reality of the battlefield, it "risks falling into a trap."

Ukraine is struggling to fill gaps in its military as Russia's full-scale invasion enters its third year.

The country has resorted to confiscating people's passports and forcing conscription on ill-suited civilians, The New York Times reported last week.

In one instance, Ukrainian recruiters tried to enlist a 36-year-old mentally disabled man, his attorney told the Times. Tetiana Fefchak, the attorney, was ultimately able to block the man's conscription.

It remains unclear how many troops Ukraine is deploying to the battlefield, or how many it needs to replenish its forces.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this month that there are 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers fighting on the front lines.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin signed a decree earlier this month that would bring an additional 170,000 servicemen to Russia's 1,320,000-strong army.

Even so, the Russian army is also struggling to send enough soldiers to make up for its frontline losses, as the Institute for the Study of War reported in an assessment earlier this month.

Since the start of its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has used a variety of strategies to try to beef up its troop levels, including recruiting prisoners, enlisting foreign soldiers and migrant workers, paying up to 10 times the average salary, and raising the conscription age, as Business Insider previously reported.