International- The average Ukrainian soldier is 43-years-old, according to Time Magazine.
- When the war began in February 2022, the average Ukrainian soldier was between 30 and 35 years old.
Soldiers in Ukraine are veering increasingly older as the country grapples with a shortage of soldiers after roughly 20 months of brutal fighting against Russia.
As countless casualties have hampered Ukraine's forces, the average age of a soldier in the country is currently around 43 years old, Time magazine reported last week.
That average is up by nearly 10 years from March 2022, one month after the war began, when the average age of a Ukrainian soldier was between 30 and 35 years old, according to FT.
"They're grown men now, and they aren't that healthy to begin with," a close aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Time. "This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia."
Ukraine does not release the number of deaths or injuries among its troops, but Western officials said in August the war's total casualty (killed and injured) toll was nearing 500,000.
As the war drags on, Zelenskyy is concerned international support for the country is waning, he told Time. Less than half of Americans still support Congress giving more weapons to Ukraine, according to an October Reuters poll, where 35% disagreed and the remaining respondents were unsure.
A longtime member of Zelenskyy's team told Time the president feels betrayed by Ukraine's Western allies who he sees as having only given the country what it needs to survive the war but not beat Russia for good.
As American lawmakers squabble over whether to continue funding Ukraine, however, the country's personnel problems may be more dire than a lack of equipment.
Even if the US were to provide Ukraine with all the weapons it promised, a Zelenskyy aide told Time, Ukraine simply doesn't "have the men to use them."
When the war first began in February 2022, Ukrainian recruits were plentiful; people volunteered in droves to defend their land from Russian invaders, while a mass mobilization effort that forbade nearly all men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country bolstered troop numbers early-on.
But recruitment is significantly down these days, Time reported, and the country is struggling to keep combat-age men from fleeing.
In August, Zelenskyy fired the head of the draft offices in every region of the country amid concerns of conscription corruption. But the move backfired, a Ukrainian senior military officer told Time, and slowed recruitment efforts to an effective stop.
Ukraine is also one of the oldest countries in the world with one in four people over the age of 60.
Earlier this year, Insider reported on the retirees who are fighting side-by-side with their younger comrades in Ukraine, including a 63-year-old and two 59-year-old men who volunteered.
"Now we are completing what our grandfathers started 100 years ago. When it becomes difficult, I always tell the boys what kind of fighters they were," Leonid Onyshchenko, a 63-year-old former nuclear physicist said.