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Ukraine Can No Longer Spare Its Youngest Soldiers From the Front Lines
A shortage of soldiers is Ukraine’s most serious challenge as it enters another year of war with Russia.
SAMAR, Ukraine—Kyrylo Horbenko represented the future of the Ukrainian army.
Immediately after turning 18, he joined a program that fast-tracks military careers for Ukraine’s youngest recruits, hoping front-line experience would help him secure a spot at a military academy he hadn’t had the money to attend.
“I want to devote my entire life to military service,” the gangly teen told The Wall Street Journal last spring as he prepared to take his oath of service at a base in east Ukraine.
Less than six months later, Horbenko was dead. Thrown into combat on the most dangerous part of the front line, he was cut down by Russian artillery while en route to reinforce a Ukrainian position in Pokrovsk in October.
In the early years of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine largely tried to keep its youngest men away from the front lines. They would be needed to rebuild the country once the war was over.
The fate of Horbenko, whom comrades described as a committed patriot and an ideal future commander, underscores the severity of Ukraine’s manpower deficit in the face of a relentless onslaught by Russian units that often outnumber its own units 10 to one.
It also illustrates Ukraine’s impossible choice four years into a war that has decimated its professional army: how to safeguard and nurture a rising generation while at the same time ensuring a steady flow of bodies to the front line?
Most men willing to fight signed up long ago. Infantry units are full of older men unfit for arduous combat missions. Front-line stints are far longer than they used to be, compounding exhaustion. Many other men are either in hiding or have paid bribes to flee the country illegally.
Incoming Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Jan. 14 that two million Ukrainians are dodging the draft and more than 200,000 soldiers have deserted, amounting to around one-fifth of the entire armed forces. He didn’t say in what time period.
“Manpower is likely the single most important factor that will determine how 2026 goes for Ukraine on the battlefield,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute think tank who regularly visits Ukraine’s front lines. “As well as how far Russia is able to advance.”
Horbenko was in sixth grade when he announced he wanted to start preparing for military service. In Samar—the commuter town near Dnipro where he shared a ramshackle house with his mother, Tetiana Horbenko, a supermarket cashier, his car mechanic stepfather and his younger brother, Yegor—army service was a way of rising up the social ladder.
The family couldn’t afford fees for a military school, his mother said, and Horbenko spent the following years researching the armed forces and Ukraine’s past conflicts, and leaning on two serving uncles for advice about which branch of the military to join.
In the summer of 2023, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in full swing, Horbenko read a misleading online report saying the enlistment age had been lowered. He led two dozen friends into a local recruitment center and announced their desire to fight. The officials on duty laughed them out, telling them to come back when they were adults.
Horbenko was the only member of the group who did. By the time he became eligible for service the following year, Ukraine had been at war with Russia for more than a decade. He joined Ukraine’s 25th Airborne Brigade through a new program called “Contract 18-24,” which offered young recruits a high salary and various perks, including university spots, in return for six months of training followed by six months of combat as infantry soldiers. The program’s creation was a tacit acknowledgment of how depleted Ukraine’s fighting force had become.
Before he left for training, Horbenko had one outstanding task: He proposed to Lera, his girlfriend of four years, and together they selected a venue and the outfits for a wedding to take place once his 12-month contract ended. He would then enroll in a military academy to become an officer, and they would start a family.
“Our generation was brought up to defend our country,” Horbenko told the Journal last year after arriving at the base of the 25th Brigade, where he spent evenings watching videos of Ukrainian military operations and lifting weights. “This is our duty before the state and our people.”
Hundreds of young Ukrainians have enrolled on the 18-24 program since last year, joining various brigades. With a shortage of infantry, commanders sent many of them into the maw of Russia’s advance.
Vyacheslav Malets, 18, defied his parents and moved from Germany last year to fight in his native Ukraine, becoming the program’s first recruit. For his service on the front line, he was awarded a medal in September by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Malets died in October after stepping on an antipersonnel mine near Pokrovsk. Other young recruits have been maimed or left disabled for life. Many have deserted. Ukrainian units have since allowed some 18-24 recruits to serve their six months in drone units, further from the fighting.
Mykola Kapralyk, a priest in Samar who grew close to Horbenko, said he has lost around 100 men from his flock to the war. He recently oversaw the funeral of a 19-year-old soldier, with hundreds in attendance. Kapralyk praised those who sign up to fight but worried that many, like Horbenko, were overconfident. “He watched a few videos and believed he was invincible,” he said.
On a visit to Samar midway through his training, Horbenko regaled relatives with stories of his training, showing video clips from the shooting ground. Ivan Glyan, Horbenko’s cousin, said the teen had noticeably filled out in the months he had been away. His jaw was squarer and facial hair thicker.
Then, on Oct. 18, Horbenko and five other soldiers were sent to reinforce a badly undermanned position inside Pokrovsk. Russia had spent two years trying to capture the former mining hub of 60,000 people, and was now advancing on its center. It was throwing infantry into deadly assaults against pockets of Ukrainian resistance, and striking supply routes into Pokrovsk with every kind of munition.
Ukrainian infantrymen were hiking more than 10 miles on foot to reach positions inside the devastated city in east Ukraine. The leadership in Kyiv was under pressure from some military commanders to retreat from Pokrovsk to save lives.
Horbenko sent a final message to his mother, before his group came under fire as it entered Pokrovsk. Only one of the six was an experienced soldier. As they scrambled to safety, and treated the injured, they realized Horbenko was missing.
The next morning they found his body, splayed out beside a fence, said one of the men, 19-year-old Oleksandr Bahach.
“There were drones everywhere,” Bahach said. “We couldn’t get his body out.”
Because his body couldn’t be retrieved, Horbenko’s family hasn’t received payouts from the government, or confirmation of his death. Tetiana, Horbenko’s mother, said “he was simply not yet ready for war.”
Lera, Horbenko’s fiancée, still wears the engagement ring he gave her. She said that if she could, she would go to Pokrovsk herself and get his body back.
“Eighteen-year-old boys have no business being on the front line,” she said. “They’re still not really adults, just young, silly kids.”
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com
