Ukraine puts pressure on fighting-age men outside the country as it tries to replenish forces

KYIV, Ukraine — Even as Ukraine works to get much-needed arms from a huge U.S. aid package to the front line, its government is seeking to reverse the drain of its potential soldiers, announcing that men of conscription age will no longer be able to renew passports from outside the country.

The Cabinet of Ministers said men between 18 and 60 who are deemed fit for military service will only be able to replace their passports inside Ukraine.

Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, mostly to neighbouring European countries.

The European Union’s statistics agency, Eurostat, says

4.3 million Ukrainians are living in EU countries, 860,000 of them men 18 or older.

The defence minister of Poland, home to one of the biggest Ukrainian diasporas, said his country was ready to help “in ensuring that those who are subject to compulsory military service go to Ukraine,” though he did not specify how.

Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said: “Ukrainian citizens have obligations towards the state.”

The move has met with criticism inside Ukraine. Opposition lawmaker Ivanna KlympushTsyntsadze, who heads the Parliamentary Committee for Ukraine’s European Integration, said denying military-age men access to consular services could lead to “well-founded” legal challenges at the European Court of Human Rights.

“I think that these actions will only push an enormous number of Ukrainians to look for different ways to obtain citizenship from other countries,” she said.

Russia’s population of almost 150 million dwarfs Ukraine’s 38 million, and Moscow can draw on a much bigger army.

This month, Ukraine lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25 in an effort to bolster the size of its military. Oleksandr Pavlichenko, executive director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, said the measure was a violation of individual rights and unlikely to succeed in getting Ukrainian men to return home from abroad.

“It’s just an emotional step, not a legal one,” he said. “It will not bring the results.”

Ukraine is in need of fresh troops to bolster forces in the south and east, where Russia is pressing forward with its efforts to take ground from outnumbered and outgunned troops.

The U.S. is sending $61 billion worth of new military aid, a lifeline for Kyiv’s armed forces in their more than two-year war with Russia.

U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law the aid package on Wednesday.

U.S. officials confirmed this week that the United States last month secretly sent Ukraine a number of long-range missiles that Kyiv has urgently sought so that its forces can hit Russian forces well behind the front lines. Ukraine used them for the first time last week to strike an airfield in occupied Crimea, the officials said.

The Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMs, have a range of about 300 kilometres. More are expected to be sent to Ukraine as part of the new U.S. aid package.

Russia was dismissive of the weapons’ likely impact.

“This will not fundamentally change the outcome of the special military operation. We will succeed, but it will cause more problems for Ukraine itself,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said “the key now is speed” in getting the supplies into place.

Ukrainian forces have run desperately short of artillery ammunition and air defence missiles during six months in which the U.S. aid was held up by wrangling in Congress.