Early in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Mykola Kulichenko endured an ordeal. He was abducted as a civilian, survived a Russian execution attempt by a stroke of luck and then climbed out of his own grave by pushing through the dirt heaped above him.
His brothers died beside him, but Mr. Kulichenko had turned his head at the last moment and a bullet passed through his cheek, leaving a hole but not causing life-threatening wounds.
His case elicited widespread shock and sympathy in Ukraine — but it did not shield him from Ukraine’s mobilization system. He received a draft summons in October.
Mr. Kulichenko has used his second lease on life to care for his elderly father and return to raising ducks and chickens on a farm in northern Ukraine. But he said he still has trouble sleeping, as he flashes back to being shot and buried alive then finding his way home with his body covered in bruises and his cheek bleeding and tremendously swollen.
Given the trauma of his ordeal, he doesn’t think he should be drafted into the army. “It was very hard to climb out of my grave,” he said.
“What would it change if I go” to the trenches now, he said, claiming that his presence would have no impact on the fighting. “I would take my life to the front and leave it there, for nothing.”
The summons of Mr. Kulichenko, who is 35, underscores the unpredictable and lopsided mobilization system in Ukraine that leans heavily on recruiting older men.
The policies have drawn criticism from the Biden administration, which has said Ukraine should expand its draft to younger men aged 18 to 25, who are now exempt, to defend hundreds of miles of front line. The need for soldiers is now more acute than the need for weapons, American officials have said.
Ukrainian officials say they cannot draft men in their late teens and early 20s without risking demographic shortfalls in the future, and they have pushed back against the American criticism.
“Ukraine cannot be expected to compensate for delays in logistics or hesitation in support with the youth of our men,” Dmytro Lytvyn, a communications adviser to the president, wrote recently in a post on X. It was another swipe at the pace of Western weapons support, which Ukraine views as tepid and overly cautious.
Mr. Kulichenko’s experience also points to the difficulty Ukraine has had in calibrating the rules governing draft exemptions. He became eligible for recruitment after rule changes last spring eliminated some exemptions for hardship, including for those caring for ailing relatives.
Like a game of Whac-a-Mole, each change knocks out some who enjoyed exemptions while adding others who had not — with civilians left to argue over which hardship was more deserving.
The changes to the law were intended to crack down on draft dodgers who abused the mobilization system by claiming hardship when little actually existed, a practice abetted by corruption in the draft operation.
With the loopholes supposedly plugged, recruitment officials stepped up the draft through the summer. Ukraine does not disclose figures, but military analysts have said an initially promising flow of recruits for the army has since tapered off. Fewer men are entering basic training, and many of them are old or in poor health, military commanders say.
Ukraine plans to draft an additional 160,000 men in the “near future,” the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksandr Lytvynenko told Parliament late last month. This number would restore units to 85 percent of their full strength, he said.
But reaching deeper into the pool of older men risks filling the ranks with less motivated and healthy soldiers. Even now, none of the brigades in combat are fully staffed, said Maj. Maksym Zhorin, a commander in the 3rd Assault Brigade. Of the new soldiers turning up, he said, “the quality of personnel has significantly deteriorated recently.”
Ukraine, meanwhile, is falling back at two locations on the front inside the country, in the eastern Donbas region and near the town of Kupiansk in northeastern Ukraine, and it has lost about half of the territory captured in an incursion into the Kursk region of Russia in August.
“We are truly on the verge of a military catastrophe,” Yevhen Dykyi, a military veteran and commentator on the war for Ukrainian media, told radio NV. It is not because of mistakes by the army, he said, but because of the failure to draft enough soldiers.
But aggressive mobilization efforts, mostly aimed at older men in rural areas, have led to a backlash in society. Women have blocked roads to prevent recruitment officials from searching for draft dodgers in some western Ukrainian villages.
Men have slipped across the borders to Europe to avoid the draft, sometimes swimming across rivers. Others simply remain at home, lest they get picked up at a checkpoint or other location.
Parliament has been considering a partial swing of the pendulum back — introducing several overhauls to reduce draft evasion and desertion by restoring exemptions and granting draftees more choice in how they serve. Men are now sometimes allowed to choose or change the units in which they serve, for example.
An amendment passed in Parliament in a first reading on Nov. 20 would grant deferments to civilians whom the Russians had arrested earlier in the war and to those who lost close relatives in the fighting.
If signed into law, Mr. Kulichenko could qualify on both points, though under current rules he is still eligible for the draft.
The issue of whether war injuries should merit an exemption from future service has been a divisive one in Ukraine. Men have returned to serve after suffering more grievous injuries than Mr. Kulichenko. Some have voluntarily returned to service even after their legs or arms were amputated. Such dedication is praised by Ukrainians who view their lives and homes depending on holding back Russian soldiers.
Russians arrested Mr. Kulichenko and his two brothers in March 2022 in their hometown, Dovzhyk, north of Kyiv. The dynamic in the war was the opposite of today — the Russians were retreating from northern Ukraine. The brothers were suspected of planting or helping to plant a roadside bomb that killed several Russian officers, Mr. Kulichenko said. He denied any role in the incident.
The brothers were held for three days in an abandoned sawmill where they were interrogated and severely beaten. With the Ukrainian Army approaching, Mr. Kulichenko said, the Russians decided to shoot the brothers to eliminate evidence of the torture. His ordeal was reported at the time by The Wall Street Journal and later taken up in a war crimes prosecution in Ukraine, in which Russian soldiers were tried in absentia.
Russians loaded the brothers in a truck, drove them into the forest, lined them up beside the grave and opened fire. A bullet passed through Mr. Kulichenko’s cheek and he fell to the ground. He lay still as the soldiers piled on dirt, then clambered out after they left.
The draft summons arrived in October. He said he understands the army “lacks people and that is why they take everyone.”
He has not responded to the letter by appearing at a draft board, and said he does not intend to. He does not want to fight in the war, given what happened to him, he said.
“I didn’t get over it,” he said.
The post He Was Shot in the Face. Now Ukraine Wants to Draft Him. appeared first on New York Times.
