Ukraine on Wednesday lowered the military conscription age from 27 to 25 in an effort to replenish its depleted ranks after more than two years of war following Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The new mobilization law came into force a day after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed it. Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed it last year.
It was not immediately clear why Zelenskyy took so long to sign the measure into law. He didn’t make any public comment about it, and officials did not say how many new soldiers the country expected to gain or for which units.
Conscription has been a sensitive matter in Ukraine for many months amid a growing shortage of infantry on top of a severe ammunition shortfall that has handed Russia the battlefield initiative. Russia’s own problems with manpower and planning have so far prevented it from taking full advantage of its edge.
Haha very funny.
But just to make this clear: The “Russian Oligarch” link you sent starts off with people from the 90s – that generation is gone, replaced by people hand-picked by Putin. They did not become filthily rich and then came to dominate politics, it’s the other way around: Trusted by Putin, they got installed in positions of power which comes with the privilege of skimming off money. That’s the exact same system the Tsars had. Putin knew Prigozhin since the 90s, they were old buddies.
Russia could, in principle, have turned towards an actual oligarchy like Ukraine, the oligarchs certainly tried to, see e.g. Khodorkovsky. In Russia the Siloviki didn’t let that happen, every single one of those oligarchs committed some crime you can nail them for – or not, if they stay in their lane, meaning out of politics. In Ukraine, for one reason or the other, that didn’t happen, they were let into parliament where they then could slowly be disempowered by the people, instead of three letter agency cadres. Which is also how power ultimately ended up with the people in Russia and (broadly speaking) the FSB in Russia.