AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Ukraine's military desperately needs more boots on the ground. Draft eligibility for men spans age 25 to 60. There are reports of raids on bars and restaurants trying to catch draft dodgers. And now the government has announced plans to conscript more than 160,000 Ukrainians. This as Russia advances in Ukraine's East. Andrew Weiss is a former U.S. national security official who specializes in Russia and Ukraine at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Welcome to the program.
ANDREW WEISS: Great to be here.
RASCOE: What do these conscription efforts say about the state of Ukraine's military at this point in the war?
WEISS: Ukraine needs more people at the front. They probably need hundreds of thousands more soldiers, particularly in the infantry, which means the people who are right up at the line. So the Ukrainians are averaging about 5- to 6,000 new men being recruited every month. They need to be about five times higher than that. They should be running a monthly intake of about 30,000, which is what the Russians are currently doing if they're going to make up the ground in terms of the losses they've suffered as well as being able to kind of prevent the Russians from punching through the line at weak spots.
The problem is that the level of dysfunction inside the Ukrainian government about how to handle conscription has made that deficit really challenging to close. It's a hot potato given the losses Ukraine has suffered and then given the fact that Russia - which has, for all intents and purposes, become a petrostate - is able to buy its way out of its manpower challenges.
RASCOE: Well, just how significant are Russian advances in recent months? Does Russia have the upper hand right now?
WEISS: Yeah, the Russians have been escalating throughout most of this year, and you see the battlefield situation is getting worse for the Ukrainians. The Russians are still limited in terms of how quickly they can advance just due to their own shortcomings in terms of the quality of their offensive operations, but the Ukrainians are falling back a lot faster. And attention focuses on a couple of key, strategically important towns like Pokrovsk, which has an important role as a place for shipping supplies.
The other big challenge is that, folks may remember, in August, Ukraine seized a portion of Russia's territory in the Kursk region. That area is now where Russia is deploying North Korean troops, and the concern is that that has taken away reinforcements, kind of emergency supplies, that Ukraine would need to plug the gap elsewhere.
RASCOE: How significant is it that Russia might use North Korean troops in Ukraine?
WEISS: Upwards of 10,000 North Korean troops are now expected to be at the front, either fighting in Kursk or potentially moving into Ukraine proper. The number of North Korean soldiers is probably less important than the impact this is going to have on Ukrainian morale, a sense that Russia just keeps throwing one thing after another at them and being able to escalate.
And then it also rattles Western governments, including the United States and other European partners, who are worried about the fact that Russia has been steadily escalating the war over the course of 2024. We've seen the Russians try to lay waste to Ukraine's economy and destroy its energy grid. We've seen them conduct a large-scale sabotage campaign, including targeted killings and assassinations in various parts of Europe. And then obviously, we see Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. So I think Western policymakers are actually more now on the back foot and more worried about how this is all going than they had been, say, a year ago.
RASCOE: It seems like Ukraine is in this kind of treacherous moment. And the U.S. is also in this moment where there's a lot of questions about what's going to happen after the U.S. election. But I guess overall, do you think that the U.S. and NATO should be doing more to support Ukraine and to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin? And if so, what would that support look like?
WEISS: There's no doubt that the Ukrainians are extremely worried about the outcome of the U.S. election and the possibility that Donald Trump is going to become president again. Trump has, on numerous occasions, indicated that he wants to let bygones be bygones and to normalize ties with Vladimir Putin. And Zelenskyy feels like he will possibly have to deal with Trump, you know, that he doesn't have any choice. The problem is is that Donald Trump has routinely bashed our allies and indicated that he's not invested in things like our role in NATO.
So the most important thing, I think, that the Ukrainians and friends of Ukraine are going to be looking for from the next administration is a sense of continued commitment and then, I think, to show that we're ramping up especially our defense industrial base, which has really lagged because this is a potentially long war. We need to be able to resource it. We need to keep the Ukrainians in the fight, and we need to show Putin he's wrong about being able to outlast us.
RASCOE: That's Andrew Weiss from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you so much for joining us.
WEISS: Great to be here Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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