Ukraine's young people started heading west in 1991. Ukraine, while the industrial equivalent to Detroit for the Soviet Union only had dated equipment and non-competitive production methods when competing with The West whose closed markets were protectionist against any outside intrusion.
Most of the farming was industrialized with little hope for an influx of new young city kids and all of society was rapidly descending towards mafia level rent seeking as the Army sold off huge rafts of equipment at bargain basement prices (billions to hundreds of thousands in some cases), making that market segment no longer practical either (at one time Ukraine had the third largest army in Europe, just behind Russia and NATO).
Without industry, farming or military, the majority of the 'cream of Ukraine's youth' simply left and never returned. Ukrainians joined labor markets and crime gangs and, sadly, were whored out if they were women.
Because anything was better than slow starvation in a country which was 90% bread basket.
Comes the 2014 war in the Donbas, some 14,000 civilians are killed in the east but Ukraine's army ALSO suffers a huge defeat as, having gone down from 20 brigade constructs to about 6, going in, they came out with ONE, the 17th Armored Brigade. Now, a Brigade should honestly have 3,000-3,500 men and most in Ukraine had considerably less, going in. But by the time the Russians were done kicking their asses at places like Ilovaisk and Debaltseve, their wasn't enough left to man a company.
In Debaltseve alone, they bad guys lost 200 tanks, 300 other AFV, 150 tubes of artillery and 700 soft skin vehicles.
The result was that, from 2016 onwards, the next generation of Ukrainian youth, already depleted by their parents having kids outside the country and never coming home, to add them to the population, simply vanished. 'Off Grid' was very real and an ongoing problem because Ukraine needed new young idiots to shell civilians in The East. And the new young idiots refused because small scale manufacturing, STEM jobs and most importantly, IT had come to Ukraine in a big way. And so they stopped living at home, coming in to work to pick up their paychecks, going to bars and clubs and movies to socialize and a whole host of big fat cat, little no-more-war mice actions.
With the result that, since 2016, Ukraine has had between 15-25% shortfalls in their conscription, for the better part of 6 years. This is why so many young volunteers (and there were many) were so ill prepared when someone literally handed them an AK-47, two magazines, a case of Molotov Cocktails. And pointed to a map with 'the last we heard, they were around here, have a car? Good luck and get going...' these UNTRAINED young people tried and mostly died while the U.S. brought in literally plane loads of FGM-148 Javeline and NLAW and Panzerfaust 3.
Only about half of which got to the front, the rest being 'disappeared' into convenient arms dealers hands for resale in Kosovo, Damascus, DAK and other exotic locales. As Ukrainian oligarchic criminal syndicates continue to dominate all levels of government in a rent-seeking apparatus you would not believe.
The point being that Ukraine started behind the curve of viable, sustainment level, reproduction, then lost an entire generation of young people who saw the Kiev regime slaughter their older brothers to butcher Russian speaking Ukrainians.
And promptly Bowling Alone refused to participate in that mess as they finally had options again.
Resulting in multiple cohorts, 18-27, showing up, as patriots, when their country really needed them, with ZERO TRAINING.
You can imagine how well that turned out. This is a large part of why the dead are scattered, as rotting corpses, savaged by animals and left to stink in the sun, across the battlefields of Ukraine today.
And why NATO had to essentially take over the role of rapidly training up levy after levy of cannon fodder infantry, as the GOOD SOLDIERS all left their administrative jobs to fight at the front.
The simple fact of the matter is (and this is only what is publicly admitted, in the Kyiv Post, so it may factually be worse) Ukraine entered this war with upwards of 25% less on-rolls troops than its minimal (for the size of country) level of 6 brigade constructs needed. And that was with most of those units 'put into reserve status' with 90% losses to things like heavy mechanized systems.
These heroically brave people have been screwed from the beginning. They should have taken neutrality and gotten rich off of acting as an end hub for BRI.
