There may be a battle looming, not just between the Trump administration and Ukraine over the conscription of men between the ages of 18 and 25, but also within the Trump administration.
The call for Ukraine to cast a wider conscription net predates the Trump administration. Facing imminent loss on the battlefield, after NATO had bankrupted its supply of weapons, demanding that Ukraine throw more men into battle emerged as the last grasp solution during the Biden administration.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “In fact, we believe manpower is the most vital need they have. So, we’re also ready to ramp up our training capacity if they take appropriate steps to fill out their ranks.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary. Right now, 18 to 25-year olds are not in the fight.”
That call was picked up by Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, who said “one of the things we’ll be asking of the Ukrainians is, they have real manpower issues. Their draft age right now is 26 years old, not 18. I don’t think a lot of people realise that they could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers… [I]f the Ukrainians have asked the entire world to be all in for democracy, we need them to be all in for democracy.”
But Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, seemed to take the opposing view to Waltz, recognizing that throwing more Ukrainians into the battle compounds Ukraine’s problems rather than solving them. “The problem with Ukraine is not that they’re running out of money,” Rubio said at his January 22 confirmation hearing, “but that they’re running out of Ukrainians.”
Hellbound and Down 