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Soldiers march during Ukraine's Independence Day military parade in the centre of Kiev, Ukraine, August 24, 2015. President Petro Poroshenko said on Monday Ukraine was facing a precarious year, warning that Russia had several strategies to undermine Kiev's attempts to move towards Europe.
Ukraine’s new mobilization law takes effect
A new mobilization law came into force on Saturday as Ukraine struggles to counter a growing Russian offensive in the northeast part of the country. The legislation, passed in April, requires men aged 18-60 to carry their military registration documents with them at all times and present them upon request. Conscripts must update their address, contact information, and military records within 60 days through government institutions or a mobile application.
To grow the ranks and deter draft dodgers, President Volodymyr Zelensky also signed two bills allowing prisoners to join the army and hiking fines for evading conscription. The government will offer troops cash bonuses and money toward houses or cars. But critics warn the treasury can’t afford the proposed incentives and that businesses will be forced to close if the military siphons more workers.
One thing the law does not address is demobilization. Early drafts of the law proposed that troops serving for 36 months be demobilized and that those serving on the front line for more than six months be rotated to other positions. But Ukraine's military leadership successfully lobbied against those proposals, concerned that it would strip them of their most professional and experienced troops.
To counter charges of undermining soldier morale, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry says it is working on a separate demobilization bill. But it remains to be seen whether higher troop numbers will be enough to turn the tide for Ukraine.
A view of a Dollar Tree store in Washington, U.S., June 1, 2021.
Hard Numbers: Forest of Dollar Trees axed, Danes for drafts, Colombia reforms stall, Don Lemon X-communicated, Wilders won't be PM
1,000: Dollar Tree, a major discount food and variety chain, will close 1,000 stores across the United States. The chain’s stores are often the only source of food in low-income communities that would otherwise be “food deserts,” but the stores and others like them have faced strong criticism for driving out independent grocers and selling unhealthy products.
11: Denmark has proposed to expand military conscription, nearly tripling service time to 11 months and drafting women for the first time. The move comes as a number of European countries weigh reintroducing drafts (see Daily writer Alex Kliment’s recent column on that here). But look closely and the Danes want to expand the size of their conscription force by a mere … 300 people.
8: At least eight of the 14 Colombian senators on a key committee will vote to shelve President Gustavo Petro’s healthcare reform, in a major blow to the left-wing president’s plans to expand the state’s role in healthcare and pensions. Petro, a former Marxist guerilla and capital city mayor, was elected in 2022 on a wave of anti-establishment frustrations. Since then, his agenda has stalled and his poll numbers have fallen, raising fears that he may try to mobilize the streets to defend his agenda.
1: It took just one interview with Elon Musk for former CNN host Don Lemon’s new partnership deal with X to fall apart. Musk said Lemon “lacked authenticity” and accused him of being a mouthpiece for CNN head Jeff Zucker. Lemon says he had a deal with X and “expects to be paid.” Want to see it? Lemon plans to drop the interview on social media platforms on Monday.16: Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders has abandoned his bid to become prime minister after 16 weeks of negotiations, saying that he recognized he could not gain the support of all coalition members. The Netherlands may now take an unusual path to a government, wherein the leaders of each party in the coalition do not take cabinet positions.
Ukrainian serviceman kisses his wife who was visiting him during a short break from his frontline duty, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, at the train station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine February 14, 2024.
Frozen legacy: The battle for posthumous parenthood in Ukraine
Yehor Terekhov and his wife Anna had always planned to have children. But when Yehor was injured on the front lines of the war in Ukraine, they decided to freeze that possibility — literally. The couple, who live in Kyiv, decided to preserve Yehor’s sperm in case he didn’t return from his next tour of duty. “At war, anything can happen,” he says. “It is always good to have a Plan B.”
For Yehor, 44, the decision wasn’t just personal; it was also political. He saw it as a way “to preserve the genes of the Ukrainians, especially the ones who are ready to sacrifice their lives.”
Yehor and Anna are among the thousands of couples in Ukraine who have frozen reproductive material since the war broke out in 2022. Most fertility clinics have offered the service for free or at reduced prices to military members.
Until recently, the law had nothing specific to say about using those specimens even after their donors were killed. So fertility clinics – which are common in a country that was once a world leader in surrogacy and IVF – simply required notarized contracts permitting spouses to use the sperm if the men died in combat.
Then, in November 2023, the Ukrainian Parliament passed legislation requiring clinics to destroy the sperm of soldiers killed in combat. Some lawmakers opposed posthumous reproduction on religious grounds, and others worried about the costs of cryopreservation.
But many couples were not informed of the change.
That was when Olena Babich, a Kyiv-based lawyer who has worked in Ukrainian maternity law for 20 years, took to Facebook to write about a widow who had recently learned she could no longer use her husband's sperm.
“How,” she asked, “do you explain to a grief-stricken woman who, just a couple of months ago, was drawing up documents with her husband to have a child, that while her husband was defending the state and died, our lawmakers literally deprived him of the right to be a father after his death?"
The post caused a huge public outcry. It was shared over 10,000 times and generated 1,500 comments, many of which accused the government of destroying future generations of Ukrainians, spurring Ukrainian MPs to take to the comment section to defend themselves. Many government officials wrote they did not understand what they were voting for and promised to rectify the legislation.
Ukraine’s parliament voted to revise the bill in February. Under the new law, which takes effect in April, the government will now pay for the collection and preservation of servicemen’s sperm for up to three years. It will allow for post-mortem use as long as it is explicitly permitted in the deceased soldier’s will.
“It was one of the rare cases when one Facebook post changed the legislation of the country,” says Babich.
Still, Babich is not satisfied with the revised legislation. While the government is paying for cryopreservation, there is no program to assist widows with the costs of artificial insemination, she says. In Ukraine, the cost of that service can range up to $1,000, no small amount in a country where the average monthly wage is $388.
Ukraine isn’t the only country grappling with whether fallen soldiers can father children. Ukraine is now one of just 12 countries that have legalized posthumous reproduction. Supporters of the procedure say it’s a way to preserve soldiers’ bloodlines. But there are many thorny ethical and legal questions surrounding using the sperm of the deceased.
In Israel, where the procedure has been legal since 2003, the government expanded the service after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. It is now legal to retrieve sperm from soldiers shortly after they are killed in battle. However, in Israel, it is largely the parents of the deceased, not the widows, who are fighting for the right to have grandchildren.
Some critics of posthumous reproduction have called it “planned orphanhood” and say it’s unethical to produce a child who may grow up without one or both of their parents. Others continue to object on religious grounds — IVF of any kind can involve the disposal of embryos, which they consider to be living beings.
But for couples like Yehor and Anna, it’s about leaving behind living monuments to bravery.
“To the people who are fighting,” says Yehor, who has deployed again to the front lines in Donetsk, “it is important to know that they are preserving their bloodlines.”
Does America need a draft?
A few days ago – while cleaning out a dresser drawer filled with some old pocket squares, a box of cufflinks, a bag of dead-battery watches, a wad of bills from Brazil, Russia, and Colombia, and a hollowed-out dried gourd filled with guitar picks – I came across something related to the news these days: my father’s US Army dog tags from the 1950s.
As a refugee from the various horrors that had befallen his home country of Czechoslovakia a decade earlier, my father chose to serve in the US Army, both as an act of gratitude for the US role in liberating Europe and as a way to root himself in his new home. For millions of other young men in those days, however, the army was compulsory – the draft was still in effect.
The draft, of course, lasted until the 1970s when it was scrapped as part of the national reckoning over America’s political and military failures in Vietnam.
Could it ever come back? Should it?
As it happens, a number of close US allies are again wrestling with the question of whether to reintroduce military conscription.
In Europe, countries spooked by Vladimir Putin’s appetite for empire and Donald Trump’s distaste for alliances are scrambling to shore up their armies. This year Latvia reinstated a draft, following similar moves in recent years by Sweden and Lithuania.
But it’s not just small nations along Russia’s prickly borders. Germany, which dropped its draft in 2011, is now mulling a return to compulsory service to address a shortfall in troops.
Meanwhile, in Israel, with the war in Gaza raging, there have been fresh calls to end the religion-based military service exemptions for Israel’s 1.2 million ultra-Orthodox Jews.
On the surface, these are debates about military preparedness and resources. But they are also about something deeper: the social contract between people and the state. If the government asks you to give up two years – or even to risk your life – under what circumstances would you say yes?
One might be: a good reason to fight. The Europeans worry that an expansionist Russia could eventually bring war to their borders. Top Russian generals spouting off about a “a wider European war” do nothing to reduce that anxiety. For the Latvians or Swedes or the Germans, there’s a clear and present enough danger.
Another might be: You generally trust your countrymen and your government. Sweden and Germany are both societies near the top of the list among OECD rankings of trust in government. Austria and Switzerland, which have proudly clung to their drafts and national service programs for decades – are too. Israel, for its part, may have a nasty and combative politics, but among Israeli Jews, social cohesion on national defense is famously strong.
All of this helps us understand why one important country is NOT having a conversation about a draft.
Less than 20% of Americans support the idea of bringing one back. That’s hardly surprising. The US is a deeply polarized place, where trust in the government is low. Its wars of choice, fought largely by marginalized communities, have (rightly) soured the public on foreign military adventurism.
It’s comical, in fact, to imagine what would happen if a president of either party announced a military draft: We can barely agree on who won the last election, let alone a solid reason to put our kids in combat boots.
But a draft of some kind might, paradoxically, be good for the US. For one thing, it would widen the circle of people directly affected by US foreign policy choices, which is no bad thing. One reason Iraq and Afghanistan became “forever wars” is that they were “working class” conflicts. The casualties were borne overwhelmingly by lower-income families, far from the centers of power.
A draft might also do something else that rarely happens in America these days: pull together people of different parties and incomes for a common, and in some ways extreme, shared experience.
Americans, in fact, seem to like that idea, at least if it doesn’t involve boot camp: Polls show that as many as two-thirds would support some form of mandatory national service – a kind of domestic Peace Corps.
It’s worth considering. It wouldn’t leave anyone with dog tags for their kids to find in a messy drawer decades later, but if there’s a kind of draft that can help to address America’s internal conflicts, wouldn't you be for it?.
Write to us with your thoughts on a draft in America! If you include your name and location, we might run your comment in an upcoming Daily.