Declining Ukraine's military power is one of the key issues under debate in US President Donald Trump's latest initiative to end the war.
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The original 28-point framework, criticized in Ukraine for aligning itself with broad Russian demands, called for limiting Ukraine's military to 600,000 troops. The counterproposal of the European allies instead proposed a threshold of 800,000.
While imposing such restrictions on Ukraine, a country that was only trying to defend itself against Russian invasion, is unjustified, the post-war Ukrainian military is realistically expected to be much smaller, due to factors such as economic constraints, according to experts who spoke to the Kyiv Independent.
Ukrainian military analyst and reserve major Oleksii Hetman believes that a number of 300,000 would be sufficient, but only under the conditions that the troops would be professional and regularly trained to be ready to intervene effectively in the event that it would be necessary.
“We will not need nearly a million soldiers in the Armed Forces after the war, as we have today, because we do not even have enough training grounds where these people can conduct training and coordination of battles,” Hetman told the Kyiv Independent.
As the US pressures Kiev and Europe to quickly reach an agreement to end the war, after nearly a year of failed peace talks, Ukraine is trying to create the conditions to prevent another invasion.
While Ukrainian officials and civil society criticized the original proposal as a “capitulation” after nearly four years of war, CBS News reported on November 25, citing an unnamed US official, that Ukraine agreed to the revised version of the US proposal, except for some “minor details”.
A peace plan approved by Ukraine and the US thus calls for limiting the number of soldiers in the post-war Ukrainian army to 800,000, the Financial Times (FT) reported on November 26, citing unnamed Ukrainian officials.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, reiterated Hetman's argument that “reduction will not be a problem for Ukraine.”
“With a ceasefire, it will want to demobilize some of its forces, now estimated at 880,000, and will likely fall below 600,000,” CSIS wrote in its Nov. 24 analysis, adding that Ukraine's military had only 209,000 active troops before the war.
Analyst Hetman stressed, however, that it is crucial for Ukraine to maintain its combat-ready reserves, which total more than a million people and participate in training once or twice a year. He added that the entire society must be prepared for the outbreak of a new war, which means that both men and women between the ages of 18 and 60, similar to Israel, must be prepared for “various combat operations.”
“Imposing a limit on Ukraine's military size will send the wrong signal because then Russia is the aggressor and Russia continues to pose a threat.”
“Do training and be prepared in an emergency so they know what to do and how to do it so there's no chaos so it's clear where to go, to which facilities, what to do there,” Hetman said.
The importance of a reserve force
The ability to quickly mobilize reserves to which units are already assigned is important to the country's defense against another potential attack, according to Andrii Tkaciuk, a Ukrainian major and political scientist.
“In this sense, we have to look at the Israeli example, where the army has the ability to double its numbers in a day,” he explained.
“I think it's the right thing to do and everyone should participate in training and be ready to mobilize for the army,” he added, supporting Israel's model of mandatory military training for men of conscription age.
While Ukraine should have the right to dictate its own military size as a sovereign country, it understands that this consideration is part of the negotiation process and that reducing the size of the military would likely be necessary from an economic point of view anyway, the analyst said.
Yulia Kazdobina, a researcher at the Security Studies Program at the Ukrainian think-tank Prism, said that Parliament would have to pass the law on the size of the Ukrainian army if troop limits were to be imposed on Ukraine. But she believes it would be difficult to find people ready to fight – especially after many of those who volunteered in 2022 were killed – with Ukraine having a small army.
Echoing EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas's call for Russia to limit the size of its army and military budgets, Kazdobina stressed that “imposing a cap on Ukraine will send the wrong signal because in this case Russia is the aggressor and Russia continues to pose a threat.”
Important details should include “what counts and what doesn't” in that limit, such as the number of troops in reserve and an international monitoring mechanism, according to Steven Horrell, a senior fellow in the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
“Even if this limitation becomes essential to the success of a cease-fire and peace, ultimately Ukraine should still insist on a higher and higher ceiling,” the former naval intelligence officer told the Kyiv Independent.
“Ultimately, the past 12 years have demonstrated that Ukraine must maintain its own capabilities for national security.”
