As Ukraine grapples with a chronic shortfall of troops, President Zelensky has announced pay rises to accompany creative military recruitment drives
Anthony Loyd
May 01, 2026
The Times
The first advertising campaign was simple and exhortative. “Join the decisive battle,” it urged Ukrainians of fighting age.
Today, in the fifth year of a war that has no immediate end in sight, potential recruits are being invited to sign up and serve for very different reasons. It might be because they are tired of the daily commute, worried about a receding hairline or would simply like to kill an invader while sitting in a deck chair. Others are asked if they want to slay the zombie horde or want to be a hero, renowned not just for courage but for being cool too.
Evolving with the changing moods and shifting public perceptions of the conflict, Ukraine’s recruitment drives have become a vital advertising tool in the struggle to offset the army’s chronic manpower deficit, projecting the brands of particular units as a way of appealing to possible volunteers.
The effort began three years ago, spearheaded by the 3rd Assault Brigade, whose media team — now part of the Third Army Corps — remain at the forefront of recruitment campaigns alongside units such as the 2nd Khartiia Corps and the 1st Azov Corps. It reflected the feeling of the time, of growing hopes for success in a counterattack against Russian troops in southern Ukraine, buoyed by victories the previous autumn.
Three years and hundreds of thousands of casualties later, wiser and battle-hardened, Ukraine’s military marketing teams have evolved. Though preserving the core message of recruitment campaigns since the First World War — be a soldier, be a man — the new appeals are likely to concentrate on themes of personal development, alongside assurances of being led by humane and competent commanders. The latter are intended to assuage widely held fears that recruits will be poorly trained and hurled into hopeless “meat-grinder’ assaults by careless officers. “The central themes vary but right now we understand that some people are afraid to join the army and go to war,” said Khrystyna Bondarenko, a former journalist with 20 years’ experience, now a serving officer who heads the communications department of Ukraine’s Third Army Corps.
The corps, built around 3rd Assault Brigade, was formed last year under the command of Brigadier Andriy Biletsky, one of the country’s most effective commanders, who has an almost cult-like following as well as a controversial past involving far-right political roots. “They think they will be sent to the front immediately and die or get injured,” said Bondarenko, 41. “It’s important to show them that before they get to war they go through several months of training, and only after that do they go to the front.”
The media wing of the corps, staffed by dozens of military personnel as well as civilians with backgrounds in public relations and journalism, has developed a strategy — regularly featuring images of Biletsky — that emphasises the pastoral care for Third Corps soldiers, as well as the humanity of its officers.
With slogans such as “Humane Commanders”, and “We Are Here to Live”, they stress the bond between commanders and their troops, as well as twinning the value of a soldier’s life with that of future generations and the need for national survival. “One of our main tasks is to get rid of that fear of the army,” Bondarenko said. “So one of our principal slogans is, ‘We don’t pity people, we take care of them.’”
‘Wars are not won without people’
The need for volunteers remains of paramount importance. War and grief are an entrenched part of Ukraine’s daily life — long gone are the heady days of 2022, when thousands of volunteers eager to fight formed long, snaking queues outside enlistment offices.
Instead, as the country’s mood swings back and forth with the fortunes of war, the chronic shortfall of troops on the front line remains the greatest challenge. In an effort to improve the situation, President Zelensky announced a series of major new reforms for the Ukrainian army on Friday, including pay rises and increases in combat supplements for infantry troops. Set to start in June, the reforms are also to include the possibility of fixed terms of service, allowing long serving soldiers the chance of a phased discharge from the army, rather than soldiering on in an open ended commitment. “On the one hand, everyone says we must fight until victory — and on the other hand, everyone is running away from mobilisation,” Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, President Zelensky’s chief adviser and formerly Ukraine’s director of military intelligence, said last month. “This is a huge, enormous problem. Wars are not won without people. Without people, wars are lost.”
If it is to replace casualties and men lost to desertion and exhaustion, as well as rotate frontline units, Ukraine is estimated to need between 15,000 and 20,000 new recruits every month.
Although Kyiv’s own casualties are not as severe as Russia’s 1.2 million losses, they are nevertheless huge. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, published in January and drawn from an analysis of multiple sources, estimated Ukrainian forces suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including between 100,000 and 140,000 fatalities, between February 2022 and December 2025.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of eligible Ukrainian recruits are avoiding service. As of January, 200,000 Ukrainian troops were declared absent without leave, while a further two million men were dodging the draft.
Men aged between 25 and 60 are eligible for conscription under martial law but mobilisation is deeply unpopular. Police have recorded 600 attacks on conscription staff since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Only five were committed in the optimistic days of 2022. Last year, 341 incidents were recorded, and there have been 117 attacks in the first three months of this
year. Many of the 200,000 Awol troops are believed to have fled their units because of uncaring or incompetent commanders, rather than a fear of fighting.
Realising the potential for recruiting from among this pool of disaffected men, the Third Army Corps has extended its recruitment campaign to target Awol soldiers, who will be given an amnesty from charges if they enlist with the corps. “Guys go Awol for different reasons: family issues, problems with their health or wounds, or problems with their commanders,” a 31-year-old sergeant, call sign “Bob”, said at a Third Corps training base where he had signed up with the 3rd Assault Brigade. He went Awol from a different unit ten months earlier.
Wounded in action five times, the sergeant said he had gone Awol because of the incompetence of his previous unit’s commanders. “A new draft of officers arrived, including a new battalion commander, and they nearly killed us all near Vuhledar,” he said, adding that he wanted to join the 3rd Assault Brigade — which he had researched through Instagram — owing to its professionalism.
Another Awol soldier who had arrived at the Third Corps base to join up, a 23-year-old called Vladyslav, had been badly wounded in his tricep while fighting in Bakhmut three years ago and had abandoned his unit because of a combination of injury and a failure of trust. “Though I was badly wounded I never had the time to recover properly,” he said. “Even though it was difficult to handle a rifle, my previous commander said I was fit. But I love the army. I rehabilitated my arm while I was Awol, then came to the Third Corps because I want to continue as a soldier.”
To date, the recruitment campaign targeting Awol troops has been a success. The Third Corps estimates that 80 per cent of its current recruitment comes either from Awol soldiers or fresh enlistees. It counts both as volunteers.
Soldiers are also civilians
Recruitment posters were first widely used in Europe during the Napoleonic wars, when impoverished volunteers were lured to service with the promise of regular pay, food and shelter.
During the First World War the recruitment poster came of age. The 1914 “Your Country Needs You” image of Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, by Alfred Leete entreated men to join the British Army and fight, and was deeply influential on artists across the world.
The “I Want You for The US Army” by JM Flagg was based on the British poster, and Soviet artists of the revolutionary era were similarly influenced. Dmitry Moor’s 1920 “Have You Volunteered?” poster, featuring a Red Army soldier pointing at the viewer, was a direct descendant of Leete’s image.
History of recruitment posters
A century later, the 2019 British Army recruitment campaign, “This is Belonging”, sought a more nuanced approach than a straight call to patriotism or revolutionary fervour, with a series of posters aimed at targeting Gen Z’s smartphone and gaming generation. Ukraine’s own recruitment messaging is fast and ever-changing, tracking societal shifts through the use of social media analytics to ascertain the public response to its campaigns. “One of our main tasks is to
break the barrier between the civilian and military world,” said Staff Sergeant Oleksandr Zhylyayev, 44, head of media projects for the 2nd Khartiia Corps. “We want our potential recruits to understand that soldiers were also civilians, and that they still like music, are parents of children, have hobbies and like to walk in the park, but their work is to protect Ukraine — and kill Russian invaders too.”
Skill rather than battlefield machismo
Priding itself as an intelligent and sophisticated unit, Khartiia emphasises personal development in its recruitment drives. Its “Grow Up in Khartiia” campaign last summer appealed to recruits with a message of learning new skills rather than battlefield machismo.
Ukraine’s latest recruitment campaigns also familiarise society with the era of long-term conflict, and remind it of the bond between soldiers and civilians: an essential message if the bleed of draft dodging is to be staunched.
To this end, aside from using billboards and social media platforms, units such as Khartiia, Third Corps and Azov use branded merchandise and café hubs, and have their own radio stations to spread their message, as well as taking to the stage and cinema.
Ukraine recruitment video
The film Killhouse, released this week in cinemas across Ukraine, was made in collaboration with Ukraine’s main intelligence directorate (HUR), the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Third Assault Brigade. Some 80 per cent of the film’s participants were soldiers on active duty from Ukrainian units. “There’s no longer you or me. There’s only us. We are one,” the film declared.
The Khartiia Corps was boosted in February when U2 released a short film, made by Khartiia member and cinematographer Ilya Mikhaylus, to accompany the band’s song Yours Eternally, in which Ed Sheeran and the Ukrainian singer Taras Topolia joined Bono and The Edge on vocals. The film featured footage from the frontline in Kharkiv, as well as one of Ukraine’s best known female soldiers, the former athlete Alina Shukh.
Staff Sergeant Zhylyayev, who before being mobilised was a marketing director for Multiplex cinemas in Ukraine, is delighted with the film’s impact. “The involvement of U2 with Khartiia Corps made people aware that it’s cool to be a part of this unit,” he said. “I want to show Ukrainian soldiers as cooler men and women than rock stars.” “We want Khartiia to be a big brand for adults, for children, for festivals, for summer camps,” he added. “We want to be like Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is for everyone.”
Anthony Loyd has been writing for the Times for over thirty years. He began his career reporting from the Bosnian war in 1993 and has since worked in multiple conflicts, including those in Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. His special reports have included eye-witness dispatches from the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Srebrenica, the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the defeat of Islamic State in Mosul, Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in Libya, and the withdrawal of the US-led coalition from Afghanistan in 2021. Anthony exposed the use of Sarin gas by the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, and later discovered and interviewed Shamima Begum in 2019. His Times multimedia projects have included the short film ‘Another Man’s War’ from Ukraine, and the highly acclaimed podcast series ‘Last Man Standing’. Among his many awards for The Times the reporter has won foreign correspondent of the year five times in the British Press Awards , and twice won the prestigious Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents.