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In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”

Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years.

Now recruitment is way down. As conscription efforts have intensified around the country, stories are spreading on social media of draft officers pulling men off trains and buses and sending them to the front. Those with means sometimes bribe their way out of service, often by paying for a medical exemption. Such episodes of corruption within the recruitment system became so widespread by the end of the summer that on Aug. 11 Zelensky fired the heads of the draft offices in every region of the country.

‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight

TIME
10/30/23
Simon Shuster

Reports of Putin’s death might not be greatly exaggerated

Is Russian President Vladimir Putin dead? According to a mysterious Russian Telegram channel called “General SVR” and Valery Solovey, a prominent Russian political analyst, the answer is yes. In fact, the Russian president supposedly breathed his last on Thursday, Oct. 26. The Putin we see now is thus actually his double, who, Solovey claims, has been filling in for the sickly real Putin for several months.

Few Russian or Western analysts believe General SVR and Solovey (who some say are one and the same person). After all, they have no concrete evidence supporting their sensational claims. They do provide remarkably detailed accounts of Putin’s supposed death that enhance their verisimilitude, but imaginative crackpots and secret police provocateurs would be expected to do the same.

The problem is that Solovey strikes one as anything but a crackpot or a dupe of the Federal Security Service. He has a biting sense of humor, speaks well, argues logically and generally comes across as the kind of professor every student would want. Other than his claims regarding Putin’s death and the supposed exile of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the deceased head of the mercenary Wagner Group, to an island off the coast of Venezuela, his analyses of Russia’s internal politics are invariably smart and incisive.