“Not sure what the difficulty might be (might have been) in recruiting home-grown troops.”
Second, they had over 6,000 mercenaries. It is now down to 3,000. Many have died; many have left after they had an opportunity to see how bad the situation was. Ukraine’s oligarchs had hired 1,000 Americans and 3,000 other mercs. A week ago after two of ours were captured the Pentagon sent out a message to Ukraine that they wanted American mercs to leave Ukraine within the month.
Third, there is an ongoing (and almost funny) routine going on of authorities trying to “catch” people and writing them an immediate summons. The authorities used to be in uniform; but that gave advance warning to the “hiders” out and about in public and they got a running head start to avoid capture. (Videos on the net quite funny.)
Authorities wised up and no longer “recruit” in uniform and are catching more that way, though many military age men have left the country.
Fourth, 80% of Ukrainians are not “political” and don’t care who is leading the country. They are well aware of the unbelievably high casualty rates and do anything they can to avoid that fate.
Fifth, and most important most of the suitable men are dead or wounded or are already in the fight.
Why do you just post obvious Moscow-produced garbage? Do you really believe the fiction factory junk you post? It does not correspond to reality in any way. Ukrainians have fought the much larger country very well. They fight with the spirit of 1776. Ukrainians are political. The cossacks in the one-time-zone country are fighting the eleven-time-zone country to Russia’s eternal humiliation. But I guess you get paid to spew your Putin’s Bolshevik BS.