By Jeff Mason
(Reuters) -Ukraine should consider lowering the age of military service for its soldiers to 18 from 25, a senior U.S. administration official said on Wednesday, putting pressure on Kyiv to bolster its fighting forces in the country's war with Russia.
Speaking to reporters, the official said Ukraine was not mobilizing or training enough new soldiers to replace those lost on the battlefield.
"The need right now is manpower," he said. "The Russians are in fact making progress, steady progress, in the east, and they are beginning to push back Ukrainian lines in Kursk ... Mobilization and more manpower could make a significant difference at this time as we look at the battlefield today."
Russian forces are making gains in Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of the 2022 invasion, taking an area half the size of London over the past month, analysts and war bloggers said this week.
In April Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed into law legislation to lower the mobilization age for combat duty from 27 to 25, expanding the number of civilians the army could mobilize to fight under martial law, which has been in place since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
U.S. President Joe Biden's administration has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine, but that backing may diminish when President-elect Donald Trump comes to power in January. Trump has tapped Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who presented him with a plan to end the war in Ukraine, to serve as a special envoy for the conflict.
A source in Zelenskiy's office said the country did not have what it needed to equip the troops it was mobilizing now.
"Right now, with our current mobilization efforts, we don’t have enough equipment, for example armored vehicles, to support all the troops we are calling up," the source said. "We cannot compensate for our partners’ delays in decision-making and supply chains with the lives of our soldiers and of the youngest of our guys.”
U.S. officials recognize getting younger troops is politically fraught for Zelenskiy’s government and Ukraine has discussed the option of offering incentives for younger people to sign up in a non-mandatory recruitment drive, another official said.
Behind closed doors, Germany also has been calling on Ukraine to lower its conscription age, according to a German defense ministry source.
While Biden is still in office, the United States will continue to provide Kyiv with hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds, thousands of rockets of various ranges, hundreds of vehicles and weapons systems to support combat operations as well as air defense interceptors, the first U.S. senior administration official said.
"Ammunition and vehicle shortages are not the most critical issue facing Ukraine. They now have healthy stockpiles of the vital tools, munitions and weapons that they need to succeed on the battlefield," he said.
"Without a pipeline of new troops, the existing units who are fighting heroically on the front lines, cannot rotate out to rest, refit, train and reequip."
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Susan Heavey, Thomas Balmforth, Simon Lewis and Sabine Siebold; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Deepa Babington)
