Braving rain and snow, hundreds of Ukrainians gathered last week outside the Kyiv City Council with signs reading, “I don’t want a park” and “Why do I need paving stones?” They chanted, jumped and clapped as they called for an end to road repairs and a freeze on the construction of a new subway depot.

Ukrainian soldiers with a tour guide in the port area of Odesa, which has been struck by drones and missiles, Oct. 8, 2023.

Protesting the renovation of one’s city may seem highly unusual, especially in a country whose president was elected four years ago on a promise to repair roads. But protesters said a more urgent cause demands funding today — the war effort.

“This money should be spent on buying weapons,” said Yevheniia Klyshal, a 29-year-old nutritionist who was waving a sign that read, “New roads won’t win this war.”

The protests, which have also been seen in other major Ukrainian cities such as Odesa and Lviv, have reflected a growing sentiment: as the war against Russia drags on and Ukraine runs out of weapons and ammunition, the whole country must be put on a war footing.

Since Russia invaded last year, large numbers of Ukrainians have raised money to buy weapons and volunteered for the army. But with the war raging far from several large Ukrainian cities, many citizens have returned to a semblance of normal life, going to work and schools during the day, and restaurants and bars at night.

Now, with Ukraine’s counteroffensive failing to yield major gains and as Russia regains the initiative in parts of the battlefield, calls have been growing for all Ukrainians to play a greater role in the war effort.

In places such as Kyiv, protesters say that will mean forgoing the comforts of life far from the front line and reallocating most public resources to the army.

“The war will last long,” said Iryna Ignatovych, a founder of Money for the AFU (the initialism for Armed Forces of Ukraine), a citizens group behind the Kyiv protests. “Russia is a very big country with a lot of resources. Ukraine is not so big, so in order to win, we must redirect all our efforts to help our military. The rear must support the front.”

“It’s a question of the nation’s survival,” Ignatovych said.

The protests began in Odesa in late August, when a few dozen Ukrainians demanded that money earmarked for repairing a courthouse be spent on the army instead. The initiative struck a chord with many citizens and the movement quickly spread to other cities. In Kyiv, demonstrators have gathered every Saturday since mid-September under the Soviet-style building of the local city administration to press for changes in the city’s public spending.

Much of their anger has been directed at the Kyiv city budget for 2024, which includes $1 million to rebuild a crossroads and $670,000 to renovate a park opened only five years ago. “It’s just luxury,” Ignatovych said.

Some Kyiv city councilors have suggested that it was not the capital’s main role to finance the war effort and that substantial funds have already been allocated to funding army brigades. Still, the capital’s military budget for 2024 — about $27 million, according to official figures — is only a fraction of this year’s, which has outraged protesters.

“I want the budget to be used for the defense of our country, not to repave sidewalks or put asphalt on roads that already look normal,” said Tetiana Nagumuk, who was standing among protesters last week, a Ukrainian flag draped around her shoulders.

Around her, hundreds of people in their 20s and 30s held up placards highlighting what they saw as absurd wartime investments.

“You’re building roads for the occupiers,” said one. Another was scrawled with a slogan alluding to the air raid alerts that routinely rattle the capital. It read: “Kyiv in 2024 be like: Attention! Missile danger. Proceed immediately to the renovated park,” with the word “shelter” crossed out.

Under pressure, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced last week that the City Council would earmark an additional 600 million Ukrainian hryvnias (about $16 million) to the military in this year’s budget.

That didn’t quell the protesters’ anger.

“Six hundred million is not enough!” they chanted Saturday, on a bitter-cold morning, as passing motorists honked their horns in support. The demonstrators demanded that more money be spent on buying armored vehicles, building bomb shelters and funding relief programs to help wounded soldiers returning from the front.

“It’s OK to make our city comfortable and nice, but I don’t think that’s our main need now,” said Liena Kyrylovska, 24. Like most protesters, she also believed that funding urban development would lead to the kind of corruption schemes that have long plagued Ukraine.

Many in Ukraine had hoped for a quick victory after the country’s armed forces successfully repelled invading Russian forces and then regained vast swathes of territory last year.

But Ukraine’s stalled summer counteroffensive has dashed those hopes and “a majority of people now understand that we’re not on a pathway to victory,” said Petro Burkovsky, head of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a Ukrainian think tank.

Burkovsky said the popularity of the protests — in a country where public displays of criticism of the government have mostly vanished during the war — shows that Ukrainians are eager not to let what they consider wasteful spending derail the war effort.

To many, this means shattering the relative sense of normalcy that has taken hold in cities far from the front line.

“Sometimes, everything looks like we live in a country without a war,” Yevgen Dykyy, a former Ukrainian battalion commander, told the magazine Ukrainsky Tyzhden last month. He said he had been shocked to see “hundreds of flower beds, sidewalks, pedestrian bridges and fountains” that had been paid for by taxpayers and that were spread all over Kyiv.

“Have we already won the war?,” Dykyy asked. “Today, all the money used for building fountains, decorations and laying tiles should be redirected directly into the national defense fund.”

Myroslav Havryshchuk, one of the organizers of the Kyiv protests, said putting the country on a war footing had become all the more urgent in the face of the West’s dwindling support for Ukraine’s war effort. “We need to think strategically and start to count on ourselves,” he said.

Perhaps the protesters’ main fear is a return to a situation similar to that of a few years ago, when a frozen conflict between Ukrainian troops and Moscow’s proxies in eastern Ukraine gradually escaped the public’s attention, leaving the country unprepared for the full-scale invasion that lay ahead.

“I really hope that this won’t happen,” said Markiian Zadumluvyi, a photographer at a recent protest.

A few feet from him, a protester held up a sign that read, “I don’t want a park where I can be killed by the Russians.”

Ukraine faces soldier shortage as war with Russia drags on.

Ukrainian soldiers..

It's been nearly two years since Russia's still-ongoing invasion of Ukraine shocked the world and galvanized Western nations to a degree unseen since the Cold War. In that time, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been estimated killed in battle, alongside hundreds of thousands of their Russian counterparts, according to the Kyiv Post. All told, recent U.S. intelligence estimates that Russia has lost "nearly 90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began," Reuters reported — a staggering figure that brings into focus the sheer size and scale of the past two years of warfare.

Still, in spite of what is allegedly a nearly 1-1 turnover in the Russian military since the start of the war, it's Ukraine which now finds itself at a loss for manpower — even as the conflict between both countries seems to have stagnated into a protracted stalemate. Under siege by a vastly larger global superpower, the Ukrainian armed forces have spent months struggling to replenish their ranks and regain momentum against a foe with a seemingly bottomless reserve of potential new recruits. With lagging enlistment an existential concern for Ukraine, the country has embarked on a major effort to expand its ranks, all while continuing to make the case for foreign aid to help support the ongoing war effort.

Just how serious is Ukraine's recruitment problem, and what is it doing to ensure the country has enough manpower to continue its fight against Russian imperialism?

'Conscription raids'

The Ukrainian military is "desperately looking to plug its front lines" against Russian offensives, with some military commanders "resorting to conscription raids on gyms and shopping centres," The Economist reported this month. The result, according to the magazine, is that "few of those who are signed up this way make good soldiers." Russia, meanwhile "looks favoured in the long run" with a pool of potential recruits — particularly those in prisons and from poorer communities — about four times larger. Ukrainians, however, are less likely to enlist in part because many no longer see the war with Russia "in the existential terms" that defined the conflict at its onset, according to a Defense Ministry spokesperson.

Some potential recruits are similarly dissuaded by the fact that Ukraine has "no clear deadline for the demobilization of soldiers" including those who have served for nearly two years, Germany's DW News reported. A petition saying that "military service cannot remain open-ended and calling for troops to be given a clear timeline" for dischargement garnered 25,000 signatures, and prompted several protests in Kyiv, Reuters reported last month.

Meanwhile, military recruiters' "aggressive methods go well beyond the scope" of their authority, causing the number of court rulings on alleged conscription abuses and errors to skyrocket to more than 200 in November alone, according to The New York Times. Similarly, corruption among recruitment officers prompted a mass firing this summer by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who announced in August that the government had "opened 112 cases against 33 officials involved in recruitment" over alleged bribes, The Times reported.

Speaking with Time magazine last month, one Ukrainian official close to Zelenskyy stressed how dire the situation had become by pointing out that even if Western arms and equipment were delivered without delay or reduction, "we don't have the men to use them."

'Everyone knows there are opportunities'

High on Ukrainian officials' list of personnel-boosting efforts is cracking down on draft dodging. Speaking with the Kyiv Post, one draft dodger who paid $5,000 for a medical certificate that exempted him from the draft explained that even though "it all felt wrong and disturbing, everyone knows there are opportunities" to escape conscription.

To counteract this, Ukrainian officials recently enacted a system they hope will expand volunteer enlistment by allowing volunteers to "apply for the posts to which they feel best suited — perhaps to an unusual degree in a war of national survival" Politico noted, while digital tracking will better assess the country's mobilization ability.

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zaluzhny acknowledged Russia's long-term manpower advantage to The Economist, calling it "a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life." For Ukraine, however, the "most expensive thing we have is our people."