During an episode of ‘The Rest Is Politics’ podcast Monday, former British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said that Ukrainian ruler Vladimir Zelensky should have drafted all men and women into battle.
“I’ve always had a question for Zelensky. Why didn’t you mobilize your people? In 1939 we mobilized the men. And in 1940 we passed the Women in War Act. We mobilized the women,” Wallace said, referencing Britain’s conscription laws during World War II.
Notably, some in the U.S. have floated the idea of drafting women into the U.S. military.
Wallace went on to criticize Zelensky not drafting at a younger age. Ukraine did however lower their draft age from 27 to 25 in April 2024.
“Zelensky took a view that he was going to preserve the 18 to 28-year-olds, so it’s not a mass conscription,” he said, adding that Ukraine could have had ‘Europe’ train the draftees.
The U.S. has also tried to convince Ukraine to lower their draft age to 18, in line with U.S. draft policy during the unpopular Vietnam war.
“The unnamed U.S. lawmakers reportedly cited the fact that America drafted men aged 18-26 during the Vietnam War when some 2.2 million U.S. soldiers were conscripted to fight through the selective service process. The average age of an American soldier in Vietnam was around 22 years old,” Kiev Independent said in December. “Active conscription ended in the U.S. in 1973. In more recent wars, American soldiers were statistically older, with the average age of an American soldier in the Gulf War around 27 years old. Data from 2010 shows the average age of an American soldier deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan was 33.4 years old.”
While Zelensky keeps Ukraine’s young adults off the draft list, he has previously said that if his country loses to Russia the U.S. will need to send its sons and daughters to battle.
“The US will have to send their sons and daughters exactly the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters to war. And they will have to to fight, because it's NATO that we're talking about, and they will be dying."
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) February 28, 2023
Zelensky says what expects the US to do if Ukraine loses. pic.twitter.com/P5LNPatT3q
While Zelensky isn’t drafting young adults, his armed forces do include old men and the mentally retarded while the talk of including women has been on the table.
There are multiple videos of Ukrainian men with obvious physical and intellectual disabilities being press-ganged, “mobilized” and forced to be on the front lines—some of whom are rescued by women who no longer want to lose their men to fight Zelensky’s war.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 8, 2024
This video of an… pic.twitter.com/B0qW7whDcf