
Military Entrepreneurism Fuels Direct Recruitment in Ukrainian Units
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 22 Issue: 14
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Executive Summary:
- Facing a critical manpower shortage, Ukraine has adopted a decentralized recruitment model, empowering top-performing units to handle their own recruitment, training, and deployment. This approach, known as military entrepreneurism, contrasts with traditional centralized conscription.
- Units such as the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade and the 414th Unmanned Aerial Systems Strike Regiment provide tailored roles, quality training, and well-equipped conditions, which have attracted volunteers and improved retention, contrasting with unpopular forced mobilization efforts.
- Ukraine’s shift towards unit-led recruitment is reshaping both its military and political landscape. Expanding this decentralized model across will be crucial in maintaining force cohesion and preventing further disparity between elite and regular units.
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine reaches its third year in the coming weeks, Ukrainian armed forces are adapting in new methods of recruitment, training, and deployment that challenge traditional ideas of centralized conscription and unpopular mobilization efforts. In the latest indication of Ukraine’s manpower dilemma, the Ukrainian Air Force announced a special commission to investigate the forced reassignment of aircraft maintainers to infantry units (UNIAN, January 16). Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Chief of the General Staff Oleksandr Syrskyi assured the public that technicians in shortage specialties would remain in place while acknowledging the pressing needs on the front (UNIAN, January 14). This scandal follows one from late fall, when around 1,700 personnel out of 5,800 reportedly deserted the French-trained 155th Separate Mechanized Brigade, a flagship unit meant to symbolize Europe’s enablement of forward-deployed combat power (RFI, January 10).
Amid the critical manpower shortage and the immense political cost of coercive mobilization, a novel recruitment approach is quietly shaping the future of warfare (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 18, 2024). No less important than Ukraine’s whole-of-society technological adaptation, this new recruitment approach offers important lessons to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) militaries confronting their own recruitment shortfalls in peacetime and in preparation for highly attritional large-scale combat. Ukraine’s decentralized approach can be described as military entrepreneurism, in which top-performing units have been responsible for recruiting, equipping, training, and deploying motivated troops tailored to their needs. These tasks are traditionally centralized in armed forces bureaucracies.
An example of this new recruitment approach is Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade. This brigade has a Telegram following of over 327,000 and is one of Ukraine’s largest military units (Telegram/ab3army, accessed February 5). With its own training program, fundraisers for equipment, and public relations campaign, it offers an antidote to the central government’s unpopular mobilization campaign that is often perceived as sending untrained men to random assignments and near certain death (Radioroks.ua, October 13, 2023; Ab3.army, accessed February 5). In July, the brigade’s combat veterans organized a standup-style tour in EU countries marketed toward the Ukrainian diaspora, offering informal conversations with honest answers to questions about the realities of war (TSN, July 9, 2024).
In a January 4 interview, the brigade’s commander, Andriy Biletsky, declared that there is no real use in “busification”(бусифікація), Ukraine’s 2024 word of the year describing the dragnet conscription of men from streets to army buses (UNIAN, January 6). “We all understand very well that we need conscription … but we understand that the forms it has taken are inadequate,” he said (, January 4).
Another unit, the 414th Separate Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Strike Regiment, has a similar approach. Notably, it does not use recruitment centers, relying on a 94-point questionnaire and phone interviews with potential recruits (Ukrinform, December 16, 2024). Its commander, Robert Brovdi, announced a self-funded, self-equipped recruitment drive and reported that the unit has grown from a company to a brigade over the last year. In a demonstration of pragmatism, he even welcomed deserters from poorly organized units to apply for the 414th Regiment. A State Border Service brigade also announced direct recruitment options with a choice of specialty (State Border Service of Ukraine, November 8, 2024).
Three years of one-way deployments and attrition warfare have made the war’s initial phase of queues at enlistment centers a distant memory (Forbes.ua, July 8, 2022; see EDM, April 24, 2024). That is why the entrepreneurial success of independent Ukrainian units has seen progress. Among their keys to success are honesty with potential recruits—the realities of war are evident in each Ukrainian’s smartphone—alongside effective recruit training and individual agency. Entrepreneurial units set their own standards and train their recruits to enable their usefulness and instill confidence in a fighting chance of survival. “When a soldier joins a unit equipped with adequate resources and confident leadership, he will do everything to stay,” one battalion commander wrote in response to the French-trained brigade’s desertions (Kyiv Independent, January 17).
Contrary to the conventional mobilization’s “needs of the army” approach, Ukraine’s entrepreneurial brigades make a point to match recruits with their aptitudes and preferences. Recent statistics demonstrate that the most popular specialties include combat UAS (16 percent), drivers (16 percent), riflemen (15 percent), and headquarters staff (9 percent) (Militarnyi, January 21). Geographically, regions closest to the frontline provide the largest volunteer shares, ranging from 15 percent from Dnipropetrovsk oblast to nearly 12 percent from Lviv Oblast (Ukrinform, December 9, 2024).
The Ukrainian military has taken notice and begun to institutionalize this recruitment model. Starting October 1, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) allowed volunteers to choose their military unit (Ukrinform, October 7, 2024). The boldest step came in November, when the General Staff directed brigade commanders to create their own in-house recruitment functions, allowing them to solicit and integrate volunteers without higher intermediaries (Ukrinform, November 25, 2024).
In the last year, administrations in Washington and leaders in Poland and Lithuania have pressured Ukraine to lower its conscription age and repatriate its men from the European Union (Delfi, April 25, 2024; European Pravda, September 16, 2024; Ukrainska Pravda; January 12). Some exhausted and frustrated Ukrainian troops agree with this imperative (Kyiv Independent, January 23). A chicken-or-egg debate rages between Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian Parliament about, on the one hand, expanded mobilization proponents and, on the other hand, whether manpower or available equipment and training are limiting factors. Ukraine’s latest manpower scandals have made obvious the risks inherent in simply widening the conscription dragnet without qualitative reforms.
Focusing on intrinsic motivation, quality training, and individual agency in a mobilization crisis is easier said than done. Ukrainians at the unit level, however, have proven the value of decentralization and a business-like approach to recruitment as they have in informally procuring equipment from drones to personnel carriers and satellites (Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence, June 26, 3034; see EDM, July 8, October 8, November 8, 2024). One of these instruments has been brand management, which has led to units such as the 3rd Brigade and 414th Regiment having to turn down applicants. They illustrate the multiplying effects that public affairs practitioners can achieve at the tactical, not just strategic, level.
Beyond the military benefits of sourcing motivated troops, the future evolution of Ukraine’s entrepreneurial units has political implications—something that Ukrainian political operators surely have noticed. Biletsky is a uniformed politician who will bring his unit’s reputation to post-conflict politics, which continues growing with high-profile interviews and featured articles (YouTube/@SergiyPeichev, January 14). Spreading unit-level recruitment across the AFU is not just a military decision. Neglecting it will only further differentiate “elite” units from the rest of the regular force. The Servant of the People political party’s ongoing rebrand into “Zelenskyy’s Block” adds impetus to increasing healthy, entrepreneurial competition across the force and not limiting brand power to a handful of high-profile units and their commanders (RBK Ukraina, January 13).