December 13, 2025:
Ukraine has once more made it legal for military age men to leave the country. In 2021 there were 20 million Ukrainians living outside Ukraine. Since 2022 that has been increasing each year, Current Ukrainian population is about 39 million and the government has been seeking ways to improve morale while also sustaining the fight against Russian invaders.
One proposal that was implemented was establishing universal training for 18-22 year old men. For those still in school, mandatory training for male students is now conducted in universities and other post-high school institutions as a standalone subject. Training consists of 90 hours of theoretical instruction followed by 210 hours of practical training Subjects include basic methods of military service, first aid, and operational tactics before they move to hands-on exercises in specialized training centers. This approach is supposed to make the trainees more confident about military service and less likely to flee the country because they feared what might happen if they went to war.
Ukrainians have been fighting the Russians for nearly four years and are seeking to institutionalize their military lessons learned. The Russians are now short of resources and still operate under economic sanctions. Ukraine believes that with improved training for all their personnel, they will reduce their own casualties while increasing those of the Russians. Vladimir Putin vowed to keep fighting for as long as it took. That will be an empty promise if Putin discovers that a major change in troop quality makes any Russian military efforts futile and very costly in terms of men and resources.
Ukraine already has some units that adopted these improved methods before the war but never had time or resources to retrain everyone. Over the last year Ukrainians have been standardizing their troop training and using methods that combine all that has been learned so far. This is done by simply by adopting what did work, discarding what didn’t and gradually retraining all units that were not using the most effective methods. All new recruits would be taught to use the new techniques, even if it lengthened the basic training.
NATO nations add individual training for sergeants and officers, some of it delivered via videos, including interactive versions. European NATO members play a larger role in this retraining because they are close enough, often adjacent, to Ukraine to receive Ukrainian trainees and send them back quickly after training is complete.
The Americans have been using the Center for Army Lessons Learned, of CALL, since the 1980s. CALL personnel have been compiling and organizing lessons learned in Ukraine for the Ukrainian. The CALL concept and implementing CALL results was one of the factors behind the revised training program. The reduced casualties encouraged more Ukrainian men to join and persuaded some military age men who fled the country to return.
By 2023 the Ukrainian military had grown to 700,000 troops plus over a quarter million police, border guard and reserves available. By 2025 that grew to 900,000. About fifteen percent of these personnel were women, who, except for some snipers, handled support tasks. Several hundred thousand civilian workers also handled support tasks. This was a practice practiced by the Soviet Union military. When Ukraine became independent, as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, some Soviet military practices were retained. Unlike the Russians, who continue to send barely trained recruits into combat, Ukraine learned from NATO, particularly American, experience. Ukrainian soldiers received considerably more training than their Russian counterparts and were more lethal and less susceptible to combat losses.