US urges Ukraine to lower fighting age to 18 to bolster ranks, official says

Ukraine should consider lowering the age of military service for its soldiers to 18 years old, 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 a bill 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,

In the meantime, 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 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." REUTERS