When Americans picture warfighters, they don’t think of grey stubble and crow’s feet. They imagine lean bodies in digital camo, twenty-somethings with rifles and rage. That image held true for generations: in Vietnam, the average U.S. servicemember killed was just twenty-three. More than sixty percent were under twenty-one. In Iraq and World War II, the average hovered around twenty-six. These were young men dying young—sometimes barely out of high school, sometimes not even that.
But Ukraine tells a different story.
In one trench I visited, I saw a man in his fifties, hunched low, shaking from the concussive force of nearby artillery. He wasn’t some rare exception. By 2023, the average age of a Ukrainian soldier had climbed above forty-five. The country’s first conscription wave in 2022 targeted men over thirty-five. Veterans, reservists, and civilians alike—many with paunches and bad knees—were handed rifles and told to dig in. Teenagers were kept back. Even as casualties mounted and Western allies pushed for wider mobilization, Ukraine held the line on youth. Until April 2024, men under twenty-seven were exempt from the draft. Only then was the floor dropped—to twenty-five.
To this day, the front is held by middle-aged men. Taxi drivers. Welders. Dads. The kind of men who should be fixing roofs or coaching football, not defending trenches with RPGs. In some units, the average age is pushing fifty. No other war in modern memory has leaned so heavily on such old bones.
There’s valor in that. But also desperation. A country with few options is digging deep into its reserves—not of weapons, but of human will. And those reserves are aging fast. Russia has also followed a similar mentality with sending men to the front.
The reasoning behind this is brutal state pragmatism. Both Russia and Ukraine are aging societies hurtling toward demographic collapse. For years, their birth rates have hovered far below the replacement threshold of 2.1 children per woman. In Ukraine, the war has only deepened the crisis: in 2022, the total fertility rate dropped to just 0.9—the lowest in modern Ukrainian history—while millions of women of childbearing age fled the country or chose not to bring children into a landscape of death, displacement, and martial law. Russia’s figures are only slightly better. Its total fertility rate remains below 1.5, and the Kremlin has been forced to reckon with the fact that more Russians now die each year than are born—despite lavish incentives, cash payments, and state-sponsored campaigns glorifying large families.
But this isn’t just about low birth rates. It’s about population loss on all fronts. Emigration has hollowed out entire age cohorts. For years, young people from across the post-Soviet sphere—Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia—have fled to Europe, North America, or anywhere with functioning economies and political stability. Moscow and Kyiv alike have seen their educated, working-age populations shrink not just from falling birth rates, but from decades of brain drain. The war only accelerated this; in Russia’s case, the exodus of hundreds of thousands of draft-age men in 2022–2023 was not just a political embarrassment—it was a strategic wound.
In this context, conscription becomes a matter of grim arithmetic. States cannot draft what they do not have. With shrinking youth populations and fewer healthy 20-somethings to pull from, both Ukraine and Russia have turned increasingly to older men. It’s not ideology—it’s necessity. When demographics fail, bodies are found wherever they still stand.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine can truly afford to send their youngest and brightest to the front. They see young, able-bodied men and calculate their greater long-term utility to society: these are the people who might power future tech-driven economies, start families, and anchor national recovery. In contrast, a 51-year-old mechanic from a rural oblast is unlikely to contribute to the country’s demographic revival. He won’t be building a startup or raising children. In purely bureaucratic terms, he is a cost center—someone who, if not killed in battle, will one day draw a pension and require medical care. From the state’s perspective, his life is already spent.
And there is something else: optics. Young death cuts deeper. It lingers longer. A dead teenager sparks mourning that transcends ideology. Their funerals draw bigger crowds. Their faces were once on Instagram, in TikToks, in family albums uploaded to cloud servers—a visible record of potential cut short. The national psyche takes those losses personally. It becomes harder to recruit when the dead look too much like your own children. That kind of grief doesn’t just affect families; it ripples across the social fabric, eroding political will and destabilizing morale. Better, in the state’s eyes, to bleed quietly. And older men, by cruel design, tend to die quieter deaths.
One of the more haunting videos to emerge from this war is the execution of Oleksandr Matsievskyi. You can find the footage online if you have the stomach for it. If you don’t, here is what happens: a Ukrainian prisoner of war is forced to dig his own grave. As the camera rolls, his captors ask him for any final words. He simply replies, “Slava Ukraini”—Glory to Ukraine—before being gunned down in the ditch like an animal. He doesn’t look like a fresh-faced recruit. He looks like a man with mileage. A man older than what we think of as a soldier. His murder is not just a war crime—it is an emblem of the branded barbarism that has defined this war, a grotesque act filmed for spectacle and shared for intimidation. Russia denies every atrocity—Bucha, Bakhmut, the torture chambers of Kherson—but the evidence accumulates, frame by frame, body by body.
Matsievskyi’s execution hits harder precisely because he looked like someone’s uncle, not someone’s son. In a war fought by middle-aged men, the propaganda and horror have aged too. What used to be young lives lost in early promise is now middle-aged sacrifice filmed in trenches and basements. It’s no country for old men, and yet they’re the ones dying with their boots on, their final words a salute to a future they know they won’t see.