By
Matthew Luxmoore
Follow and Nikita Nikolaienko | Photography by Svet Jacqueline for WSJ

Jan. 29, 2026 11:00 pm ET
SAMAR, Ukraine—Kyrylo Horbenko represented the future of the Ukrainian army.

Immediately after turning 18, he joined a program that fast-tracks military careers for Ukraine’s youngest recruits, hoping front-line experience would help him secure a spot at a military academy he hadn’t had the money to attend.

“I want to devote my entire life to military service,” the gangly teen told The Wall Street Journal last spring as he prepared to take his oath of service at a base in east Ukraine.

Less than six months later, Horbenko was dead. Thrown into combat on the most dangerous part of the front line, he was cut down by Russian artillery while en route to reinforce a Ukrainian position in Pokrovsk in October.

In the early years of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine largely tried to keep its youngest men away from the front lines. They would be needed to rebuild the country once the war was over.

The fate of Horbenko, whom comrades described as a committed patriot and an ideal future commander, underscores the severity of Ukraine’s manpower deficit in the face of a relentless onslaught by Russian units that often outnumber its own units 10 to one.

It also illustrates Ukraine’s impossible choice four years into a war that has decimated its professional army: how to safeguard and nurture a rising generation while at the same time ensuring a steady flow of bodies to the front line?

Most men willing to fight signed up long ago. Infantry units are full of older men unfit for arduous combat missions. Front-line stints are far longer than they used to be, compounding exhaustion. Many other men are either in hiding or have paid bribes to flee the country illegally.