Two hundred thousand people. That is how many members of the Ukrainian army are currently listed as absent without leave, according to former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, speaking in a live broadcast on Thursday. This is not a figure from enemy propaganda - it is a figure spoken by a man who sat at the top of Ukraine's defence system.

Fedorov said solving that problem should be the first priority of mobilisation reform. Not weapons procurement, not the front, not diplomacy - but the people who have already been mobilised and are not where they are supposed to be.

The state is looking for its own soldiers

He pointed to a second problem too: a vast number of Ukrainians are being sought for breaching mobilisation rules, and too many state resources go into searching for them and recruiting them. Think of it as logistics. Part of the apparatus of a country at war is tied up locating its own citizens.

The proposed reform would, according to Fedorov, change the approach at the root - better communication with citizens, better military training, and the option for recruits to choose the unit they will serve in. „We wanted to create a system in which people know they are subject to mobilisation and have all the conditions to serve their term, instead of being hunted like people evading an obligation,” he said.

Confrontations in the street

Between what is planned and what is happening there is some distance. Clashes have already begun on the streets with members of the recruitment service, who are confronting Ukrainians who do not want to be mobilised and sent to the front. That is a scene that has nothing to do with reform - it is what happens when a system stops persuading and only collects.

In parallel, according to Ukrainian media, a law passed in the Verkhovna Rada that will allow the tax authority to supply the Defence Ministry directly with data on all taxpayers aged 18 to 60. Separate communication will be arranged for Ukrainian embassies around the world. Which means for those who have long been out of the country too.

The Balkans know this scene

War rarely ends with those who wage it. It first eats away the trust between the state and the person who is supposed to defend it, and once that trust is spent, all that is left is the record - a list of names, tax numbers and addresses. This region remembers what it means when a state starts counting its people instead of persuading them.

Fedorov argues the reform would reduce draft evasion and make the process more transparent. Maybe. But the figure of 200,000 did not appear overnight, nor because of poor communication. The question nobody is asking out loud is simpler: how long can a state mobilise people who have already decided they are not coming?