Ukraine needs people not weapons – MP
Kiev’s greatest challenge in the conflict with Russia is not a lack of Western weapons, but a critical shortage of manpower, Ukrainian lawmaker Anna Skorokhod has said.
US President Donald Trump on Monday pledged to provide Ukraine with more weapons – funded by European NATO states – and threatened Moscow with “severe tariffs” if no peace deal is reached within 50 days.
“We’ve heard something like this before, and I say it’s a game,” Skorokhod said in an interview with the Ukrainian political YouTube channel Superposition.
“Our main problem is people. Nobody is giving us people,” she added. “We can expect Trump to decide on providing weapons, but I want to emphasize that war cannot last forever.”
Skorokhod dismissed Trump’s ultimatum to Moscow as political maneuvering, arguing that none of the key players can afford to lose what even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio once openly described as a “proxy war” with Russia.
In a separate video last week, the Ukrainian lawmaker criticized official casualty figures as misleading and urged citizens to examine cemeteries and Red Cross data on missing persons to grasp the true scale of the losses.
“Just look at the demographic situation... If we are heading toward erasing the nation to zero, we are very quickly and successfully succeeding in this,” she warned.
Ukraine’s population was just under 52 million when it declared independence in 1991 amid the collapse of the USSR. By the time of the last census in 2001, that number had dropped to 48.5 million. A 2024 government demographic report estimates the population in Kiev-controlled territories at 31.1 million.
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky officially acknowledged fewer than 50,000 military casualties as of February, but third-party estimates and increasingly harsh forced mobilization measures suggest the actual number is much higher. At the same time, Kiev is bracing for continued labor shortages, as many Ukrainians who fled since the escalation of the conflict in 2022 show little intention of returning.
Moscow has accused Kiev of waging a war “to the last Ukrainian” on behalf of Western nations, with Russian President Vladimir Putin saying that Ukraine’s recruitment officers are grabbing people “like dogs on the street.”
