The Ukrainian army needs weapons. Lowering the conscription age from 25 to 18, as the U.S. wants, will only set more soldiers up to fail

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The Biden administration is urging Ukraine to lower its conscription age to 18 — a significant drop from the current minimum of 25 years old —  in a bid to quickly increase the size of Kyiv’s military. Were the Ukrainians better armed, this recommendation would have been sensible, but it is difficult to ask people to fight without proper equipment.

Top White House officials, however, are suddenly claiming that Ukraine has enough weapons and only lacks soldiers — which is simply untrue. It thus seems that President Biden’s team is using its last gasp of power to throw Ukraine under the bus, lest posterity judge the Democrats for failing to adequately support Kyiv. Evidently, legacy matters more than accountability.

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It’s true that the Ukrainians have been outnumbered since the beginning of the war, as is inevitable when a nation defends itself from an adversary that is over three times more populous. Yet the fact that Ukraine was able to gain the upper hand in 2022, liberating large swathes of its land in the process, shows that this handicap has been surmountable.

Although Ukrainian successes during the first three months of war were clearly a product of Moscow’s overconfidence, it quickly became apparent, as Russian forces reorganized, that western weapons, not the size of Ukraine’s........

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