Soldiers in Ukraine are veering increasingly older as the country grapples with a shortage of soldiers after roughly 20 months of brutal fighting against Russia.

As countless casualties have hampered Ukraine's forces, the average age of a soldier in the country is currently around 43 years old, Time magazine reported last week.

That average is up by nearly 10 years from March 2022, one month after the war began, when the average age of a Ukrainian soldier was between 30 and 35 years old, according to FT.

"They're grown men now, and they aren't that healthy to begin with," a close aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Time. "This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.Ukraine does not release the number of deaths or injuries among its troops, but Western officials said in August the war's total casualty (killed and injured) toll was nearing 500,000.

As the war drags on, Zelenskyy is concerned international support for the country is waning, he told Time. Less than half of Americans still support Congress giving more weapons to Ukraine, according to an October Reuters poll, where 35% disagreed and the remaining respondents were unsure.

A longtime member of Zelenskyy's team told Time the president feels betrayed by Ukraine's Western allies who he sees as having only given the country what it needs to survive the war but not beat Russia for good.

As American lawmakers squabble over whether to continue funding Ukraine, however, the country's personnel problems may be more dire than a lack of equipment.When the war first began in February 2022, Ukrainian recruits were plentiful; people volunteered in droves to defend their land from Russian invaders, while a mass mobilization effort that forbade nearly all men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country bolstered troop numbers early-on.

But recruitment is significantly down these days, Time reported, and the country is struggling to keep combat-age men from fleeing.

In August, Zelenskyy fired the head of the draft offices in every region of the country amid concerns of conscription corruption. But the move backfired, a Ukrainian senior military officer told Time, and slowed recruitment efforts to an effective stop.

Ukraine is also one of the oldest countries in the world with one in four people over the age of 60.

"When I talk, for example, with mortar operators, and the guys tell me: we have finally received as much ammunition as we have ever received in this war, and we are destroying an orcish (Russian) stronghold, but there is no one to go in because the infantry has run out," Dykyi said.

“And, unfortunately, I do hear similar things, to put it mildly; this is not just a one-off case that surprised me a lot.”

The former company commander of the Aidar battalion also said that ongoing mobilization is underway in Ukraine, but it "barely covers our losses.""We need a powerful wave of mobilization to create a numerical advantage over our enemies at least on this occasion, for the first time in the war," Dykyi added.

“We have never fought with an overwhelming number, we have always been fighting in the minority.”Dykyi said that although about a million people have been mobilized in Ukraine — 800,000 in the Armed Forces and 200,000 in other armed groups — there are actually far fewer people on the frontline compared to the 400,000 troops that Russia has concentrated there.

"Four hundred thousand is the number of orcs (Russians) in the four occupied oblasts, and that's it," he said.

“This is a real army at the front and in its immediate rear, within tens of kilometers. Those 400,000 do not include all their logistics, all their headquarters, and all their rear support. By the way, none of their wounded are included, because they are immediately taken out and are not included in this figure, nor is their entire medical care. While we have one million — this includes the army at the front, the entire northern border, where we have to keep a lot of troops, and hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers who are being treated but not taken off the hospitalization schedule because they have to return to their unit after treatment. All military infirmaries, rear logistics, all warehouses, and even military enlistment offices — this is our million. This is not the same as one million at the front.”

Ukraine has not disclosed the number of soldiers at the front, "but let's just say that it has never come close to the figure of 400,000," the former Aidar company commander said.Dykyi said that Ukraine's technological advantage in terms of its modern Western weapons systems is not so great that it alone can compensate for the difference in troop numbers.

Earlier, in an op-ed published by the UK weekly news magazine the Economist on Nov. 1, Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi said that Ukraine needs to expand the category of people who can be mobilized.

The top general called building up reserves one of his main priorities.

"Russia has failed to capitalize on its hefty manpower advantage because (Russian dictator) Vladimir Putin is worried that a general mobilization might spark a political crisis, and because Russia cannot train and equip enough people," he said.

“However, our capacity to train reserves on our own territory is also limited.”

About 43,000 women now serve in the Ukrainian military, according to the ministry of defense, an increase of about 40 percent since 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The proportional increase is less than the male fighting force, which has more than tripled over the same period.

Ukrainian women are fighting in combat in southeastern Ukraine now. In several steps since the invasion, the military abolished restrictions that kept women from roles such as machine gunner, tank commander and sniper, and lifted rules prohibiting women from driving trucks. It raised the age limit for female recruits, previously 40, to 60, the same as for men.

Earlier in the full-scale war, women had taken combat roles in paramilitary groups or by skirting rules. And they have been wounded, captured and killed, though the military does not release casualty figures for either men or women.

The Ukrainian Army’s outreach to women is a step toward equality, to be sure, but one that also reflects the tremendous toll the war has exacted.

The hundreds of thousands of men who wanted to volunteer at the start of the war, many lining up on Day 1, have already joined; many are dead or wounded. Ukraine now needs to mobilize and train many more soldiers to sustain its resistance to the Russian invasion, even as men are increasingly dodging the draft.