The Evolution of War Traced through Ukraine’s Army Recruitment Ads

Wherever you go in Ukraine, army recruitment ads are impossible to miss. They loom from skyscraper billboards, plaster street corners and hang from highway bridges.

The ads are the work of individual units that recruit volunteers, rather than rely on conscription. The first ones appeared in the spring of 2023, and brigades have rolled out new ad campaigns every few months.

Early ads pulsed with a call to arms, in keeping with the national drive to repel Russia’s invasion. But as the war ground on, enthusiasm waned and Ukraine struggled to recruit, the tone changed.

More recent ads have reassured people that enlistment is not a one-way ticket to the front. Some have even tried to glamorize military life. And, lately, they have played on people’s pride to defend their country.

Here’s how the ads have evolved, and what they say about the country’s shifting moods at a time of uncertainty over whether diplomatic efforts will bring an end to the war or the fighting will persist.

In the spring of 2023, as Ukraine readied a much-anticipated counteroffensive to reclaim Russian-occupied territories in the south and east, it needed men to fight. That’s when the Third Assault Brigade, founded by Andriy Biletsky, a far-right politician before the war, launched one of the war’s first recruitment campaigns.

The brigade’s ads showed armor-clad soldiers advancing across a scorched-earth battlefield, as a helicopter and a drone flew overhead. “Join the decisive battle,” it urged.

Six months later, the counteroffensive had failed, with Kyiv’s forces capturing only several villages at great human cost. Some Ukrainians questioned whether the fight had been worth it.

With the mood shifting, the Third Assault Brigade launched a new campaign. This one cast the war as an existential battle, and featured Ukrainian fighters facing zombies and monsters.

The zombie depiction tapped into the Ukrainian perception that Moscow’s forces are brainwashed by Kremlin propaganda and mindlessly kill at will, on the battlefield and off. Russian troops have been documented executing Ukrainian civilians.

“We wanted to show that if you don’t fight now, darkness will prevail,” said Khrystyna Bondarenko, the brigade’s head of media.

By late 2023, the war had settled into a bloody stalemate. Ukraine’s army needed to replenish its ranks after the failed counteroffensive. But with no end to the fighting in sight, more and more Ukrainians were reluctant to join.

So the brigades shifted their message. They began advertising noncombat roles to show that enlisting wasn’t always a march to the front lines.

Azov, a National Guard unit, launched a campaign with the tagline “The military needs different professions.” The ads showed cartoon-style hands holding a stethoscope, a wrench or a pen — a reminder that the army also needs doctors, mechanics and clerks.

The Third Assault Brigade highlighted how new technologies — especially the drones now flooding the battlefield — were reshaping soldiers’ roles. Alongside posters of a man wielding a chainsaw, the brigade released ads showing soldiers in goggles piloting drones or working on laptops.

The Ukrainian Army also struggled to enlist men because the draft process remained mired in Soviet-style bureaucracy and corruption. Many men were assigned to roles that didn’t fit their skills and received only a few weeks of training.

“People were afraid that as soon as they joined the army, they would be sent to the front lines not knowing what to do,” said Vsevolod Kozhemyako, a businessman who founded the Khartiia brigade at the start of the war.

To ease those fears, Khartiia launched a series of ads promising recruits NATO-style training and financial support. The posters featured real brigade members who at times looked more like IT workers than soldiers, with weapons absent from many of the images.

“We always need people with good business skills,” Mr. Kozhemyako said. “So we were telling them they would be used based on their skills.”

Last summer, conscription was on everyone’s lips as Ukraine embarked on a major mobilization drive. A new law required all men ages 18 to 60 to register on a government website, the first step toward a possible call-up. The authorities set an ambitious target of drafting 30,000 new soldiers each month.

Many men who wanted to avoid the draft went into hiding.

In response, the Third Assault Brigade launched campaigns over the next six months portraying army life as cool. Targeting younger men, who are needed for assault missions, the ads drew on youth culture with styles like anime. One video showed brigade members battling zombie-like Russian soldiers and bonding with friends on the training ground. The video ends with a young man deciding to join the unit’s ranks.

The brigade said it had used artificial intelligence to produce the ads. Ms. Bondarenko, its head of media, said that A.I. saved resources — the brigade cannot afford to pull soldiers from the front lines for photo shoots — and opened up new possibilities for original content.

Another ad showed a drone pilot reclining in a deckchair on the beach, with the tagline “Summer, FPV, Third Assault.” With the reference to first-person-view drones, the ad played on a widespread belief that being a drone pilot was a way to take part in the fight while staying safely behind the combat lines.

That perception has changed. As drones became central to the battlefield, drone pilots themselves became prime targets for enemy strikes.

The Third Assault’s most provocative campaign came last summer, when the unit ran ads showing a model lounging on a soldier’s lap or embracing him on a motorcycle. The message was clear: If you join the brigade, Ms. Bondarenko said, “beautiful girls will love you.”

Critics called the campaign sexist, but Ms. Bondarenko said it was highly effective, attracting as many as 250 applications per day to join the brigade.

By the time Ukraine entered its fourth year of full-scale war this year, fatigue had set in across the country. The message that army life was pleasant no longer resonated. So the brigades once again shifted their approach, this time appealing to people’s sense of pride and duty.

Leading the effort was Azov. In the summer, the unit released a video ad showing two women at a hair salon. One laments that she can’t take her husband out to celebrate his birthday because he’s worried that draft officers will snatch him if he leaves the house. The other casually says that she and her husband plan to go to Italy.

“Seriously? Your husband got an exemption?” the first woman asks. “No,” the second replies. “Mine is in Azov.” The hair salon falls silent.

The video shames those evading service and nods to the pride that comes from joining a unit that earned heroic status for its fierce resistance to Russian assaults. It was also a pointed reminder that while martial law bars most civilian men from leaving the country, soldiers can be allowed to travel abroad during breaks.

In another ad released this spring, Azov showed a young recruit video-calling his mother from the training ground and telling her, with a faint smile, “Mom, I’m joining Azov.”

Oksana Bondarenko, a communications officer for Azov, said the ad was timed to the introduction of a new government program encouraging enlistment among 18- to 24-year-olds, a group that is not subject to mobilization in Ukraine, which begins at age 25.

“Most young men say that when they decide to join the army, they’re afraid to tell their parents — mostly so that their mothers do not get upset,” she said. The campaign suggested that joining the army might make your family proud.