- Ukraine is looking to draft a law by the end of 2026 that will legalize postwar mercenary work.
- It could help its hundreds of thousands of soldiers turn their battlefield experience into careers.
- Ukraine is estimated to have 880,000 to 1 million troops, or at least 6% of its workforce.
Ukraine is moving to legalize private military companies, paving the way for its roughly 900,000 troops to potentially work as mercenaries in a postwar future.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that he had instructed government officials and intelligence services to draft a law that would permit such organizations by the end of 2026.
Speaking in his regular address, Zelenskyy said the decision was made as part of a discussion of "postwar opportunities for our warriors."
"The whole world sees that the Ukrainian warrior is truly strong and truly experienced. Our security export — after this war and for veterans — must become a real business opportunity," Zelenskyy said.
Ukraine fields between 880,000 and 1 million active personnel, a roughly fivefold increase from pre-war levels.
The country had about 200,000 troops and personnel in early 2022, before conducting a mass mobilization of men aged 27 to 60 that year. In 2024, it lowered the draft age to 25.
A million troops could represent at least 6% of Ukraine's total workforce. Hundreds of thousands more adults now work for local defense industry manufacturers. Ukraine hasn't been publishing labor surveys since 2022, and it's difficult to estimate how many working adults it will have after the war.
Government statistics from 2021 said the country had a labor force of 17.4 million people, but millions of workers have since left or been displaced. It's unclear how many will return.
Jobs are also hard to come by, with Ukrainian officials saying in 2024 that the employment rate was around 53%. Postwar recovery often varies widely by country, but research shows that the longer a conflict drags on, the more likely that its economy takes more than 10 years to recover.
A 2022 analysis by the London-based think tank Centre for Economic Policy Research, for example, found that more than half of modern postwar economies took at least two decades to catch up to the GDP per capita growth of peer nations.
Ukraine has been bolstered somewhat by foreign aid and a surging local defense industry, and its GDP has increased steadily by between 3 to 5% each year since plunging 29.1% when the war began. But its full-scale war has also already entered its fifth year.
The new law could thus be a significant boon for troops exiting the war, with skills such as drone piloting and maintenance being increasingly in demand overseas. Kyiv said in January that it trained at least 50,000 drone pilots in 2025 alone.
Mercenary work is formally outlawed in Ukraine, though the country has relied heavily on volunteer organizations and battalions since 2022. Now, however, many informal fighting units have since been absorbed into Ukraine's official military structure.
Zelenskyy didn't say if Ukraine's government would be involved in regulating private military companies. Nor did he define what services they would be permitted to offer.
One of the most well-known private armies in the region, Russia's Wagner Group, fought alongside the Kremlin's troops against Ukraine during the earlier years of the war. The contractor firm is often considered a shadow extension of Moscow's military, but has fallen in influence after its then-leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, notoriously launched a dramatic, short-lived coup in 2023 .
