In Ukraine, you can get an exemption from military service illegally for a few thousand euros. Many consider it a better option than dying on the front.
KIEV On Friday, while Russia struck Kiev with Kinžal ballistic missiles, in Odessa a criminal ring was arrested, who organized a channel for men of draft age abroad. The army evaders acted as escorts for the disabled seeking health care in other countries, but the disabled were only disabled on paper.
There are a lot of draft dodgers in Ukraine, and often they can get their release by bribing the people at the local recruiting office. Corruption is so common that the president Volodymyr Zelenskyi decided to fire to the managers of all recruitment agencies.
Zelensky has two difficult tasks ahead of him. First of all, he must show that Ukraine has made progress in anti-corruption work so that Western support will continue and integration into Western structures will progress. Second, the president has to get new soldiers into the army to support the counterattack in a situation where the war only drags on and the enthusiasm for defense decreases.
With a one-on-one attack on recruitment agencies, Zelesnkyi tackles both problems. According to him, there are more than a hundred criminal investigations against the employees of the offices, and charges have already been brought against more than thirty.
The president says that bribes have been accepted in both cash and cryptocurrency. There are many kinds of crimes. For example, the Recruitment Office of the Donetsk region paid its own employees bonuses of about one million hryvnias, or 25,000 euros, for participating in battles that never took place.
But the most common form of corruption is arranging exemption papers, or so-called white tickets, for men. White flag is estimated to cost around 10,000 euros. Selling them is so widespread that the public sometimes suggests that the state legalize the phenomenon in order to get more profits.
Many Ukrainian men do not want to go to the front. Invitation offices only in the Kyiv region in June handed over to the police six thousand cases of avoidance. The number does not include those who obtained a white flag illegally, as their papers are usually in order and they are not searched for.
The longer the war continues, the more some Ukrainian men want to continue their normal lives. The further away the hostilities rage, the less the war is felt as one’s own.
I know a couple of cases myself. A healthy young man from Western Ukraine, who considered himself an extra-patriot before the war, moved to North Macedonia in the autumn of last year by buying himself a certificate for an illness that makes him unfit for service for five thousand euros.
Another case is a man who enlisted in the armed forces at the beginning of the attack. He went through training, but when he got to the front, he realized how brutal and scary warfare is. He wants to get back to civilian life, but he doesn’t get a return ticket from the front until the end of the war. He says he’d rather sit in prison than die somewhere in Bahmut’s trench.
When avoiding service is so easy even during an offensive war, it at least does not increase the will to defend in those for whom the war is only one factor in the background.