The Draft Dodgers of
Ukraine
The country’s struggling army is trying to
replenish its ranks. But with its forces
taking a pounding in the east, Kiev is
discovering that new recruits are making
themselves scarce.
By Alec Luhn
February 20, 2015 "ICH"
- "FP"
- KIEV, Ukraine — Roman has been
dodging the draft for almost a month now.
A longtime political activist and accountant
in Lviv, in western Ukraine, he no longer
lives where he’s registered at his parents’
house in a small village outside the city,
so he wasn’t there when the local draft
board tried to serve him notice on Jan. 16.
His father refused to sign at first; he
relented after the head of the village
threatened to call the police. But Roman,
24, who declined to give his last name for
fear of being tracked down, never showed up
for the required medical examination.
“I am against every war, but especially this
war, because it’s meaningless,” said Roman,
who has been staying in an apartment in Lviv
that belongs to his wife’s relatives. “I
think this conflict was created
artificially. The Ukrainian mass media
helped this along by spreading this
patriotic hysteria.”
Desperate for manpower in its standoff with
pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, which
has lasted some 10 months and killed at
least 5,600, the Ukrainian military early
this year reinstituted a general draft,
giving itself the power to conscript young
men between the ages of 20 and 27. But a
huge number of Ukrainians, like Roman, are
reportedly avoiding service, either because
they’re disturbed by the prospect of
fighting their fellow countrymen in the
rebel ranks, are against the war in
principle, or because they are simply afraid
to go. Although no exact figures on the
number of those avoiding conscription are
available, it could be as many as tens of
thousands: The military said in September
that during partial mobilizations in 13
regions in 2014, 85,792 of those summoned
didn’t report to their draft offices and
9,969 were proven to be illegally avoiding
service.
Now young men with views like Roman’s are on
the run as the government tries to stem a
rash of reported draft dodging and is
cracking down on anti-war sentiments. Last
week, high-profile journalist Ruslan Kotsaba
was detained on charges of treason and
espionage after he spoke out against
mobilization. Days later, President Petro
Poroshenko announced that the security
service had “detained 19 active critics of
mobilization” for their “anti-Ukrainian
activity.” New regulations reportedly in the
works could soon prevent those eligible from
service for going abroad or even leaving
their home regions without permission.
The reports of large-scale draft dodging
have raised questions about whether Ukraine
will, in the face of a cease-fire that
appears increasingly shaky, be able to
recruit the manpower it needs to defend
itself against Russia aggression — and
whether it will be able to do so without
repressing freedom of speech or civil
liberties.
Roman, for his part, is nervous. This month,
worried that his arguments against the war
would attract the attention of the
authorities, Roman deleted all the posts on
his Facebook page.
“I deleted everything, cleaned out the page,
because I’m afraid,” he said. “I’ve been
reading the statements of these
parliamentarians that social network pages
are full of terrorist propaganda … that what
you write on networks can be held against
you, that censorship should exist even on
the Internet.”
The Ukrainian military, hollowed out by
years of corruption, was woefully unprepared
for the pro-Russian uprising that began in
eastern Ukraine in April. The moribund army,
which before the start of the conflict had
been reduced to begging for gas and
batteries from donors and only had 6,000
combat-ready troops, was forced to rely on
well-wishers — often drawn from the ranks of
the country’s oligarchs — to buy supplies. A
vast web of volunteer battalions sprang up
to fill the manpower gap — some of which,
operating only loosely within the scope the
military’s chain of command, have been
accused of human rights abuses and war
crimes.
Once conscription-based, the army abolished
the draft in October 2013 as part of reforms
under former President Viktor Yanukovych
that sought to create a more professional
fighting force. And when fighting in eastern
Ukraine broke out in spring 2014, the
country didn’t immediately resort to a
draft. It relied at first on mobilizing
solely from the ranks of former soldiers to
replenish its lines: In July, Parliament
approved Poroshenko’s order for a “partial
mobilization” of those with military
experience and raised from 50 to 60 the age
at which former soldiers could be called up.
Kiev conducted three waves of these
mobilizations in 2014, which have grown the
country’s military forces to 200,000 men,
according to Sergey Pashinsky, head of the
national security and defense committee in
the Ukrainian parliament.
But despite these efforts, Kiev’s losses
have mounted, especially during a rebel
counteroffensive in August and September
that was almost certainly backed by Russian
troops. Poroshenko said in December that
1,252 servicemen had been killed, and the
number has been rising over the past month
as the separatists have pushed forward,
capturing Donetsk airport and, on Tuesday,
the railroad junction town of Debaltseve.
As early as May 2014, then-acting President
Oleksandr Turchynov signed a decree
reinstating the general draft, although
conscripts were not called up immediately.
Now the army’s plans call for conscripting
40,000 20- to 27-year-olds for 18 months of
service, and recruiting 10,500 professional
soldiers (who voluntarily sign a contract)
over the course of the year, although
Poroshenko has promised the conscripts won’t
be sent to fight in Kiev’s “anti-terrorist
operation” in the east immediately, but will
instead be sent to train and serve in rear
posts. In addition, the army recently
announced plans to call up 20,000 additional
reservist ex-soldiers in the first quarter
of the year to replace 20,000 mobilized in
March, and may mobilize another 40,000 to
50,000 replacements between April and
August.
The military may even call up women who are
of good health, have indicated a desire to
serve, or have “army-relevant education,”
military spokesman Vladislav Seleznev said
this month, although he said the “majority”
of those enlisted will serve in support
positions rather than combat duty.
The draft announcements have been met with
alarm even in the country’s traditionally
more nationalistic west. Ukrainian outlets
have published reports of men fleeing the
country en masse to avoid being drafted. In
one village in the Ternopil region, 45 men
out of the 60 who were to be called up left
the country five days beforehand, and all
the draft-age men in another village
disappeared overnight, regional draft office
commissar Andriy Masly told journalists. Of
the 14,000 men who were supposed to present
themselves at the regional draft office for
medical examinations, 7,500 didn’t show up,
he said.
Roman said that out of the 36 young men in
his home village who were called up, he
knows several who are avoiding service. More
than 1,300 criminal investigations have been
opened against citizens suspected of evading
military service, according to the Defense
Ministry.
The situation is even stickier in other
parts of the country where the population is
divided between those who back Kiev and
those who sympathize with the pro-Russian
rebels. Small anti-mobilization rallies have
been held in places like Zaporizhia, which
borders Donetsk region and is close to
rebel-controlled areas.
Russian media have jumped to cover such
protests, and president Vladimir Putin has
encouraged the rash of draft dodging,
ordering officials to change legislation so
that Ukrainian citizens can stay in Russia
for longer than the allotted 30 days and
won’t “have to return to Ukraine, where they
are being caught and sent under the bullets
again.” Russia’s Federal Migration Service
said at the beginning of February that
20,000 conscription-age Ukrainian men had
entered the country in just one week and
that a total of 1,193,000 such men were in
Russia. (Though traditionally, thousands of
Ukrainians have regularly gone to Russia for
work.)
The Ukrainian government’s response to
reports of draft dodging has been to tighten
the screws on civic freedoms. At the end of
January, Poroshenko ordered the government
to adopt legislation to regulate travel
abroad for those eligible for conscription.
In February, the armed forces said it would
forbid draft-eligible men from leaving their
home provinces without permission from the
local military commissar.
The moves come just as Ukraine faces
increasing scrutiny for its handling of the
detained journalist, Kotsaba, who faces
treason and espionage charges for recording
a video statement in which he called on
Ukrainians to resist Kiev’s “illegal”
mobilization, and argued that the conflict
in eastern Ukraine was a “civil war,” not an
“anti-terrorist operation,” as Kiev
officially calls it. (Kotsaba was detained
for 60 days and, if convicted, could spend
at least 15 years in prison.)
Human rights watchers roundly condemned
Kotsaba’s detainment, and Amnesty
International declared him a prisoner of
conscience. But that hasn’t stopped the
Ukrainian government from pursuing other
measures that would clamp down on freedom of
speech when it comes to the fighting: After
Kotsaba’s arrest, Anton Geraschenko, an aid
to interior minister Arsen Avakov, said he
was working with Parliament to introduce
legislation making it a crime to publicly
call on people to avoid mobilization. On
Feb. 7, Geraschenko warned activists
planning to hold a picket against
mobilization the next day that if they spoke
out, each of them would be held for several
hours to ascertain their identity, Amnesty
International reported.
Valeria Lutkovskaya, Kiev’s official human
rights czar, said in a statement on Tuesday
that the “persecution of journalists and
civic activists for their activities is
unacceptable.” Lutkovskaya said she was
“fairly confident” that Article 10 of the
European Convention on Human Rights, which
guarantees the freedom of expression, had
been violated.
But Roman is not waiting around to find out.
He is searching for work in other countries
and plans to emigrate once he does.
“I’m planning to leave country for a time,
until this war ends,” he said. “I don’t
understand how you can force a person to
pick up a gun if he doesn’t want to.”
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