Outcry in Ukraine after Kyiv scraps demobilisation plan for long-serving soldiers
Ukrainian lawmakers have sparked anger by scrapping a clause in a draft law that would have given soldiers who have spent long periods fighting on the frontlines a chance to return home.
With Ukraine’s army outnumbered by Russia on the battlefield, “the offensive continues along the entire frontline. And currently it is impossible to weaken the defence forces”, Dmytro Lazutkin, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s defence ministry, said Wednesday on state TV.
“We cannot make hasty decisions now,” he added, explaining the military’s opposition to the provision.
Military leaders have put pressure on politicians to ditch a draft amendment that would have given soldiers serving for more than 36 months the possibility to be discharged.
The draft law passed its first reading in parliament in February. That draft included the demobilisation plans, after debating its recruitment policy for more than a year.
But that clause was removed ahead of its second reading on Wednesday, after an appeal from the chief of the army and defence minister, said Iryna Friz, a member of the parliamentary defence committee, in a Facebook post.
The reversal immediately spread anger across Ukraine, a country exhausted by years of war, and has risked sapping morale in the stretched armed forces.
“It’s a disaster,” Oleksandr, a 46-year-old artilleryman in the Donetsk region told AFP.
For many men, having a demobilisation date was a source of motivation to carry on fighting, he said.
“When a person knows when he is going to be demobilised he will have a different attitude,” he said.“If a person is like a slave, then it will not lead to anything good.”
Sergiy Gnezdilov, an activist and soldier who fought for the city of Mariupol, called the move a “cruel twist”.
Ukraine’s armed forces have been fighting since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists seized border regions.
Russia then launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, with Kyiv’s troops now engaged across a sprawling 1,000km (600-mile) frontline in the east and south.
Several financial benefits for soldiers were also scrapped from the draft bill, Friz said, and the government will instead review “mechanisms of rotation of military personnel”.
Soldier and political figure Yuriy Gudymenko criticised the new version of the proposed law for having “neither punishments for evaders, nor serious benefits for newly mobilised people”.
He predicted it would result in “an increase in the number of unauthorised absences from units, bought decisions from medical commissions and non-returns from vacations”.
The defence ministry acknowledged on Wednesday that finding a way to relieve soldiers was “necessary”.
“It is clear that people who have been fighting since the beginning and holding the defence since 2022 are getting tired and exhausted,” spokesperson Lazutkin said.
Yevgen, a paratrooper fighting in eastern Ukraine, said he had not seen his wife, who lives abroad, in two years.
Last year, he was on leave for only 10 days, which he spent on treatment. “Those soldiers who have been fighting for a long time, for more than a year … They are already very tired,” he said. “Families are falling apart because the husband and wife are not together for six months or a year.”